Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it
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Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it
Neal Stephenson<br>Jul 21, 2026
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Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.<br>I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that, when writing by hand, one is continually solving a series of small problems having to do with the spacing of words, how letters are connected, the crossing of the letter t (sometimes more than one in the same word) and the dotting of the letters i and j, and how to accomplish all of those things through coordinated movements not just of the fingers but of the whole arm. All of that has to be integrated in real time with whatever is happening on a more abstract level in the brain’s processing of ideas and imagery.<br>Concurrently I have been following discourse on Reddit and other sources about how widespread use of AI has forced educators to return to the long-abandoned practice of having their students take exams in person by writing things out longhand in blue books. This has created new challenges for students who never really learned how to write by hand, and for teachers who can’t make sense of their students’ terrible handwriting.<br>About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.<br>Every so often, when I’m signing books at a book tour appearance, someone will come up to me and say something like “you must have writer’s cramp!” or “is your hand sore yet?” I never have the time to provide a full answer. If I did, however, my answer would be that never, at any time during a quarter of a century during which I have spent a substantial fraction of each working day writing by hand, have I experienced even the faintest traces of so-called “writer’s cramp” or any other such hobgoblins.<br>Yet I can remember getting a sore hand when I was a kid writing out assignments in school. Many people probably remember such experiences and assume, reasonably enough, that it’s a natural consequence of writing by hand for any length of time. This is not the case.<br>Here are some fairly simple dos and don’ts for people who want to reap the benefits of writing by hand.<br>Don’t use a pencil (or a cheap ballpoint)
It’s pretty obvious that you’re going to get tired faster if your muscles have to exert more force. Writing with a pencil requires significantly more force than writing with a good pen. Old-school ballpoints with thick ink are no better. You can see visual evidence of this if you flip over a sheet of paper on which you’ve been writing with a pencil or an old ballpoint. The paper will bear a visible imprint where it was pressed down by the writing instrument. Often that will continue down into the stack of paper beneath. That’s because you had to push hard. This doesn’t happen with a fountain pen. If the nib is working properly you need to exert very little force. The nib is basically skating on the little lake of ink that it has just laid down.<br>Pains me to say it, but rollerball gel pens are about as good as fountain pens on this front.<br>Don’t use a gadget
It might then seem reasonable to think that writing with a stylus on an iPad or similar would be best, since no force is needed and friction is minimized. I don’t think this is true. A small amount of friction is actually desirable. You don’t want the tip of the writing instrument to skid out of control. Your brain and your little hand muscles are relying on a little bit of friction. Since I’m writing this during the World Cup, I’ll make a soccer analogy. Soccer players have spent many hours dribbling balls across playing fields, and they’ve internalized the physics—they know about how far the ball is going to travel when they kick it a certain way, and how often they need to give it another kick to keep it moving. If you put them on a giant, frictionless air hockey table, all of that knowledge would become useless. Every touch on the ball would send it out of control. Dribbling the ball down the field would become more tiring because they’d have to be making continual efforts to control the ball’s movement. Relying on a little bit of friction reduces the amount of mental and physical effort.<br>The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a...