Writing is thinking – but does it need to be solitary?
"Writing is thinking," they say. This adage captures something true: the act of writing helps us discover and refine our thoughts. When I sit down to write, the cadence and structure required to build a narrative helps surface ideas that exist somewhere between my conscious and unconscious mind.
Yet this phrase also reinforces a myth – the lone genius laboring in isolation. It frames thinking as something fundamentally individual and separate from others. It's the romantic image of Hemingway hunched over his typewriter, seemingly conjuring brilliance from within himself alone.
But even Hemingway wasn't truly working alone. Behind his celebrated prose was Maxwell Perkins, his long-time editor whose invisible hand helped shape works we now consider quintessentially "Hemingway." When we pick up one of his books, we see only Hemingway's name on the cover – the collaborative nature of its creation effectively erased from public view.
This hidden collaboration stands in stark contrast to creative partnerships in other domains, where co-creation is celebrated rather than obscured. Consider how hip-hop has both embraced and challenged the myth of the solitary genius. When MF DOOM and Madlib collaborated on their seminal 2004 album "Madvillainy," they created something neither could have achieved alone – DOOM's intricate wordplay intertwining with Madlib's experimental production in perfect synergy. What's remarkable isn't just the collaboration itself, but how openly it was celebrated. Both artists maintained their distinct identities while acknowledging their partnership as essential to the work's creation. The album stands as evidence that creative collaboration doesn't diminish individual brilliance – it amplifies it. Unlike Hemingway's hidden editorial relationship, DOOM and Madlib's partnership was central to the project's identity and reception.
These contrasting approaches to collaboration reflect broader patterns in how we conceptualize creative and intellectual work. We've seen persistent resistance to new forms of collaboration. When Twitter first emerged, journalists widely dismissed it as nonsense – now many find themselves reluctant to leave the platform despite numerous reasons to do so. We're witnessing a similar skepticism toward collaborative thinking with AI.
This resistance fascinates me because my own thinking process has always been conversational. While some colleagues and friends in my field excel at processing ideas through solitary writing, I often need dialogue – that tight feedback loop with another mind that helps me shape concepts before I can effectively capture them in writing.
Today, AI offers a new kind of conversation partner. Working with AI allows me to think through ideas on my own terms but with the benefit of responsive interaction. It creates a middle space between isolated reflection and human collaboration.
This shift from theoretical possibility to practical application is already transforming how organizations express themselves. I recently completed a three-month project helping a small B2B business venture into the D2C market. What began as a conversation last year evolved into developing a brand and content strategy that works intimately with AI. The result? They now produce content for their online magazine that is unmistakably theirs, despite approximately 90% being AI-written. The formula and ruleset we created is precisely tuned to their expressive goals, while they refine the output with the crucial 10% that rounds everything out. Will this approach produce the next Hemingway? Certainly not. But does it help them express themselves as a company more effectively and shape, publicly, how they think and what people can know about them? Absolutely.
These collaborative processes – whether between human editor and writer, musical producers and lyricists, or organizations and AI tools – point to something more fundamental about thinking itself. Perhaps most importantly, large language models, despite their biases, reflect a broader tapestry of human thought than any individual mind can contain. Interacting with these systems connects us to patterns of thinking beyond our own limited perspective.
The evolution of thinking doesn't have to mean abandoning the desk for entirely machine-mediated ideation. Rather, it opens possibilities for conjuring ideas into existence through various interactions – both human and AI-assisted – instead of perpetuating the myth of the lone genius with their whiskey bottle.
The name on the cover, the byline on the article, the singular attribution of ideas – these conventions obscure how thinking actually works. Ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from true isolation. Perhaps it's time our understanding of thinking and writing evolved to acknowledge the inherently collaborative nature of how ideas form.
Meta: This essay itself exemplifies the collaborative process I'm describing. While the examples are mine – Hemingway and Perkins, choosing MF DOOM and Madlib – the structure was developed with AI assistance. I even utilized a structured thinking plugin (available to anyone through MCP in Claude) that functioned much like an editor would, analyzing my thoughts pragmatically and helping reshape them for clarity. The final piece reflects both my perspectives and the benefits of collaborative thinking tools – a practical demonstration of the very thesis I'm advancing.
Some writing on the AI space that I have previously only published on social media platforms:
Johannes and I have been publishing new episodes of our podcast “Follow the Rabbit” every week since February. We love them all but here is a recent episode, about a 19 Dollar strawberry, that epitomizes why we are doing this kind of podcast and work in the first place.
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