Blanca Lacasa argues that everyday writing deserves the same attention and care often reserved for books. Her latest work, Atentamente, published by Libros del K.O. in 2026, gathers examples and exercises aimed at bringing creativity to emails, postcards, travel diaries and instant messages.
Lacasa, 54, says she developed her writing through emails long before instant messaging became widespread. While working in journalism and communications, she used breaks to create playful sentences, hidden acrostics and word games based on email subject lines. One example transforms the repeated “Re:” used in email replies into a series of Spanish wordplays.
“Everyone wants to publish a book, but nobody wants to send a postcard to a friend,” she says, defending the pleasure of opening a mailbox and finding an unexpected message. Her book challenges the idea that only texts published in book form and addressed to a broad audience qualify as writing.
Atentamente follows her essay Las hijas horribles, her novel El accidente and more than a dozen children’s books. Lacasa says she now finally identifies herself as a writer, after spending years describing herself primarily as a journalist. She worked for more than two decades in the culture sections of Elle and Vogue, served as editor-in-chief at Solar and continues to collaborate with media outlets.
The author has long practised what she calls “minor writing”. She exchanged notes with her sisters while they lived together, kept travel diaries and experimented with emails shaped like arrows or hills. She argues that this kind of writing has not disappeared in the age of instant messaging: emails and WhatsApp conversations can still turn ordinary daily events into stories shared with friends.
Rather than presenting a manual, Atentamente offers hundreds of examples inspired in part by the writing games associated with OuLiPo, the French group known for using formal constraints to stimulate creativity.
Lacasa also sees everyday writing as a way to preserve human communication. She criticises the use of artificial intelligence in routine personal exchanges, arguing that language used in daily life is what connects people and reflects their humanity.
The book is both a celebration of ordinary expression and a call to resist passivity. Lacasa maintains that continuing to be kind can be a political gesture, even when people remain angry and express that anger publicly. For her, the decision to treat an email or a WhatsApp message as a potential piece of literature is at the heart of her artistic practice.
Sources: El País Portada.