Writing Handbook

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Why write nonfiction?
This handbook helps you write nonfiction books and blogs for three reasons:

1 Gain leverage
Keeping thoughts to yourself can be a disservice to the world. If you have something important to say and you say it well, you send strangers down paths badly needed.
Writing is one of the most radical things you can do without money. Skilled writers change the world from their couch.

2 Clarity of thought
Writing is a laxative for the mind. When you write, your brain can't stop itself from drawing connections between ideas and exploring their implications. Writing slows down your thinking so that you can play with your ideas. This also shines a light on broken logic, which helps you gain clarity.

3 Human connection
The most efficient way to meet interesting people is to become someone they already want to meet. One way to do that is by doing interesting things then writing about them publicly with an authentic voice. Like-minded people will want to meet the person behind that voice; writing is a bat signal for your tribe.

What you'll learn
You'll deconstruct a topic you want to write about. Across five lessons, you'll learn to be more interesting, substantive, and resonant:
Page 1: Ideas — Identify what to write about
Page 2: First Drafts — Generate insights for your topic
Page 3: Rewriting — Rewrite for clarity, intrigue, and succinctness
Page 4: Style — Rewrite for style and flow
Page 5: Practicing — Iterate toward mastery
See the bottom of your screen for navigation links.
I’ll provide a cheatsheet on the last page of this handbook, but I recommend taking notes. Reading educational content without notetaking is like exploring new territory without drawing a map. Help your brain draw connections between ideas.

Who should read this?
This handbook is for:
Advanced nonfiction writers wanting to improve their craft: You’ll learn new insights to better understand how exceptional writing works.
Aspiring writers who fear publishing online: This handbook may help increase your confidence. We'll overcome blockers together.
Over the next thirty minutes, you'll become a more deliberate writer who understands why they're writing what they're writing. There's a science to nonfiction that I believe has been overlooked.

Our goal
This is page one of a guide to Writing Well. This page covers:
Finding the best ideas to write about—for blog posts, essays, and articles
Finding the most interesting direction to go in
Writing an intro that compels readers to continue reading
When writing, consider listening to atmospheric music. It may help reduce your susceptibility to distraction: a steady beat without vocals helps put you in a trance. Here's my Spotify playlist.
What makes nonfiction good
People read nonfiction to learn and to feel. My framework for ensuring a blog post accomplishes both is to start with a first draft that focuses on "novel" ideas.
A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile. I've identified five categories:
Counter-intuitive — "Oh, I never realized the world worked that way."
Counter-narrative — "Wow, that's not how I was told the world worked!"
Shock and awe — "That's crazy. I would have never believed it."
Elegant articulations — "Beautiful. I couldn't have said it better myself."
Make someone feel seen — "Yes! That's exactly how I feel!"
Novelty is what gives readers dopamine hits. You find novel ideas by pursuing your curiosity and noting what interests and surprises you along the way. If it intrigues you, it'll likely intrigue your readers too.
In drafts two and beyond, I then rewrite these novel ideas to make them resonate. Resonance is when ideas take root in readers' minds. It's the art of capturing their imaginations and relating to their life experiences so that they feel.
Ideas resonate when they're wrapped in:
Stories
Analogies
Examples
Authentic voice
In other words:
Writing Quality = Novelty x Resonance

Utility + Inspiration + Empathy + Novelty x Resonance - April 19, 2023 @ 9:40 PM

That's my writing framework.
And it starts with choosing your topic.
1 Choose your topic
We write to clear our minds, reflect on our experiences, force ourselves to dive deeper, satisfy our curiosities, teach others, build reputation, and hone our craft.
But the best topic to write about is always the one you can’t not write about. It’s the idea bouncing around your head that compels you to get to the bottom of it.
Sometimes, this means the ideal place to start is thinking through what bothers you most. Write a post to work through that—because the best writing is often therapy that you publish for the world to learn from.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Step one is choosing an objective for your post, such as:
Open people’s eyes by proving the status quo wrong. Example.
Share a solution to a tough problem. Example.
Distill an overwhelming topic into something approachable. Example.
Tell a suspenseful and emotional story that imparts a lesson. Example.
Articulate something everyone’s thinking about but no one is saying. Cut through the noise.
Identify key trends on a topic. Then use them to predict the future.
Contribute original insights to a field through your research and experimentation.

Combining these with the ideas of Dickie Bush - April 25, 2023 @ 6:00 AM

Open people’s eyes by proving the status quo wrong
How to take action on it
Analytical analysis on it
Aspirational take on the "right"
The human reason on why this is the case

Share a solution to a tough problem
How to take action on it
Analytical solution 
Aspirational solution
The solution and it's anthropological underpinnings

Distill an overwhelming topic into something approachable.
Actionable insights from distillation
Analytical breakdown of the topic
aspirational findings of the data
anthropological understanding of the topic

Tell a suspenseful and emotional story that imparts a lesson.
Actionable lesson
Tell the story with the numbers
Aspirational lesson
Anthropological lesson (Why do we react like that)

Articulate something everyone’s thinking about but no one is saying. Cut through the noise.
How to take action on it
Analytical analysis on it
aspirational take on it
the human reason on why this is the case

Identify key trends on a topic. Then use them to predict the future.
How to take action on it
Analytical analysis on it
aspirational take on it
human reason why

Contribute original insights to a field through your research and experimentation.
Actionable insights
Analytical insights
aspirational insights
anthropological insights

Step two is pairing that objective with what motivates you:
Does writing this article get something off your chest?
Does it help reason through a nagging, unsolved problem you have?
Does it persuade others to do something you believe is important?
Do you obsess over the topic and want others to geek out over it too?

Here are some motivations I came up with (using Lyle)
Does writing about this topic help you make sense of your experience(s)?
Do you want to share your personal insights and perspective on the topic?
Does writing help you process and integrate new information and experiences?
Do you find writing about this topic to be cathartic or therapeutic?
Are you simply curious and want to discover more about the topic?

Your objective clarifies what you're trying to accomplish, and your motivation ensures you actually see it through.

That’s all that's needed to write with conviction: pair an objective with a motivation. When writers lack one of these, they tend to not finish their articles.

If the right objective and motivation combo isn't coming right away, that's okay. Start writing like you would in a diary to uncover what's in the back of your head. As you write, a clear objective will eventually emerge. At that time, do a full rewrite with your clear objective as your guiding light.

Once you've chosen what to write about, the next step is uncovering what to say.
It's not that I'm so smart. It's just that I stay with problems longer.
—Albert Einstein
2 Write an intro
My process begins with writing an intro because intros help me find novel ideas.
I define an intro as the minimal information necessary to:
Introduce the breadth of the post's contents so that readers can decide if it's for them.
Hook readers into reading more.

It doesn’t matter how you hook readers, so long as you eventually fulfill the hook.
A hook is not a gimmick. It’s a fundamental psychological principle: A great intro—like an electrifying opening to a film—buys goodwill with readers. Buy enough goodwill and readers look past the weaker parts of your post—because they're chasing the high from your great opening.
And, most intriguingly, the flipside of a hook is a novel idea you can write about. Let me show you what I mean.

What is a hook?
A hook is a half-told story. You raise a question then tease only part of the answer:
Questions — Pose an intriguing question, but don’t give the full answer.
Narratives — Share the start of a narrative, but withhold the conclusion.
Research — Highlight research findings, but only a small portion.
Arguments — Make an unexpected claim, but don't explain how it's true. - (Paul Graham is really good at this April 19, 2023)

Hooks serve two purposes: 
They compel readers to continue reading. They switch on the storytelling machinery in readers' heads.
They help you identify what's interesting—novel—to write about.
We don't need the answers to our hooks—yet. At this point, we're just trying to find the most interesting questions we can possibly pose that will get people to keep reading. Later, our hunt for answers will become our pursuit of novelty.
Let's look at three types of hooks.
1 Narrative hooks
With a narrative hook, you share the beginning of a profound change in circumstances, but you withhold the conclusion.
Provide just enough details for readers to feel emotionally invested.
My clothes turned to ice. I took them off and looked for a fresh pair—before realizing that I hadn't actually brought one.

The pair I just removed took off with the wind and over the mountainside.

I was now standing—bare—on an arctic summit. I had no way of avoiding full-body frostbite and death by hypothermia.

It was 3 AM and there wasn't a soul within miles.

That was the day I lost everything. And this is the story of what happened next.
2 Research hooks
With a research hook, you highlight fascinating findings—but only a portion.
I tracked all 90 living individuals who were born without the ability to sense pain.

80 of them are living normal lives by following strict day-to-day regimens.

The remaining 10, however, are defying everything we know about what it means to survive. They've led to the discovery of fascinating new drugs.
3 Argument hooks
With an argument hook, present a bold claim but withhold how you arrived at it.
There's a 90% chance that Cloudtex goes bankrupt within thirty days. This post walks you through the startling corruption that triggered their downfall.
There's a reliable technique for getting yourself to sit down and write—to completely break through procrastination every single time.
Asking a question isn't enough
For a hook to resonate, readers must be given enough context to care about the rest of the story.
Therefore, our intro must accomplish two things:
Give readers a reason to care about our hook. Connect it to meaningful problems they face. (Failing to do this is where most intros go wrong.)
Hook readers with half of an interesting story.

Hooks become talking points
When you identify a good hook, you've also identified a compelling idea to explore in the rest of your post.
And that's the point: great hooks force you to write something novel.

If you can't find good hooks on your own, ask others what questions they most want answered on your topic.

Find the answers then turn those into hooks.
Note that there are many ways to write. I'm sharing approaches that I find most reliable. There is no right or wrong way—only what works best for you.

Are you bored right now?
If you don't care to learn about the ideation process, you can skip half this guide and continue at Page III (Rewriting) for rapid fire advice on improving your writing.

How to generate hooks
You create hooks by finding questions you want answers to then posing those questions in your introduction:
Ask yourself, “If someone else wrote my intro, what are the most captivating questions they could pose to make me excited to read this?”
Write those questions down. Even if you lack the answers.
Rank your questions by how much they interest you.
The top questions become your hooks: pose them in your intro, but don't reveal their answers.

Turn questions into hooks
If you’re writing about, say, bodybuilding, you can turn questions into hooks:
Can you build a significant amount of muscle within three months? How do the celebrities playing superheroes do it?

Turn this into a hook → You can build a significant amount of muscle in three months. I’ll walk you through how celebrities do it when preparing for roles.
Is it possible to build all that muscle without going to the gym? Can you buy cheap home equipment instead?

Turn this into a hook → You can build that muscle without going to the gym. There’s affordable home equipment that makes this possible.
Or, maybe it’s one of life's big questions:
How can we comfortably live our lives when hundreds of millions still suffer through poverty, famine, and war—through no choice of their own?
Or, perhaps it’s "boring" research on job statistics:
Which jobs are still considered great, but are on track to have their wages cut in half over the next few years, and will leave you without transferable skills?
Anything can be interesting when framed by an intriguing question.
Your questions don’t have to be jaw-droppingly interesting either. They just have to be good enough for your target audience to think, "This post won't be boring."

The spine of a good intro
In a nonfiction essay that explores new ideas, an effective intro often follows this structure:
Establish shared context.
Surface a problem and what’s at stake.
Explore the problem's significance.
Tease a clever solution.
Study how the intro below (1) hooks you with a half-told story and (2) explains the importance of the idea so that you care to hear the rest of the story.

Intro — The need for adventure
I’ve been running an experiment for the last few years. Each time I catch up with a friend, I ask them to describe the moment in their life when they felt most alive.
I noticed something interesting about their responses.
Over 90% of them describe a travel experience. Maybe it’s the time they backpacked Europe. Or the time they went bungee jumping in Australia.
Nearly everyone associates their most alive moment with traveling, despite the fact that we spend less than 5% of the year away from home.
But there’s another way to live where travel is not the rare escape. In fact, there’s a simple shift in your habits and beliefs that will have you feeling more alive than ever—without even leaving your city.
—Nick Costelloe
3 Combat skepticism

While a hook pulls readers in, skepticism is what pushes them away.
Skepticism often outweighs the strength of your hooks, causing readers to abandon your writing. But, you can do something about this.
In your intro, consider proactively countering any major skepticisms that exist. There are five types of skepticism to counter:
Superficial: Superficial skepticism emerges from readers not believing you’ll share things they don’t already know.
Solution: Tease your original insights in your introduction.‍
Irrelevant: Readers don’t believe you’ll cover key points they care about.
Solution: List the points you’ll cover.‍
Sloppy: Readers don’t want to sit through bad writing.
Solution: Rewrite your intro to be clear, succinct, and intriguing.‍
Implausible: Readers don’t believe you’ll deliver on your hooks.
Solution: Include quotes from authorities who agree with you.
Untrustworthy: Readers don’t believe you're qualified to write about this.
Solution: If you have relevant credentials, share them. If not, make your hooks so captivating that they can't help but continue reading. Make the rest of your post so insightful, logical, and well-researched that they believe you. Or, if you're indeed unqualified, be upfront about it and frame the post as an exploratory journey you're taking them on.

If you successfully hook readers while neutralizing their skepticism, you generate goodwill: now they're invested in reading the rest of your post.

Example of combatting skepticism
Below is the introduction to my Build Muscle handbook. I've indicated the passages used to address skepticism.

Intro
This handbook is the result of a year's research into what the latest science shows is the most efficient way to build muscle.

↑Address the Untrustworthy objection: reassure readers you have the requisite wisdom to be authoratitive.
It's for both men and women. It's primarily for beginners, but there's plenty of science-backed advice for intermediates too.

I wrote this guide because much of the casual weightlifting advice is unsubstantiated or misleading. I can't blame bloggers for it, because some of the facts in this guide have not been broadly published outside of the scientific literature. 
As a result, this handbook contradicts some popular bodybuilding recommendations, including the myth that women have a harder time gaining beginner muscle, that exercise rest times should be kept to 1–3 minutes, that most body weight exercises are useful, that machine exercises are ineffective, and so on.

Throughout this handbook, I support my claims by citing studies and showing you how to measure your weekly gains so you can confirm you're growing. 
Speaking of growth, if you're starting without muscle, you can grow it fast if you're diligent about eating, exercising, and sleeping. You can gain up to 12-15lbs (6.8kg) of muscle in 3 months when closely following a researched program such as this. (Afterward, muscle gains slow drastically.)

↑ Address the Superficial objection: reassure readers you’ll share new knowledge they don’t already have.
In addition to thoroughly citing research, this guide is also comprehensive. I dislike tutorials that provide 75% of what you need to know then leave you with questions.
We'll learn what the research says about:
How to eat to gain muscle mass.
The most effective exercise routines.
Measuring your weekly muscle gains.
Overcoming plateaus.
↑ Address the Irrelevant objection: reassure readers you’ll cover topics they care about.
Inspired? Good. If you weren't willing to spend 1–2 years in the gym to get results before now, be excited because you can compress beginner gains into 4 months.
Oh, and I have nothing to sell you. This handbook is free. There's no promotion.

↑ Address the Implausible objection: reassure readers you can deliver on your claims. In this case, I use the truth that I'm not trying to sell them anything.

4 Integrate feedback
My favorite writing trick is to only write my introduction then ask friends who represent my audience this question:
"After reading only this intro, what are the most interesting ideas I could possibly cover in the rest of the post?"
I pick and choose the responses that resonate with me. This is how I de-risk my post from lacking novelty: Am I headed in a direction that's maximally interesting?
(Amazon has a similar strategy for deciding which products to launch. They start by drafting a fake PR announcement—as if the product were about to launch. They share the announcement only with employees. If their employees aren't interested in buying the product, Amazon goes back to the drawing board. They've saved years of misguided work.)
In addition to asking friends for ideas, I also ask them to score the intro:
Ask several people to rate your intro from 1 to 10 on how interested they are in reading more. Don't let them choose 7—that's a cop-out. They have to decide between 6 (meh) or 8-10 (good).
Ask, “If you were writing this post, what questions would you most want answered?” (If their questions captivate you, turn them into hooks.)
To avoid fake scores from close friends, tell them: “Don’t be afraid of giving me a low score. If you tell me this isn't good, you spare me from wasting my time on an article no one wants to read."
Consider repeatedly rewriting your intro and asking for feedback until you reach 8/10. Don't aim for higher than an 8—ideas are rarely super interesting to everyone.

The elements of a great intro
A score of 8 validates you’ve met the three ingredients of a great intro:
It's a compelling hook into your topic. Readers sense forthcoming novelty.
It conveys the importance of the idea so that readers want to hear the rest of the story. It twisted the knife enough to help readers feel the pain you're speaking to.
It's concise. Readers don't want all the details; they want the minimum needed to be teased by your novelty in a way that resonates. (I cover concise writing on the Rewriting page.)
Next, we write our first draft
By this point, we've written an intro that ensures we're headed in an interesting direction. And we've generated goodwill so that readers are eager to continue.
On the next page, we write the rest of our essay: we fulfill our hooks and generate fascinating ideas.
Afterward, in our rewriting phase, we'll come back to tighten up our intro.
A reminder that the last page of this guide has a downloadable cheatsheet that handily recaps everything you're about to learn.

Writing your first draft
This is page two of a guide to Writing Well.
Many find that writing their first draft requires far more discipline than rewriting their first draft. It's hard to sit yourself down, think through half-formed ideas, and not get distracted by easier things.
That's why I recommend writing a terrible first draft as quickly as you can. Your goal is to speedrun—to blast through the laziness and the blockers to just get garbage onto paper. This shortcuts you to the rewriting phase, which most people find far less painful. It's strange how well this works.
That's why, in my bad first draft, I use placeholders any time I'm stuck: when an idea requires more thought than I want to put in, I just write <to fill out> and move on. My goal is to generate and connect ideas. Not to explain everything, and certainly not to say things well. Save that for future drafts.
This also means I don't care about being original in my first draft. Start with imitation then iterate toward origination over time. It's the only way to be efficient and avoid getting stuck.
I talk more about the craft of writing in my podcast discussion with James Clear (Atomic Habits) and Mark Manson. It's a good listen.
When you write a first draft, you write it for yourself. When you rewrite it, you write it for everyone else.
—Stephen King
The first draft process
Here’s the process you'll explore:
Choose an objective for your post.
Identify the ideas needed to accomplish your objective.
Write a messy braindump for each point. Lean into your curiosity.
If you don't have a hard time getting your ideas onto paper, skip this page and continue to the next: Rewriting.
1 Start with your objective
Choose an objective that focuses your thinking and makes your goal clear.
Here again are the objectives from the previous page:
Open people’s eyes by proving the status quo wrong. Example.
Share a solution to a tough problem. Example.
Distill an overwhelming topic into something approachable. Example.
Tell a suspenseful and emotional story that imparts a lesson. Example.
Articulate something everyone’s thinking about but no one is saying. Cut through the noise.
Identify key trends on a topic. Then use them to predict the future.
Contribute original insights to a field through your research and experimentation.
An objective reveals what your article must accomplish to be successful. You then use your intro—from the last page—to fish for the ideas that are most interesting to explore. Your objective and your hooks help you generate ideas for your outline.
Two types of ideas comprise your outline. Writing your first draft is the art of generating both of them:
Supporting points — Which points are needed to make my argument?
Resulting points — What are the implications of my argument being true?
Supporting points set the stage for your argument. Resulting points explore what happens when your argument is true. Meaning, you convince readers then you open their eyes.
2 Outline your ideas
Supporting points typically come first and resulting points typically come last. But, there is no correct outline. Hundreds of paths lead to your objective.
Here’s an example outline for the objective of Challenging the status quo:
State that the reader’s current view of the world is false.
Supporting point
Establish how so many people being wrong about this hurts our world.
Supporting point
Establish what’s required to get everyone to change their view.
Supporting point
Predict how the world would be different once the transition is complete.
Resulting point
Explore the exciting byproducts of the world being different.
Resulting point
More objective outlines

Articulate something everyone’s thinking about but no one is saying.
State what everyone's thinking.
‍Supporting point
‍Establish why no one is saying anything.
‍Supporting point
‍Predict the future implications of people staying silent.
‍Resulting point
‍Predict how the world would be different if we brought attention to this.
‍Resulting point
Identify key trends on a topic. Use them to predict the future.
State current trends.
‍Supporting point
‍Establish the history and causation of these trends.
‍Supporting point
‍Predict how these trends will play out.
‍Resulting point
‍Establish why we should care about these implications.
‍Resulting point
Contribute original insights to a field through research and experimentation.
Share your original insights.
‍Supporting point
‍Explain how they contribute to a field.
Resulting point
Distill an overwhelmingly complex topic into something digestible.
State the benefits of understanding the complex topic.
‍Supporting point
‍Establish your credibility for explaining the topic.
‍Supporting point
‍Break down the topic into something digestible.
‍Supporting point
‍Explain how readers can benefit from this new knowledge.
‍Resulting point
Share a clever solution to a tough problem.
Establish why it's such a tough problem.
‍Supporting point
‍State the benefits of your clever solution.
‍Supporting point
‍Walk through your solution.
‍Supporting point
‍Explain how users can implement your solution.
‍Resulting point
‍Predict how the world would be different if more people implemented it.
‍Resulting point
Tell a suspenseful and emotional story that imparts a lesson.
Hook the reader with half-told story.
‍Supporting point
‍Narrate the story.
‍Supporting point
‍Establish the lesson from the story.
Resulting point
Explain why the reader should care.
‍Resulting point

3 Fill the outline
Under each talking point in an outline, I start by writing partially-formed thoughts.
It’s more efficient to speedrun through a bad first draft and improve it later than to try starting from completion.
It’s normal if few ideas come to mind immediately. You’ll discover that the majority of your ideas arrive while writing—not before. You write in order to think.
Later, you'll discover the rest of your ideas by resting and reflecting on what you’ve written. The act of writing compels your brain to draw connections between ideas.
It can’t help itself.
In general, you'll find ideas bubbling up from these places:
Hooks — Answer the captivating questions raised in your intro.
Experience — Reflect on observations and anecdotes.
Research — Acquire knowledge.
Experiments — Run tests.
Brainstorming — Voice-record then transcribe your thoughts.
Mental models — Think critically.
A reminder that the last page of this guide has a downloadable cheatsheet that handily recaps everything you're about to learn.
People think you need to be inspired to write. No, you write in order to get inspired.
—Paul Jarvis
Filtering your ideas
As you're writing, how do you know which thoughts are most valuable? What separates good ideas from bad ones?
My approach is to focus on ideas that are interesting or surprising. These are the ingredients of novelty. Novelty is what keeps readers reading. They tend to be:
Counter-intuitive
Counter-narrative
Shock and awe
Elegant articulations
Interesting ideas
To uncover interesting ideas, continuously make your next point whatever interests you most. Skip everything that bores you.
When something bores you, it probably bores your readers too. And if something entertains you, it probably entertains them too. You're a proxy for your die-hard readers.
That’s the irony of self-indulgent writing: writing for yourself is the quickest path to writing something others love.
The mistake writers make is believing expertise is required to write compelling nonfiction. Nope, it's the rabid desire to indulge your curiosity.
I just write what I want. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
—J.K. Rowling
Surprising ideas
In addition to interesting talking points, you're also looking for surprising ideas.
Surprise is anything that contradicts what readers know or expect you to say. It makes them think, “Wow. That’s unexpected.”
You generate surprising talking points using essayist Paul Graham’s method: First, learn the basic knowledge of a topic. Then, if you can find new information that surprises your knowledgeable self, it’ll surprise laypeople too. You can also play detective: when you know enough about a topic to know what's not known about it, you can selectively resolve those gaps and share the discoveries.
Again, you are your audience's proxy. There's no need to guess what will surprise them. Hunt for something that surprises you, and others will be along for the ride.

When you get stuck
When ideas stop flowing, ask yourself:
How can I make this point more convincing?
What are the interesting implications of what I just said?
Repeatedly ask these two questions and keep moving in whichever direction interests you most.
Your outline should be specific enough to provide structure, but loose enough to not confine expansive thinking. Whenever you feel a tug pulling you away from your outline, indulge that curiosity. Pursue that adventure.
You can prune the bad stuff later.
Refer to my blog post on how to generate good ideas: Creativity Faucet.
I hated English in high school. But if they called it Thinking, then I wouldn't be as terrible of a writer as I am today.
—Quoc-Anh Vu
4 Conclusions
I'm not convinced conclusions are necessary. But I like placing them after my resulting points to prompt readers into action. Here's how.

First, share a poignant takeaway
Identify your article’s significance by re-reading it and asking, “What was this really about? What was I trying to say?”
Distill the answer into a single, punchy sentence. Make readers think, “Ahh, yes, that's why this article was profound.”

Next, provide next steps
Now that your wisdom has resonated with readers, ask yourself, What about the world can my readers better appreciate now that they've read my article?
Share where they can go next to continue the journey they started here.
For a writing guide such as this, I might conclude by sharing bloggers whose work I enjoy. Then I might urge you to reverse engineer their articles and study what makes them great. That's how you continue your learning.

5 Rewrite
Your first draft is a sacred place for generating ideas.
Because it's while writing that you discover your best insights.
You write in order to think.
When you've squeezed every last drop from your brain, it's time to rewrite those ideas into something wonderful.
Onward.

Summary
Here is our writing process:
Choose an objective for your post.
Identify the talking points needed to accomplish your objective.
Write a messy braindump for each point. Lean into your curiosity.
While writing, keep these points in mind:
Don’t feel constrained by your outline. Expect to discover most of your ideas throughout the writing process.
Trust that what interests you is what interests your readers. If not, target an audience more like yourself.
Here's how those steps fit into our overall writing process:
Choose a topic
Write your intro, and use it to brainstorm talking points
Get feedback on your intro
Create an outline using your objective
Explore talking points within your outline
Rewrite for clarity, succinctness, and intrigue ← The next page covers this
Cycle between rewriting, resting, and receiving feedback
Copy edit for grammar, word choice, and style

What is rewriting?
This is page three of a guide to Writing Well.
Your favorite authors’ first drafts are typically bad too. However, great authors have the discipline to aggressively rewrite their first drafts in pursuit of:
Being clearly understood
Persuasive reasoning
Sustaining curiosity
Resonance — Story, analogy, and poetry
The enemy of those objectives is being precious about what you originally said and how you originally said it.
When you first write an idea down, you do so in whatever disjointed way immediately came to mind. Rewriting is the art of finding the correct puzzle pieces within that mess and putting them together in the right order.
In short, your first draft is to extract novel ideas out of your brain. Your second draft is to rewrite those ideas so they resonate.
The process of writing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.
—Neil Gaiman
1 Goal: Be understood
When rewriting, one of our goals is to be understood.
Readers don't assess the quality of nonfiction by its elegance nor its complexity. Instead, the quality of nonfiction emerges from:
How strong its ideas are x how much those ideas resonate
You get in the way of resonating when your ideas are unclear.

What is clarity?
Clear writing starts with clear thinking:
What am I really saying?
What is the point I must make here?
How can I make this point easy to understand?
We'll explore two tools for accomplishing this:
Simple sentences
Examples and counterexamples
Simple sentences
I like to write sentences that a thirteen-year-old could follow.
If they can understand, so can everyone else—including anyone who's skimming.
This isn't to say children should understand the details and nuances. Rather, I think children should be able to follow the logic of all your arguments.
You already do this intuitively. When speaking to children, you simplify:
You use plain phrasing.
You use fewer ideas per sentence.
We're going to use these techniques in our writing too.

Remove abstract phrasing
Here's a sentence with complex phrasing:
"The obstacle facing media organizations is charting an economically sustainable course through a landscape of commodity journalism.”
Let’s rewrite that plainly:
“News companies are struggling to stay in business because anyone with a Twitter account can report the news now. The news has never been more of a commodity than it is today."
That's how you talk to a thirteen-year-old. In fact, that's how you should talk to everyone all the time.
In the revised example, I removed abstract words like "charted" and "landscape," and I represented a concept with a specific example.
By removing this overhead, the underlying point stands out. That's our goal.
Grammatical simplification such as this doesn't make your writing worse. The complexity of your writing should emerge from the strength of its ideas, not from how those ideas are worded.
However, don't drop key information when simplifying. This, for example, would be too reductive:
"News companies are not doing well today."
That loses the point of why news companies are not doing well. Simplify your sentences without removing the nuances.
One last example. Let's remove abstract words and talk plainly:
Bad paragraph — "Ignorance of corporate dynamics represent a persistent source of pain for a certain type of operator. Intelligent but inexperienced. I’d recommend that you avoid this pain by understanding how other people make decisions in the context that they’re incentivized to do so and by appreciating the constraints they’re operating within."
Rewritten — "It’s common to be a smart person who’s unaware of what’s going on. I recommend writing down the frameworks your team uses to make big decisions. Then, when a colleague proposes an idea that doesn’t intuitively make sense to you, think through their idea using their own frameworks. Work from there to build empathy and have a constructive dialogue."
Use fewer ideas per sentence.
The second simplification technique for talking to children is using fewer ideas per sentence.
Consider this bad paragraph:
“There's a fast growing collection of data describing the structure and functional capacity of human gut bacteria in a variety of conditions. Ongoing efforts to further characterize the multitude of functions of gut bacteria and the mechanisms underlying its interactions will provide a better understanding of the role of the microbiome in human health and disease.”
Let’s rewrite that for a thirteen-year-old:
“There’s plenty of research on gut bacteria. We’re quickly learning which roles gut bacteria play and how they interact with each other. Researchers want to better understand how these bacteria can affect our overall health.”
The original paragraph's sentences contained two ideas each. That’s an obstacle. You only fully understand the context of a sentence when you're done reading it. So, the longer the sentence, the more details you hold in your head at once. That makes understanding already complex points even harder.
I'm okay with letting difficulty emerge from uncovering the implications of what I write. But I'm not okay with making it difficult to understand what I'm trying to say in the first place.
When you keep your language simple, you can get away with making your ideas infinitely complex.
Provide examples
Examples are another tool for improving readers' understanding.
Examples convey the significance of an idea by relating it to real-world situations. They also help readers learn concepts in the context of what they're familiar with, which aids in recall. Examples are what make abstract ideas specific.
Tips for providing examples:
Don't just provide good examples, also provide bad examples. Before-and-after comparisons—like a good paragraph versus a bad paragraph—clarify what you mean and don’t mean. Help readers orient themselves on a spectrum of right to wrong.
If you make your examples fun and topical, readers pay more attention.
Examples with many moving parts should possibly be turned into diagrams.
Recap
Simple language doesn't weaken your writing. It strengthens your points by helping your underlying ideas stand out.
If you structure your logic for an audience of thirteen-year-olds, you'll think and write more clearly. But don't do this at the expense of losing nuance.
Use plain wording, simple sentences, and before-and-after examples.
I don't actually know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, though, it seems to me you should use their language.
—David Ogilvy
2 Goal: Be concise
After you've rewritten your draft for clarity, you’re left with a better understanding of what you're trying to say. At this point it's easier to rewrite for succinctness: remove everything you now realize is not required to make your point.
Succinctness—a lack of bloat—helps readers finish your post. What I've learned from asking a lot of friends for feedback is that readers often quit not because they dislike your ideas, but because they're bored.
Succinctness is a ratio. It's the percentage of significant thoughts out of all the thoughts communicated. A post can be 50,000 words, but if it's dense with true insights and devoid of unnecessary words, it's succinct.
I once stumbled into a silly book review that helps make my point:
"Great book, but overpriced. $15 for a 100-page book?"
Actually, your $15 got you 100 pages plus three hours of your time back. A 100 page book excludes 200 pages of filler. The author did you a favor. They understood that while words are free for them, they're costly for the reader.
Be deliberate
Beginning writers treat writing as a clearing of their consciousness. They write every thought that comes to mind—one sentence after another—until they’ve hit whatever word count they believe they’re supposed to hit.
In speech, when you say something that doesn't resonate, you can add sentences to further explain your point. Don't do that in writing. If your sentence doesn’t resonate, you go back and rewrite it.
Writing is a process of deliberate thought curation—where each sentence can justify its inclusion in your final draft.
When a deliberate writer has written something down, they then ask:
What is the purpose of the statement I just made? What effect does it have on the reader’s mind?
Is there something more useful I could have said instead?
Later, when they get stuck expanding on their ideas, they ask:
How can I make this point more convincing?
What are the interesting implications of what I just said?
How to rewrite for succinctness
Here is my three step process for being succinct.
1 Step 1: Rewrite entire sections
For each section of an article, I will:
Read it.
Take an hour-long break.
Rewrite the section from memory—focusing only on the critical points.
The new version written from memory will take a more direct path toward what's important. The fluff falls away when you focus on effectively re-articulating yourself.
An alternative approach is to call a friend: Have them read your draft then summarize it over the phone in thirty seconds. Delete your draft and restart from their summary. Add more words only as needed to make your ideas resonate.
I call these verbal summaries, and they're a key to succinctness.
Example: Verbal summary
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2 Step 2: Remove unnecessary detail
By this step, we've rewritten each section to succinctly convey our key points.
Now we rewrite sentence-by-sentence to remove unnecessary detail. The art of rewriting is the art of becoming self-aware about the purpose of every word.
After we remove unnecessary words, we'll rephrase what remains to be even more succinct.
First, to be brief on the sentence-level, you should remove filler words that don’t add necessary context to the sentence. This isn’t intuitive to novice writers: these extra words cause readers to unwittingly slow down and do extra work while reading. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s true point. Reading many extra words is also a chore for your brain. And when you exhaust readers, they quit reading.
Stop. That was a terrible paragraph. We need to fix two things:
Remove ideas that aren't critical to the central point.
Don't describe what doesn't need to be described.
Let’s rewrite that paragraph without its unnecessary words:
To be brief on the sentence-level, you should remove filler words that don’t add necessary context to the sentence. This isn't intuitive to novice writers: extra words cause readers to unwittingly slow down and do extra work while reading. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s true point. Reading many extra words is also a chore for your brain. And when you exhaust readers, they quit reading.
That leaves us with:
To be brief on the sentence-level, remove words that don’t add necessary context. Extra words cause readers to slow down and do extra work. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s point. And when you exhaust readers, they quit reading.
3 Step 3: Rephrase paragraphs from scratch
Now that we know what we most want to say, we're in a position to succinctly rephrase each paragraph.
Again, here’s our paragraph:
To be brief on the sentence-level, remove words that don’t add necessary context. Extra words cause readers to slow down and do extra work. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s point. And when you bore readers, they quit reading.
Let's rephrase that from scratch:
Your sentence is brief when no additional words can be removed. Being succinct is important because filler buries your talking points and bores readers into quitting.
Bingo. That's succinct. No one is getting bored midway through that paragraph.
Repeat the (1) word removal and (2) rephrasing from scratch process for every paragraph. When you’re done, your article will be less long and boring.

The Tweet test
After writing a post, I try compressing it into a single tweet. If I can pull that off without losing anything important, I delete the post and publish the tweet instead.
But if I have to split the post over multiple tweets, I know I have something meaty, and so I publish the post.
Off topic: This year, I got tired of overlong books and bad book summaries. So I made a newsletter that just shares the most interesting highlights from famous books. I distill each book's key lessons into short paragraphs. 50,000 people read it. Subscribe to see the first issue. I only email once per month.
"If it is a ten minute speech, it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it. If it is a half-hour speech, it takes me a week. If I can talk as long as I want to, it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now."
—The Operative Miller
Try this yourself
Make this paragraph succinct:
"Q System One was a quantum computer. The machine was the culmination of a year—or decades, depending on how one measures—of labor and ingenuity from IBM scientists. The researchers had assembled this stalactite of nested canisters in the recesses of the company’s neo-futuristic research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The white, refrigerated contraption dangled from a nine-foot, cubic, aluminum and steel frame. In the innermost chamber: a special processor whose progeny could help solve some of the world’s most intractable science and business problems. This particular generation featured the firepower of 20 quantum bits, or 'qubits,' the powerful data units upon which these dream machines operate."
First, remove unnecessary words. With the clarity of what remains, rephrase it succinctly.
3 Goal: Be intriguing
Clarity and succinctness help ideas resonate. They reduce mental overhead so your ideas pop.
But what gets people reading in the first place? Intrigue, which is the other quality we rewrite for.
I use two techniques for generating intrigue:
Say something novel — A novel claim is one that's counter-intuitive, counter-narrative, surprising, or elegantly poetic. It isn't something readers would have easily intuited on their own, and ideally it's significant instead of trivial.
‍Withhold information — Tease readers with a question you don't answer until later.
We're taking the elements that made our intro hooks so compelling and dispersing them throughout our entire article. This helps readers stay engaged.
1 Novelty
I use a technique I call dopamine counting to weave novelty into my writing:
I ask people to leave feedback by highlighting every sentence that gives them a dopamine hit. These are the moments of delight where they remark: "Ahh, that's cool/profound/fascinating." For each hit, I increase a counter at the end of the corresponding sentence. Like this (3).
After several people have left feedback, I look for long stretches without dopamine hits. Then I rewrite those sections to be more concise—or I inject more novelty (insights and surprises) into them.
I rinse and repeat until the article has a steady cadence of dopamine hits.
If you've read this far, dopamine counting is what got you here.
Example of dopamine counting
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2 Withholding information
The second technique for sustaining intrigue is withholding information.
Storytelling is essentially the art of choosing what information to withhold. When rewriting, decide which answers you want to reserve until the end.

The psychology of intrigue
Recall from earlier the psychological principle for introductions:
The hook principle — "A captivating intro buys goodwill with readers so they overlook an imperfect middle."
Let's pair that principle with a second:
The peak-end rule — “People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its most intense point and at its end. This implies they do not judge the experience based on the average of every moment.”
Together, these two principles help us guarantee readers enjoy our writing:
Have a captivating intro that buys goodwill.
Have at least one peak of insight or surprise.
Have an ending that satisfyingly justifies why the piece was worth reading.
There’s your writing formula. The rest of your article can be weak and most readers will still enjoy it. Take comfort in the implication: not every paragraph has to be interesting.
(Let's apply the peak-end rule to cinema: Many boring indie films are held together by one intensely poetic scene and a cathartic ending. That’s all they need for people to enjoy them.)
I dissect the craft of storytelling in my podcast discussion with Tim Urban (Wait But Why) and Jason Silva. It's a good listen.
We already learned intrigue
On the previous page, I shared my process for generating insight and surprise: use yourself as a proxy for the reader then lean into what excites you.
To craft your article’s peak, simply condense your most insightful and surprising talking points into one section. Build that climax.
Takeaways
The trifecta of intrigue: 1. A captivating intro. 2. A section of intense surprise or insight. 3. An ending that satisfyingly justifies why the piece was worth reading.
In long pieces, aim to evenly distribute dopamine hits. Rely on outside feedback; it's hard to accurately judge this yourself.
Where you are
Let's resituate you within this handbook:
Choose a topic
Write your intro, and use it to brainstorm talking points
Get feedback on your intro
Create an outline using your objective
Explore talking points within your outline
Rewrite for clarity, succinctness, and intrigue
Cycle between rewriting, resting, and receiving feedback ← You're here
‍Copy edit for grammar, word choice, and style
A reminder that the last page of this guide has a downloadable cheatsheet that handily recaps everything you're about to learn.
Feedback
Getting feedback is the most efficient way to improve your writing. This is not optional. Giving feedback is as important: giving it to others forces you to internalize the learnings from this handbook.

Asking for feedback
Ask for feedback from the audience you’re writing for. Here’s a template:
It would be helpful if you read my article slowly to transcribe the reactions you have while reading it. For example:

1. Tell me what to delete — When you notice your interest is fading, you can say “I'm drifting here. This isn’t compelling and it isn’t adding value. Get to the point quicker and hook me."

2. Tell me what to double down on — When something excites you, you can say “Dopamine hit. Go further in this direction. I have more questions.”

3. Tell me what isn't clear — When you're done reading, please score this from 1-10 on how satisfying it was. Don’t be afraid to give me a low score. By telling me this needs work, you're sparing me from releasing bad work to the public.
Keep asking for feedback then rewriting until you average a score of 7.5+ across a handful of respondents. That puts you in the "this was a good read" category.
Do not waste time striving for 9+. One reader's 9 is not the same as another's, so trying to satisfy everyone results in a bloated post that satisfies no one. There are many great ways to tell a story, so be happy when you’ve found one that works.
Thanks to Brian Tait, Matthew Mueller, Nat Eliason, Lachy Groom, and Andrew Askins for giving me feedback on this handbook.
Feedback from your future self
Your best source of feedback is often you with the benefit of hindsight. But you need a break to get that perspective. I’ve found a week is often enough time to sufficiently defamiliarize myself with my own writing.
If I personally have a writing superpower, it's that I can look back at my work with a hyper-critical eye—and I can do this repeatedly. And I enjoy it.
Take it from the world's most successful hyper-prolific writer, Stephen King: he shoves his manuscript into a drawer for six weeks before writing his final draft. When he re-opens it, he sees its flaws with fresh eyes.
I've also found that switching text editors tricks my brain into re-reading my work with new eyes. For example, if I wrote the first draft in Dropbox Paper, I'll write the second draft in Google Docs. Those tools format text differently, which kicks your brain out of pattern recognition mode, and makes it feel like you're editing someone else's work.
Here are problems with my writing that I can best identify with the benefit of a break:
Awkward sentences.
Not being persuasive.
Not sustaining intrigue.
Not being succinct on a section-by-section level.

Incorporating feedback
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A few rules of thumb for incorporating feedback from your target audience:
If you agree with it, implement it.
If 3 out of 10 people have the same feedback and you’re ambivalent about it, I'd incorporate it if it’s just a quick change.
If 4 or more out of 10 have the same feedback and you disagree with it, you are wrong. Check your assumptions and your ego: ask them why they feel the way they do. Put yourself in their shoes.
I consider my writing done when:
I've fulfilled my topic objective.
I've hit a 7.5+ feedback score.
I'm no longer making significant edits while rewriting.
If you're like me, you'll get pleasure out of revisiting old pieces every year and updating them to reflect your improved understanding of the topic.

Writing style
This is page four of a guide to Writing Well. This page focuses on four elements of style:
Your voice
Vividness
Engaging the imagination
Story and presentation
Pardon me while I open a wormhole into your brain and pump style advice into it.
See, that’s an example of style.
I could have just said: "And now let’s learn about style."

Style is voice
What gives a world-class author their "voice?"
Well, ask your friends what it's like to talk to you. Maybe they’ll mention your:
Tone of voice
Sense of humor
Eccentricities
Viewpoints
Convey those traits in your writing, and readers recognize your voice. Meaning, I don't think voice is your choice of words. It's your unfiltered self reflected on paper.

In early drafts, I like to discard my reflex to self-censor. Talk vulnerably like you do with friends. In later drafts, you can remove sensitive details.
Until then, it's a confession.
True voice is the art of forgetting the medium you're using: whatever others' expectations are of "good writing," forget them—from sentence structure, tone, formality. Throw out the consensus to take the shortest path from your brain to the word—whatever that looks like.
Even bad writing can be enjoyable when the author speaks like they would to a lifelong friend. Take this to whatever extreme you're comfortable with.

Inauthentic voice
Inauthentic voice happens for a few reasons:
You read a lot of someone else’s writing and absorb their style.
You project expertise or experience you don't actually have.
You try to "write smart:" you use words like "plethora" or “myriad.” If you don’t use those words in conversation, don't use them in your writing. It's fraudulent voice.
The antidote to inauthenticity is reminding yourself how you talk with friends. Record yourself talking, transcribe it, and work from that.
The authenticity of who you really are, as opposed to who you wish everyone thought you were, is what your audience is looking for.
—C. Robert Cargill
Style is vividness
Part of an author's style is in how they describe the world—how vivid the images and emotion are that they conjure.
One way to do this is via vividness. To explain vividness, here are writer Venkatesh Rao's remarks on the vividness of author David Foster Wallace:
"When I read a Wallace passage, it's like looking at a pinprick-sharp photograph—compared to my own blurry photographs. He unerringly picks words to use that simply work 100x better than my choices. It's like he has a 15 megapixel camera and a tripod, while I am using a three megapixel point-and-shoot. A bigger vocabulary isn't enough. The skill lies in matching words to needs."
Here's an example of vividness:
One of my favorite moments of the year involved a beetle doing yoga on a desert dune. In the Namib desert in Africa, the darkling beetle's day begins with an ascent of a massive sand dune. A tiny creature faced with a Himalaya-sized trek. Undeterred, it marches on, its legs as skinny as a runner's, up towards the summit above which a fog from the Atlantic hovers.

When it gets there, the beetle inverts its body into a headstand and stands very still. Then magic occurs. No, wait, it is something more fantastic than magic, it is nature. This is a planet about to do some of its very best work.

Droplets of water form on its shell as the fog condenses on its body. Then slowly, using grooves in the beetle's casing, the water rolls into its thirsty mouth. This is how life is sustained on earth.

—Rohit Brijnath
It's akin to cranking the saturation dial in Photoshop.
Notice how vividness isn't just detail. It's detail that resonates. It's the articulation of the rarely articulated nuances of life—in a way that makes you remark, "Ahh, that’s how I'd put words to that feeling."

Word choice
To engage a reader's senses, you can do more than just add vivid details. You can also swap plain phrases for more engaging ones.
Pay attention to the bold words, which now create metaphors:
“Make me an instrument of your pain.”
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
“Where there is hatred, let me sew love.” —St. Francis of Assisi
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.” —Albert Camus
What makes those quotes beautiful is their use of words that are uncommonly found in those contexts but whose meaning is nonetheless clear.
A common technique for applying metaphor is to ascribe human qualities to inanimate things. This gives inaminate things an inner life:
Angry storms
Shrieking sirens
Dancing leaves
Coy flames
Tired gears
This gets us back to the goal of evoking a reader's senses: One study showed that brain scan participants who read the words "He had a rough day" activated neural regions associated with feeling texture, whereas those who read "He had a bad day" didn't trigger the same effect (Source).
As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.
—Jeanette Winterson
Style engages the imagination
Style engages the imagination. When it does so elegantly, we call this poetry.
I define poetry as finding evocative, unconventional ways to say meaningful things. - Huge April 19, 2023 @ 11:06 PM
For example, instead of saying "the day was hot," you could write “even the bugs were looking for air conditioning.”
In that example, we're describing the effect caused by our subject (the hot day)—as opposed to directly describing the heat itself. In other words, poetry is one step removed from a straightforward description of the events.
The more steps you can be removed while still successfully communicating the meaning, the more "elegant" your poetry feels. The more profound your underlying point, the more "deep" your poetry feels.
Let's walk through an example using a framework I devised.

First-order description
In a first-order description, you directly describe how something is.
The day was hot.
This is how we commonly talk.

Second-order description
In a second-order description, you describe something by stating an effect it has on its environment.
The day melted our popsicles.
The reader can determine that the day was therefore hot.

Third-order description
In a third-order description, you describe something by stating its effect but not mentioning the cause by name.
Our popsicles melted.
Above, there's ambiguity as to why our popsicles melted. But with a bit of imagination and puzzle-solving, the reader pieces it together.
However, our sentence isn't very poetic yet. To get there, we choose an effect that is unconventional, counterintuitive, or witty:
Even the bugs were looking for air conditioning.
This style of writing evokes mental imagery and world-building. It's a more evocative and original way to set a scene than "the day was hot."
In short, consider finding evocative, unconventional ways to say meaningful things. It forces readers to use their imaginations to piece ideas together. You engage their minds and no longer spoon-feed each detail. Now they meditate on your implications.
Instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we’ll be terrified.
—C.S. Lewis
Style is story and presentation
There are infinite ways to tell your story. I write about storytelling here.
How you tell your story is a matter of presentation:
Wait But Why uses cartoon drawings and analogies to explain complex topics.
Maddox uses dark humor, crude GIFs, and videos to shock and entertain.
Would analogies, anecdotes, or multimedia help better convey your ideas? If so, consider using them. They can help your ideas resonate.

Takeaways
An authentic voice resonates best with readers: your way of speaking, your interests, and your perspectives on the world are a breath of fresh air when unfiltered. Consider writing nonfiction the way you sound.
Metaphorical explanations are a couple degrees removed from a literal telling of events. Engage readers' imaginations and paint vivid landscapes.
Optionally incorporate multimedia, anecdotes, and analogies to reinforce your points and to entertain.

How to tell great stories
Is it possible to turn anyone into a storyteller as good as Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Imagine anyone—even your bitter, old uncle—being able to command a stadium's worth of people hanging onto their every word.
I recently got to the bottom of it.
My motivation: I had been trying to start a podcast to exchange stories with great storytellers, but I sounded awful in comparison to them. I was ruining first impressions with people I've always wanted to meet, and that sucked.
So I embarked on a journey: learn to engage an audience like Neil deGrasse Tyson within 30 days.
While speaking with the best storytellers on the Internet, something strange became clear: they could only articulate some of the ingredients that make them great. There was more beneath their explanations that they couldn’t identify when pressed.
This was a puzzle.
Because these ingredients were hard to identify, I followed a process known as "learning by inversion." This is where you learn how something works by studying its bad examples. Then you do the opposite.
So I watched a lot of bad storytellers on YouTube. Thanks, TED.
It quickly became clear that there are two ways to tell a story:
In whatever way suddenly comes to mind
Strategically
Talented storytellers know something bad storytellers don't: storytelling is the art of strategically withholding information. Before you begin your story, you're supposed to decide which details to withhold until the end—to maximize suspense along the way.

Can I work backwards then? What do I want to withhold from each part (Beginning, Middle, End)

In contrast, bad speakers who bore me lack narrative hooks—like you'd find at the beginning of a book or a film. A hook raises a question without immediately providing the answer. For example, “It was the worst date of my entire life.” Listeners wonder, “Why?”

That might be a helpful hint. Does my hook have my reader as "Why?" or have them asking you to continue? - April 19, 2023 @ 11:44 PM

You're not going to tell them for a while.
Here's the first key learning: hooks require premeditation. Neil deGrasse Tyson told author David Perell that nearly 100% of the stories and analogies he shares in interviews are first written down. Most people don’t realize this.
The best storytellers put the work in before you hear them speak.
The storyteller's craft is therefore in making that prep work invisible. This is important: You never want to memorize your words. You only memorize key points then you rediscover the rich details and spontaneous turns of phrases in real time. This produces pauses, moments of self-reflection, and false starts.
That's what you want.
Why? The human brain is wired to lean in when it believes someone is speaking to them instead of at them. Listeners recoil in boredom when someone reads a scripted speech at them. But grab someone by the collar, look them in the eye, and tell them the crazy thing that happened to you, and they'll be glued.
In short: Feel no shame in artificially preparing your stories, but be a good enough actor to make it seem like you didn't prepare at all.
Next, I noticed that the best storytellers take the hook methodology to an extreme: they intersperse many hooks throughout their narrative by continually raising questions without immediately answering them. When they finally get to the nail-biting answers, they then drag out the telling.
Dragging is our second key lesson.
For example, consider how the climax of a blockbuster film is always a drawn out action scene. The action is never resolved within seconds—even if that’s how long it would take in real life to play out.
Instead, every detail is magnified. Every punch is slow-motion.
Beyond slow motion, great films also slow down the parts between the action. When the audience senses danger in a horror film, their truest fear emerges between the jump scares. It's the anticipation that kills us.
In other words, storytelling is not only the art of strategically withholding information, it’s also the art of time dilation.
Okay, let's pause.
Let's take inventory of our new storytelling ingredients: limited memorization, hooks, and climaxes with time dilation.
I took to the mic and recorded a test episode for our show using these techniques.
It turns out I still sucked. The stories were clinical. They resonated intellectually but not emotionally.
I realized that the problem wasn’t the story's content nor structure. Instead, the delivery was off. I was no Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was a dude rambling dry words into a microphone. Apple's Siri might as well have been telling the story for me.
So I returned to YouTube. Perhaps learning by inversion wasn’t the right approach. Let's embark on a different quest: find the best spoken storytellers on the planet and mix their signature techniques together.
I came across remarkable speakers who could make anyone lean in. They were forces of gravity.
The ingredient that I noticed each of them employed was vocal rhythm. This is the art of varying your:
Speed
Volume
Enthusiasm
Staccato and rhyme
And most of all… vocal rhythm is the art of purposeful silence.
Silence is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to play up a moment. During a moment of silence, listeners can only do two things: reflect more on what just happened or greater fear what comes next.
Below is what variation and silence sound like:

Notice his time dilation—how he stretches out moments and syllables. And notice his hero’s perspective. He’s made it his story, and in doing so he’s made it personal to the audience who've transferred their identities.
The more I listened to vocal variation, the clearer it became that spoken storytelling is a form of music. You talk. Then faster. You go silent. You strike with fast staccato sentences. Without vocal rhythm and pauses, you're just a human wall of text.
Alright, this felt like a key breakthrough in my treasure hunt. I'm ready to re-record the podcast.
In the re-recording, I successfully nailed every story beat as planned. I was finally compelling.
Sweet. I'm onto something.
But…
There was something big missing.
I was a competent storyteller, but I was nowhere near as captivating as Neil deGrasse Tyson. Audience reactions were more like "Cool story, bro"—not "holy crap, that was interesting." No one's leaning in, remembering my stories, and binging more.
I was completely unlike the ultra-charismatic actors—John Krasinski and Tom Holland—who I've seen light up talk shows. I still lacked soul and charisma.
Wait a minute.
Does this relate back to the missing ingredient that the great storytellers couldn’t articulate when pressed at the start? Is the missing ingredient how to project soul and likeability to light up a room?
I think so. I felt I had reverse engineered everything else by now, so this had to be the last bit.
But if the great storytellers can't articulate how they draw people in so well, how am I going to figure it out?
Is it just "genetic?"
I don't know. And so I paused the podcast. If it wasn't going to be good, and if it was a chore to record, then I was done.
*** One year later. ***
One of my favorite people on the planet is Courtland Allen. He runs a startup community and has a podcast of his own. One day he asked, “Do you want to start a podcast with me?”
This was one of those opportunities where you don’t say no and you lean into the serendipity.
This time, I was militantly determined to finish my treasure hunt and find the missing storytelling ingredient.
I remembered that the big thing that helped last time was studying the greats on YouTube. So, I went back to that.
After a week of wandering, I came across a guy named Jason Silva. When watching this video from him, it became clear what likeability and charisma are. Jason is a force of gravity:

What's going on here?
Why does Jason feel alive, engaged, and magnetic? What's the difference between he and I?
In paying attention to what was happening beneath the words, I noticed that Jason was using a technique: he blows his own mind when he recounts his stories.
‍Blowing your own mind entails being excited at moments of excitement, being shocked at moments of shock, and being wowed at moments of wonder. Listeners feed off this like sugar.
This, it turns out, is far more important than vocal rhythm or any other delivery trick.
Because, when you blow your own mind, something mesmerizing happens: you relive the story and its impact on you in real-time. People then see that reflected on your face and in your authentic emotions.
It's irresistibly infectious for the audience.
Not one great storyteller had articulated this to me before.
I believe this works so well because of the phenomenon of "mirror neurons," as some call it: when you see a fighter break their ankle, you wince in pain. When you see someone who can’t breathe from laughing so hard, you smile. And—the classic—when the person next to you yawns, you yawn too.
We can trace the roots of this phenomenon through years of evolution: picture a hunter-gatherer rushing down from the mountaintop to frantically gather his tribespeople. He’s exasperated and trying to recount what just happened: a pack of starving lions sprinted after him for half a mile. The tribe is glued to his every word because they feel the horror on his face—and they fear that could have been them.
It. Could. Have. Been. Them.
That's the feeling you need to transfer into your audience. They don't feel it in their bones unless it looks like you're feeling it first.
This storytelling ingredient—blowing your own mind—made me realize that my treasure hunt was doomed to fail because I was looking for the byproducts of great storytelling. Things like vocal rhythm and so on. But it turns out that, by reliving experiences, your body captures all the great storytelling ingredients automatically: it knows how to vary vocal delivery, it knows when to pause, and it knows when to emphasize. Because when your mind relives emotions, your body reacts to them instinctively. You become walking cinema.
Diving further into Jason's videos, I found more insights: while blowing his own mind, Jason exudes charisma. I noticed that charisma is the state of projecting three qualities at once: confidence + joy + love for your audience. When you embody all three, you put listeners at ease. They feel like you truly want them to be there. And when they feel that way, your thoughts flow into listeners’ minds without friction. Listeners lower their guards and their judgment. They're no longer focused on your eccentricities, insecurities, and weird hand movements. Instead, they’ve opened their minds to you.
The more a storyteller loses themselves in their own telling, the more the audience does too.
For you to drop your self-consciousness so that a crowd drops theirs, you have to embrace what theater coach Konstantin Stanislavski calls "public solitude," which is the ability to behave like you're alone when you're in front of a room full of people staring at you.
There was more I picked up from Jason and other great storytellers: if charisma is projecting confidence, joy, and love for your audience, you can't skip the joy part. This ties into why I was failing at podcasting. There was no joy in my voice. I had none of the likeability of actors like John Krasinski or Tom Holland. 
In contrast, I noticed that the most likeable storytellers appeared to be smiling—in their minds—when speaking. But you didn't see it on their faces—that can feel inauthentic. Instead, you felt the joy in their words.
So I tried this myself: when speaking, in my mind’s eye, I imagined I was smiling from ear to ear.
Wow, did this have an effect.
It recreated, at will, the dynamic of talking to someone I'm incredibly delighted to be around.
That's exactly what you want.
It turns out that, when you smile in your mind's eye, it shifts how you let words out of your mouth. It adds a light bounce to how you speak. A warmth and a spark.

This actually works at it's scary. What else can I do with this technique

This is yet another technique for tricking your brain in a way that makes you a more compelling storyteller. There's a lesson here: self-illusion is a huge part of storytelling.
And so, my friends, the storytelling picture was becoming unblurred: it turns out that the forces behind great story delivery are simple. You focus on two things and your body reflexively does the rest:
Blow your own mind
Imagine yourself smiling from ear to ear while talking
By doing this, you become the best storytelling version of yourself. It is an amplification of who you are, not a mimicking—of Neil deGrasse Tyson or anyone else. That was a flawed goal.
And so Courtland and I sat down to record our podcast yet again.
I felt confident I had the ingredients this time.
We bought the show's domain name, designed the graphics, told our friends about it, and started inviting the big guests we always wanted.
I messaged one potential guest who happened to be following me on Twitter. I asked if he’d be our first-ever guest.
He surprised me by saying yes.
Guess who it was?
Jason Silva. YouTube's ultra-charismatic storyteller.
I then went to Tim Urban to ask if he’d co-guest with Jason. Tim Urban is the mind behind Wait But Why. He's one of the best storytellers of our era.
He too said yes.
Me, Jason, Tim, and Courtland sat down for one hour to talk about a single idea:
Storytelling.
Midway into the episode, I told Jason a story of my own. It used the ingredients in this post.
He loved it.
The episode turned out wonderfully.
Before we wrapped, I asked Jason about the concept of "blowing your own mind." I said: "Is this what you've been doing? I think that was the answer to my year-long puzzle."
He said yes.
It turns out he relives the feelings he had for each idea before speaking. He doesn’t hit record until he reaches that emotional place again.
Treasure hunt complete.
Blowing your own mind was the unspoken ingredient no one could articulate.
We're off to the races now. You can listen to the podcast here: brainspodcast.com.

Let's talk about your stories
How can you find your own stories worth telling? One way is to identify the significant moments that changed your life:
Formative moments; moments of change
Painful moments
Moments of triumph and cringe
Which are the memories you can’t shake? That means they left a strong impression. Do they make you look vulnerable? Do they make you uncomfortable? Good, that makes them extra intriguing to listeners.
Now ask yourself: Which of these stories can end with inspiration, wisdom, or insight? Which has meaning so they're fulfilling to listen to?
Once you’ve identified a direction, consider stretching your story over a narrative arc:
The hero’s perspective.
Build suspense and empathy for the hero.
Goals and obstacles that produce change.
A surprising and meaningful moment of triumph.
A lesson that sticks with us.
Remember, don’t reveal everything upfront. That's a key lesson in story construction. Instead, hook the audience with a fascinating, half-told story. They have to keep listening to learn the rest. Then cinematically drag out the most intense moments.
Throughout, lose yourself in the story and blow your own mind. Relive it for the audience. Drop your guard, forget about judgment, and enter public solitude.
If you do that, we the audience hang onto your every word. Because this is a rare moment of human authenticity. We don't see that very often. In a fake society, we're starving for it.
If you want my future
storytelling
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—Julian Shapiro

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