Write of Passage

Where great writing happens | Our Final Cohort starts October 7

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

8 thoughts on Writing to Learn by William Zinsser (1998)

1. Writing is a way to explore a question and gain control over it.

2. An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else.

3. Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts.

4. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own.

5. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn.

6. Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it.

7. Writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job.

8. Writing is thinking on paper.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

If you're not listening to @david_perell's "How I Write" podcast you're missing out.

Every week David interviews a master writer and dives into their writing process, habits, and secrets.

10 Amazing episodes worth watching:

[David Perell @david_perell]

Write of Passage is shutting down, but we have one final cohort to run before it does. It’s our last dance. Our graduation tour. If you enroll, I promise it’ll be unlike any course you’ve ever taken.

The final cohort starts on October 7th. Join us!

https://t.co/nMWy6PJdGd

[Calley Means @calleymeans]

@david_perell You should feel nothing but pride. Your free content gave me motivation to write and Write of Passage alums have had an impact on millions. I know this mission will continue manifesting in amazing ways through your next endeavors.

[Danny Miranda @heydannymiranda]

@david_perell What a journey! Thank you for sharing from the heart and leading the online writing community. Write of Passage will be missed.

[Gagan Biyani 🏛 @gaganbiyani]

@david_perell Count me as a huge fan and supporter. It is rare for a company to last forever, and you made an amazing impact with Write of Passage. I'm really proud to have been a student and for it to have kicked off my writing career AND Maven. Thank you David for everything you do.

[Joakim Achrén @joakim_a]

@david_perell Did cohort 3 in 2019. It transformed my life. Thanks @david_perell, you've definitely changed so many lives.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Okay, it's time to get a little personal.

I have an update to share about my company, Write of Passage. We're going to shut down at the end of the year, and the next cohort will be our last.

This has not been an easy decision, but it’s necessary. And I want to explain what happened, especially for our alumni.

Our company, course, and community are alive and radiant. We have alumni who’ve poured their hearts into this community and built intimate friendships, we have a team who treats their work as soulcraft, and we have a culture of craftsmanship that is rare. That’s why this decision is so devastating.

I started Write of Passage to take the loneliness out of writing. The vision was to bring life to writing education. That meant building a community of people to support each other and a curriculum that feels nothing like your 5th-grade English class. Those things I envisioned, but I never expected to attract so many people who are off the charts in curiosity and enthusiasm. They’re the ones who’ve given Write of Passage so much life.

At the level of our mission, Write of Passage has been an astounding success. We’ve pushed the limits on what an online course can be with hyper-energetic Zoom sessions and a talented fleet of mentors and editors. We attracted 2,000+ students from 72 countries, reached a Net Promoter Score of 75 (higher than Apple), and we have alumni who went from publishing their first article in the course to publishing books or growing to 100,000+ subscribers. After a recent cohort, when we asked students about their experience, the phrase “life-changing” showed up 39 times.

If you had told me all that without showing me the finances, I would have assumed that Write of Passage was growing fast and swimming in revenue, but that hasn't happened.

We’ve built something worth celebrating in every way, except for the economics of the business. The first three years were roaring, but the past two have been grueling. Growth has been particularly difficult and I’ve been feeling constrained by the bi-annual cohort model itself. You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.

I’m eager to prioritize creative work again too. I originally started Write of Passage to subsidize my creative work but the demands of running the company took me away from that. There are people who can do high-quality writing while running a company, but I’m not one of them. I think I can have a bigger impact doing something else, and so, the company has run its course. Specifically, I’m eager to double-down on How I Write and prioritize my own writing again. And who knows? Maybe it’s time to write a book.

But like I said, we’re not done yet! Write of Passage will have its grand finale. The final Write of Passage cohort will run from October 7th – November 13th, and enrollment is now open.

We’re pulling out the stops to make this cohort the biggest and best yet. For one, we’re making it more accessible by lowering the price for people who enroll early, and we’re expanding the scholarship pool. So, if you’ve ever wanted to experience the magic of Write of Passage, this is your last chance.

To the Write of Passage community: Thank you for the heart you’ve brought to every cohort. From Feedback Gyms to Live Sessions, the one thing I can always count on is that you’ll show up with passion and dedication (even if y’all go a little crazy in the Zoom chat).

Happy writing,
— David Perell

[David Perell @david_perell]

It’s counter-intuitive, but most podcasts stink because the hosts care too much about the audience. They ask mass market, surface-level questions they already know the answers to instead of going down the weird and wacky rabbit holes they’re actually interested in.

[David Perell @david_perell]

My next writing cohort starts on August 26th.

If you're interested in joining but have some questions, I'm hosting a Q&A on Monday. 60 minutes. Meet alums. Learn about the program. Ask whatever you want.

Sign up below.

https://t.co/tWU2792RAg

[David Perell @david_perell]

This meme is revealing, both in its brilliance and its shortcomings.

I'll start with the brilliance. Social media algorithms have a deeper and more intimate understanding of their users than most of their best friends do. They know our quirks, our desires, our lusts, and our aspirations. They know things about us that we don't even know about ourselves. So yes, they disturb us by showing us our own shadow.

What about the shortcomings? The algorithms cater to our short-term desires instead of our long-term ones. They suck us in with political dramas, viral videos, and all kinds of porn. Like a box of Pringles, these things are irresistible in the moment, but leave us feeling regretful after the fact. So yes, like junk food, social media can ruin lives by preying on our impulses.

But our information environment doesn't need to be polluted like this.

This begs the question: How would algorithms change if they prioritized our long-term desires?

[David Perell @david_perell]

Jerry Seinfeld was offered $110 million to make one more season of his show, but he said no.

Why?

Dosage. Even the best things get boring when they drag on for too long. Seinfeld says: "Leave the audience wanting more."

Here are his rules for comedy:

1. Talent wins: "Get good at something. That’s it. Everything else is bullshit.”

2. Embrace the difficulty of writing: The problem with writing isn’t that it’s hard. The problem is that people want it to be easy, so they run away when it gets difficult.

3. Seinfeld's writing routine: Full focus, no distractions, do it every day.

4. Want to crush your creative spirit? Aim to make something that everybody will like.

5. "If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way."

6. The work never stops: Good comedians are always looking for jokes.

7. Coming up with new ideas is important, editing is important, but it's important that you don't try to do both at the same time.

8. Cut the distractions when you write. No Twitter, no Instagram, no texting, no email. Seinfeld says: “You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

9. Distraction is the enemy. It's not just getting distracted during writing sessions that crushes productivity. It's building a distracting life that kills people. Seinfeld skipped the admin work, skipped the speaking opportunities, and skipped all the schmoozing that famous people get into.

10. Forget about your audience: The fountain of creativity cannot flow when the judgmental eye of your audience is top of mind as you're creating.

11. Write a lot, publish a little.

12. Never stop focusing on the craft: Seinfeld says that in most TV shows, the writers spend roughly half their time working on the show and the other half dealing with nonsense. But Seinfeld and Larry David spent 99% of their time writing. Just the two of them. With the door closed.

That's just a taste. There's so much more in the video below.

It's a 45-minute distillation of Seinfeld's writing process. Unlike most How I Write episodes, this one is a monologue, not an interview.

I've also published it on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and shared the links in the reply tweets.

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

Notes on creativity from Isaac Asimov

1. It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable.

2. To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.

3. As far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required.

4. Creative people thrive in an environment of ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness.

5. Joviality, joking, relaxed kidding...are of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness.

Source: "How Do People Get New Ideas?” (1959)

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

Notes on creativity from Isaac Asimov

1. It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable.

2. To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.

3. As far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required.

4. Creative people thrive in an environment of ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness.

5. Joviality, joking, relaxed kidding...are of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness.

Source: "How Do People Get New Ideas?” (1959)

[Adam Saks @AdamLSaks]

Writing my "core idea" first draft for @1WriteofPassage...

For the first time in a while, I'm allowing myself to enjoy the discovery process of what the hell my core idea even is.

It has lessons from:

- stoicism
- journey of self-love
- power of self-belief
- investing in mental health
- transformation through adversity
- meditation + visualization's importance

But what's at the core?

Time will tell after I toil with it some more the next 3 weeks. Stay tuned.

(this is me as a writer, admitting that I'm figuring it out in real time, and it feels quite liberating to do so).

Until then, I'll share a simple truth that's obvious to me:

You can convince your brain of literally anything you want to. Even if it's a lie, if you believe it, it's true. This truth can be harnessed for good.

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

The most successful writers follow the "High Exposure, Low Conformity" principle.

They expose themselves to a wide range of beliefs... but they conform to nothing. Nothing, that is, except their inner vision. As C.S. Lewis put it: "Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else."

Lesson: Writers must avoid the temptation of conforming to peer pressure or the winds of the zeitgeist. Their ultimate job is to express their own convictions with flair.

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

The most successful writers follow the "High Exposure, Low Conformity" principle.

They expose themselves to a wide range of beliefs... but they conform to nothing. Nothing, that is, except their inner vision. As C.S. Lewis put it: "Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else."

Lesson: Writers must avoid the temptation of conforming to peer pressure or the winds of the zeitgeist. Their ultimate job is to express their own convictions with flair.

[hbrophy93 @hbrophy93]

I'm in @1WriteofPassage and one of our prompts was about sharing a piece of advice and mine was sharing your current rabbit holes.

In that spirit, I'll be sharing my current rabbit hole and 5 resources that I found interesting. The current one is Civil Engineering!

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

C.S. Lewis on why you need to read more old books:

“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

C.S. Lewis on why you need to read more old books:

“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."

[Write of Passage @1WriteofPassage]

This is "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog"

One of the world's best-known works of art...

7 tips from its creator:

1. Dreams solve what the waking mind can’t: “Sometimes I try to think and nothing comes out of it; but it happens that I doze off and suddenly I am startled, open my eyes, and what my mind was looking for stands before me like an apparition...”

2. Wait for your sacred moments: “All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.”

3. Evoke ONE specific reaction instead of trying to do everything: “Every truthful work of art must express a definite feeling…rather than try to unite all sensations, as if mixed together with a twirling stick.”

4. On solitude: “Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature. I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am...”

5. Great ideas come from the heart: “The pure, frank sentiments we hold in our hearts are the only truthful sources of art.”

6. Avoid “clever” but soulless work: “A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.”

7. Stand by your convictions—even if they are against the consensus of the time: “I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.”

Enjoyed these quotes from Caspar David Friedrich?

Share this post!

Follow @1WriteofPassage for more.