How I Write Clips

I interview the world's top writers. New episodes every Wednesday, and this is a feed of the very best clips.

My personal account: @david_perell

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"Weeping may be the closest experience human beings have to actual enlightenment.

Because in weeping, you have given up. You've broken down. Whatever control you wanted over the world has slipped out of your hands.

Whatever way you wanted to keep heartbreak at bay, whatever way you wanted to keep grief at bay, they've all been broken down by the grief, the loss, the person leaving you, by the diagnosis you've just been given in the hospital.

You've actually dropped down below this perimeter, and it breaks apart through that overflow of emotions. The reason you're weeping is you haven't built a body that can hold that revelation. But now you're just about to do it. You're breaking open this controlled edge that you've had, and it's breaking out of there. You're becoming larger through the weeping.

It's worth trying to have a practice of weeping, even if you can't go into full weeping, to feel the emotion as much as you can, because emotion is a doorway to something much deeper.

Camus, the great French philosopher, said: 'live to the point of tears.'"

— David Whyte

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Robert Greene spent the past seven years writing about the word “sublime.”

“It’s not dainty. It’s not fussy, old-fashioned, or quaint. It’s a mix of terror and exhilaration, of awe and fear.”

“When you look up at the night sky… if you really thought about it: goddamn, I am so small. My life doesn’t matter at all compared to a billion years from now. No one will ever know who I am.”

@RobertGreene

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

“Every writer I know who thinks they’re really good sucks. Only bad writers think they’re good."

"You need a little bit of fear, I think, when you when you write."

“No matter what I’m doing, including sitting here with you right now, there’s a little voice that’s always like, you really should be writing.”

“You have to be a little bit obsessed with this thing to do it right.”

-Harlan Coben (Over 90M books sold)

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

“If somebody doesn’t want to cooperate, I’ll write about them anyway.”

Patrick Radden Keefe has built a career writing about people who didn’t want to be written about.

His advice if a journalist calls: talk to them. The story is getting written either way.

“A lot of the time in journalism, that’s kind of the end of the story. For me, that’s often the beginning of the story.”

“Anytime I start writing about somebody, I will always make the effort to talk to them. And I always think that it’s probably a good idea for them to talk to me, whether they do or not.”

“What I say to them is the train is leaving the station.”

“I wrote a big profile a couple of years ago of Larry Gagosian, the art dealer. I thought he would say no. And then he said yes.

I think it was savvy of him to do so because he realized 'there’s only gonna be so much real estate in this piece. And if I come in, I’m my own best advocate. And the more I talk, the more real estate I’ll take up.'”

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"When you ask people about their parents after their parents have passed, every single person I've ever talked to about this said, oh yeah, I never talked to them about that. I wish I had."

If Malcolm Gladwell taught a semester on writing, this is the assignment he would give:

"I would have the kids go home, and I would have them interview their parents and bring the transcripts back into the class."

"Kids think the burden is on them, and that's why they're so inhibited when it comes to writing. We're not asking you to tell a story. Other people have stories. Go and find out what they are."

[David Perell @david_perell]

The Malcolm Gladwell Interview

His books were some of the first I ever read because we had copies of Outliers, Blink, and Tipping Point all around my childhood home. Then when I was getting into writing, I learned how to open essays by studying his New Yorker profiles.

So I wanted to ask him how he tells stories, makes his audiobooks, and manages to be such a prolific writer.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
00:38 How are puzzles similar to writing
04:55 Why specificity matters more than knowledge
12:28 How Malcolm wrote his new book
17:02 Stop readers from leaving
19:28 What he learned from John le Carré
23:58 What he learned from Michael Lewis
27:15 You should engineer your curiosity
30:59 Why memory is underrated
33:37 Give readers a big why
38:15 How to make readers cry
41:29 What audio formats mean to him
45:57 Leave room for uncertainty
48:37 Pace your story like a runner
53:02 Say more with fewer words
55:24 Malcolm’s advice for beginner writers

Here's what stuck out to me:

1) “I will turn down a story if I do not think it has intrinsic interestingness.”

2) Most of Malcolm's writing life doesn't revolve around sitting at the keyboard: “Most of my days are spent either reporting or arranging to report.”

3) Writing books requires you to pace yourself. It's like running: “In mile one, you could run much faster, but you deliberately don’t because you want to last for mile ten.”

4) "Other people have stories. Go and find out what they are." You don't need to come up with stories on your own if you're curious enough to ask questions and wait patiently until a story emerges. Doing so removes the pressure to manufacture a story from a blank page.

5) Malcolm's spent tons of time with Paul Simon and was repeatedly struck by the depth of his reference archive. He's like a walking LLM, with unlimited resources for summoning facts, riffs, and musical ideas.

6) 'Granularity' is the thing you want from the people you interview for a book. The most important person won't always give you that. Sometimes, it's the person on the front lines or the periphery of a situation.

7) Audiobooks shouldn't quote people the author interviewed. They should have the original tape from the original interview so the listener can hear it right from the source. He says: “Why bother reading someone’s quote when it’s audio? Play the tape. Let’s hear them speak.”

8) Audiobooks are so core to his work that he thinks about the audio experience before he even writes the first word of the book.

9) Sometimes, in an audiobook, the emotional register is better set by a song than prose. That's why Malcolm's new audiobook opens with music by Drew Holcomb. In 2.5 minutes “he accomplishes something I couldn’t do in the book.”

10) Delay your conclusions when doing research: “The penalties associated with premature conclusions are so large.” For example, Gladwell regrets how quickly he embraced the Broken Windows theory as an explanation for crime in New York.

11) You don't need to be good at every part of writing in order to be an outstanding writer. For example, if you have a strong voice and lively characters, you don't need an elaborate plot. He says: "Just give us enough plot to activate another part of our brain.” The point is that every part of your book should support the thing you're uniquely good at.

12) It was interesting to hear Malcolm reflect on his earlier writing and confess that he got too cute with coming up with fun names for things.

13 Is laughter slightly overrated in our current culture? Gladwell says: "Getting someone to laugh is far easier than making them cry.”

14) Interview your parents before they die: "Think about how many people, when asked about their parents after they’ve passed, say, 'I never talked to them about that. I wish I had.'”

15) If Malcolm were teaching a class on writing, he'd make kids skip class in order to sit down with their parents, record them speaking for 45 minutes, and then run the conversation through an AI transcription service. Then they'd bring the transcript back to class and write a short article about the conversation. "That's where we’d start on day one. We would then build from there."

I've shared the full conversation with @Gladwell below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to the episode on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

Enjoy!

[David Perell @david_perell]

The Malcolm Gladwell Interview

His books were some of the first I ever read because we had copies of Outliers, Blink, and Tipping Point all around my childhood home. Then when I was getting into writing, I learned how to open essays by studying his New Yorker profiles.

So I wanted to ask him how he tells stories, makes his audiobooks, and manages to be such a prolific writer.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
00:38 How are puzzles similar to writing
04:55 Why specificity matters more than knowledge
12:28 How Malcolm wrote his new book
17:02 Stop readers from leaving
19:28 What he learned from John le Carré
23:58 What he learned from Michael Lewis
27:15 You should engineer your curiosity
30:59 Why memory is underrated
33:37 Give readers a big why
38:15 How to make readers cry
41:29 What audio formats mean to him
45:57 Leave room for uncertainty
48:37 Pace your story like a runner
53:02 Say more with fewer words
55:24 Malcolm’s advice for beginner writers

Here's what stuck out to me:

1) “I will turn down a story if I do not think it has intrinsic interestingness.”

2) Most of Malcolm's writing life doesn't revolve around sitting at the keyboard: “Most of my days are spent either reporting or arranging to report.”

3) Writing books requires you to pace yourself. It's like running: “In mile one, you could run much faster, but you deliberately don’t because you want to last for mile ten.”

4) "Other people have stories. Go and find out what they are." You don't need to come up with stories on your own if you're curious enough to ask questions and wait patiently until a story emerges. Doing so removes the pressure to manufacture a story from a blank page.

5) Malcolm's spent tons of time with Paul Simon and was repeatedly struck by the depth of his reference archive. He's like a walking LLM, with unlimited resources for summoning facts, riffs, and musical ideas.

6) 'Granularity' is the thing you want from the people you interview for a book. The most important person won't always give you that. Sometimes, it's the person on the front lines or the periphery of a situation.

7) Audiobooks shouldn't quote people the author interviewed. They should have the original tape from the original interview so the listener can hear it right from the source. He says: “Why bother reading someone’s quote when it’s audio? Play the tape. Let’s hear them speak.”

8) Audiobooks are so core to his work that he thinks about the audio experience before he even writes the first word of the book.

9) Sometimes, in an audiobook, the emotional register is better set by a song than prose. That's why Malcolm's new audiobook opens with music by Drew Holcomb. In 2.5 minutes “he accomplishes something I couldn’t do in the book.”

10) Delay your conclusions when doing research: “The penalties associated with premature conclusions are so large.” For example, Gladwell regrets how quickly he embraced the Broken Windows theory as an explanation for crime in New York.

11) You don't need to be good at every part of writing in order to be an outstanding writer. For example, if you have a strong voice and lively characters, you don't need an elaborate plot. He says: "Just give us enough plot to activate another part of our brain.” The point is that every part of your book should support the thing you're uniquely good at.

12) It was interesting to hear Malcolm reflect on his earlier writing and confess that he got too cute with coming up with fun names for things.

13 Is laughter slightly overrated in our current culture? Gladwell says: "Getting someone to laugh is far easier than making them cry.”

14) Interview your parents before they die: "Think about how many people, when asked about their parents after they’ve passed, say, 'I never talked to them about that. I wish I had.'”

15) If Malcolm were teaching a class on writing, he'd make kids skip class in order to sit down with their parents, record them speaking for 45 minutes, and then run the conversation through an AI transcription service. Then they'd bring the transcript back to class and write a short article about the conversation. "That's where we’d start on day one. We would then build from there."

I've shared the full conversation with @Gladwell below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to the episode on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

Enjoy!

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"Some of my friends who are huge bestsellers do the five pages a day or 2,000 words a day, and I was like, 'what is this bullshit?'"

"If I'm running to my desk to write, that is a good thing. If I write fast, that is a good thing, because it is crystallized and I know where I wanna go."

"It has to start with the premise of: am I excited about this? If I'm not, then don't write it, because there's no way in hell that anybody's going to enjoy reading it."

- David Baldacci (over 200 million books sold)

[samarth @samarthgowda215]

a year of YouTube packaging strategy (for podcasts) in one article ↓ https://t.co/rMu0VNwJFo

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

The main thing comedian Taylor Tomlinson learned from Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird wasn't about writing:

"Bird by Bird is the writing book I've gone back to the most because the part of that book where she talks about how perfectionism makes you think that if you're perfect, you're never gonna have to die, but you are gonna die.

And everybody else who, like, wasn't as obsessed with perfection as you is gonna die too, but they had more fun than you."

"I swear to god, I think about that every single day of my life, and that's just, like, good life advice. It goes beyond writing."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Gillian Flynn learned everything she knows about screenwriting from working with David Fincher on adapting Gone Girl to the big screen:

"Some directors come in and it's like, it's because something's gonna be a hit or they can, cast a big name. Whereas he came in really knowing and liking the book."

"I made the script exactly a 120 pages. In Hollywood, if you go any longer, they're gonna think that you're this darling novelist who can't kill her babies."

"And the first thing, David was like, let's put more of the book back in here."

"He works harder than anyone I know. He doesn't phone anything in. Even down to an insert shot."

"He's always willing to go back and see, like, is there more to be gotten out of this?"

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"I felt it was being a little sexist to think that only men could be evil."

Gillian Flynn is known for writing riveting, evil female characters like Amy Dunne in Gone Girl. She told me what motivated her to focus on female evil:

"I've thought a lot about female evil, and in a way, it was because I just felt that we weren't properly represented."

"I always was kind of pushing back against that idea that women are too kind."

"That's just demonstrably incorrect if you look anywhere around the world, and if you talk to any woman who knows other women."

"It leaves women with only this idea of seeing in film or TV or books female characters who are helpmates."

"So it really was part of the reason I wrote Sharp Objects was to examine what violence looks like with women."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

@david_perell https://t.co/XsZjvouxCa

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Gone Girl's famous "Cool Girl" monologue started as writing exercise that Gillian Flynn never planned to use:

"Sometimes I just have days where I'm like, you know, just write three good pages. It doesn't have to move the plot forward. It doesn't have to establish anything. You may not even keep it."

"I was like, oh, Amy is gonna write about women's issues for a women's magazine. I'm just gonna write what an essay of hers in the magazine would sound like and would be like."

"I'm like a method writer sort of, and I was like, just this angry screed. And my husband was very afraid of me that day."

"My whole rule with myself is you can't use any writing exercises in a book. I'm so glad I kept it in the book given what I hear from people it meant something to them."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Gone Girl's famous "Cool Girl" monologue started as writing exercise that Gillian Flynn never planned to use:

"Sometimes I just have days where I'm like, you know, just write three good pages. It doesn't have to move the plot forward. It doesn't have to establish anything. You may not even keep it."

"I was like, oh, Amy is gonna write about women's issues for a women's magazine. I'm just gonna write what an essay of hers in the magazine would sound like and would be like."

"I'm like a method writer sort of, and I was like, just this angry screed. And my husband was very afraid of me that day."

"My whole rule with myself is you can't use any writing exercises in a book. I'm so glad I kept it in the book given what I hear from people it meant something to them."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Neil Strauss has written multiple NYT best sellers. He writes three drafts for three different audiences:

1) Yourself

"The first draft is that vomit draft. You get it all out there, and no one's gonna ever see that."

"So when you're writing with vulnerability, you actually can share everything there because no one will see it."

2) The Reader

"The second draft is for the reader. You make the second draft, and you now make it readable."

"There are things that feel really interesting and important, and let's say vulnerable to you, but they're not to other people... And then you have to remove those."

3) The Hater

"The third draft is for the hater, the critic. I find, that all these questions of what are people gonna think... save that this draft."

"As Kevin Hart said, 'take the bullets out of the gun.' So whatever you might get criticized for, you could already have the answers within the book."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have giant talent and no discipline."

Steven Pressfield thinks that you can't get through a 400-hour first draft without discipline:

"If you're gonna write something that's gonna take two and a half or three years every day full time, you know?"

"A first draft is four hundred hours, which when I heard that I thought that's about right."

"That's ten forty hour weeks, and nobody can work a forty hour week as a writer. You know, you can't do that. So it's more like twenty hour weeks for a first draft when you're gonna do 10 drafts or something like that."

"How are you gonna do that without discipline? It's everything."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"Suspense is the central thing in our lives. We don't know what's gonna happen to us an hour from now, a day from now."

"We live always on the edge, and we've put it out of our mind because otherwise life wouldn't be very tolerable. But it is the essence of our lives."

-Dean Koontz

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

"The character can carry the entire novel."

Dean Koontz binged 34 John D. MacDonald books in 38 days fresh out of college. This is what he learned:

"He'd wanna tell you about this character, so he'd just stop. And he'd write three to five pages about this character."

"The first time I hit this, I went, 'what is this? I wanna read the rest of the story.' And then by the time I got to the end of page five of the character stuff when the story started again, I actually was saying, 'No! I wanna know more about this character.'"

"Kurt Vonnegut actually said about John D. MacDonald, if thousands of years from now, some alien race came to Earth, and they stumbled across the work of John D. MacDonald buried under the ruin of a house, it would be the greatest finding they could ever make to understand how the human race works."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Steven Pressfield explains the "60 scenes" method:

"A movie is about 60 scenes and so it can be on index cards, three by five cards, and screenwriters do this all the time."

"If you imagine a clothesline and you're hanging, you might only have three scenes. You have like a great ending, Captain Ahab and the whale and duke it out here."

"How do we fill in the blanks? What has to happen there? What has to happen at the very start?"

"You can do 60 scenes and just keep changing them as you get better ideas."

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Long gone are the days where authors could just write and let everything else take care of itself. Jodi Picoult explains:

"Nobody can sit in their ivory tower anymore and just write books and expect them to find their way to the masses. Doesn't work that way."

"There's a lot of chaff out there. And if you've got wheat, you gotta make sure people know you got wheat."

[Tanay Kothari @tankots]

this is so cool, thank you @RobertGreene ❤️

[How I Write Clips @PerellClips]

Gustave Flaubert was a method writer.

Robert Greene says that's what makes Madame Bovary so alive:

"Flaubert was this creature of the right word, and he would sometimes spend three days trying to figure out the right word for this one sentence."

"He gets very much caught up in his stories. So when he wrote Madame Bovary, he was, like, literally becoming Madame Bovary. He becomes the characters that he writes about."

"But at the same time, he's a very careful, conscientious writer who's pouring over every sentence. They're not contradictory. The two go together."

"But because he's inside her world and he's a very disciplined writer who focuses on how language can create a world, he's able to bring the two together.

That's sort of the dance that the greatest writers go through."