David Perell
@david_perell • 477,226 subscribers
"The Writing Guy" | Christian | Host: How I Write Podcast | I tweet about writing, beauty, and architecture | My writing: https://t.co/SOE9HtxXdi
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Tom Segura has been doing stand-up comedy for ~25 years. He's known for his Netflix specials and a TV show called Bad Thoughts. His stand-up sets are based in stories and simple observations around the world. The guy can look at something you've seen a thousand times but never managed to find the humor in. At one point during the interview I was laughing so hard that I could barely ask the next question. I asked Tom how he finds jokes, develops stories for the stage, what he's learned from Chris Rock, and how to turn ordinary observations into comedy. Timestamps: 0:37 How to find jokes 2:03 Why are comedians always annoyed? 7:19 Say the obvious 11:06 What makes a joke land? 13:11 The 250 rep rule 15:07 Chris Rock 19:33 The 4 types of comedians 21:44 Use the audience's discomfort 24:39 The key to good stage presence 32:00 Mall cops and TSA agents 36:50 How to develop a joke 38:56 Stand-up vs. TV writing 49:11 Finding your way into the story 54:08 Punchlines 55:16 What a set list looks like 58:15 Word choice 59:31 Accents 1:03:50 How to start a show 1:08:01 Writing a book Some things he taught me about being funny: 1) The best mindset to bring on stage is silliness. 2) You must have strong opinions. Indifference kills comedy. You can say "this is the best coffee I've ever had" and make it funny. You can say "this is the worst coffee" and make it funny. But "it's fine, I don't care" is never funny. 3) You can tell the difference between a world-class comic and an amateur one by their relationship with silence. Amateur comics get jittery if a few seconds pass without laughter, whereas seasoned comics use it to their advantage. 4) Good word choice matters more than you'd think. "Yanked" is a funnier word than "pulled." Yiddish words are funny. An easy way to pick up on this is to listen to how naturally funny people describe things. 5) How to find jokes? Talk all the time. Talk and talk, and develop the skill of recognizing when something you've said has legs. I've shared the full episode with Tom Segura below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Tom Segura AKA Mr. Ladybug
David Perell156,042 次观看 • 14 天前
Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words. All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Why writers should visit archives 04:39 Lessons from reading diaries 09:41 Letters vs diaries 11:35 Presence over productivity 18:30 How language shapes thought 19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry 36:46 Why college failed her 39:58 Reading to survive 41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick 43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes 47:32 Why AI can never make art 53:10 Stop calling it content I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
David Perell204,732 次观看 • 21 天前
What Tom Segura taught me about comedy: 1) Being annoyed is funny. Complaining is funny. What's not funny is total indifference. You simply have to have an opinion. 2) Something magical happens between the idea and the performance. The mixture of pressure, adrenaline, and thrill all comes together, and something else comes out of your mouth. 3) If you feel people are upset when you say something, that's an advantage. You can say it, acknowledge their dislike, and then use jokes to support your point. 4) Why mall cops and TSA agents are such funny characters: Someone with no power in the world is given three square meters of dominion and told, "You are the most powerful person here." 5) The best thing a comic can do is simply talk a lot. Over time you'll find yourself saying funny stuff and learn to recognize your best takes. 6) The perfect stand-up is someone who combines incredible stage presence with strong writing.
David Perell129,180 次观看 • 14 天前
"One great detail will do the work of 50 crappy sentences." Wright Thompson is one of the last great magazine writers in America. He's long been a writer at ESPN, and if you love sports, you've almost definitely read his work. Maybe his profile of Tiger Woods. Or maybe the one about Michael Jordan. Some highlights: - "When somebody says something is overwritten, it really just means that the story is underreported." - Profiles are about figuring out what is a central complication of somebody's life and how, on a daily basis, they go about solving it. - "All of these stories, the few good ones I've written... I think these stories are like a prayer for empathy, to try to understand each other, to understand another human being a little bit at a time. Then slowly, thread by thread, you understand yourself." - On writing well: "One of the things that's missing is that nobody wants to hear what I have to say, which is just reps. Zen is a butt in a seat. There's no mystery. It's just reps." - "I wish someone had told me years ago that if you're going to be a professional writer for decades, writing is not going to be about words, but it's going to be about architecture. Only when you really understand how things fit together and move can you then actually be thinking about the words." - "All writing is trying to say something new that is true and is both specific and universal and that helps the reader understand something they didn't understand before, preferably about themselves." And here are the timestamps: 1:50 Writer's vomit vs. writer's block 8:33 The architecture of writing 11:30 What makes for a good story? 15:57 Bringing characters to life 21:11 "The hammer" 26:26 Writing a vivid scene 33:41 How to bring places to life 39:57 Dialogue vs. quotes 45:49 The role of secondary characters 51:44 The problem with "brainstorming" 1:02:13 What makes for a great ending? I've shared the full conversation with Wright Thompson below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen to the full thing on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
David Perell499,585 次观看 • 2 个月前
Jon Yaged runs Macmillan, one of the five biggest publishers in the world, so I asked him to explain the book publishing industry to me. My main question: why should authors work with a traditional publisher, especially when self-publishing is taking off? What I got was a full tour of how book publishing works. Everything from how authors make money, to how publishers choose which books to back, to the traditional vs. self-publishing debate. Timestamps: 2:01 Consolidation in book publishing 4:01 Celebrity books 7:57 The scale of the publishing industry 9:48 How to get your book published 14:15 New York 16:25 Using data to find great books 29:33 How to work with a publisher 31:11 The economics of a book deal 36:42 How sequels work 42:21 Children's books 48:42 Books in Europe vs. America 50:25 Should writers use AI? 1:00:57 How printing works 1:04:52 Book marketing advice 1:09:48 What a publishing CEO does 1:11:06 Audiobooks 1:15:17 Are people getting stupider? 1:18:20 The publisher business model 1:19:08 Macmillan I've shared the full interview with Jon Yaged below. If you'd rather watch or listen to the interview somewhere else, check out the first reply tweet where I've linked to the interview on YouTube, and also on Apple / Spotify. Enjoy!
David Perell407,504 次观看 • 2 个月前
Ocean Vuong is a poet, novelist, and professor at NYU. This is the anti writing with AI conversation. It's about breaking free from technology and convention in order to see the world fresh again, and then make beautiful art about what you see. Some highlights: 1) "We're out here to write sentences the species has never encountered, and it's possible in this lifetime." 2) "Eighty percent of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax." 3) "When you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through syntax. For every single person, it's different." And below are all the things we talked about, in the form of timestamps: 1:40 Writing metaphors 4:52 The problem with writing workshops 13:02 How AI changed writing 23:32 Why did writing get so rigid? 28:04 Rescue the cliche! 32:06 Seeing vs. recognizing 34:37 80% of writing isn't writing 41:31 What makes sentences memorable 50:31 Poetry as a testing ground for writers 1:02:30 Synchronic vs diachronic reading 1:09:03 Daringness and disobedience 1:14:27 The limits of language I've shared the full interview with Ocean below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
David Perell327,338 次观看 • 2 个月前
Anne Lamott is the queen of writing teachers. Ask 100 writers for their favorite book about the craft, and her book, Bird by Bird, will top the list. Everybody who's tried to make a work of art knows how loud the inner critic can be. When struggle comes, most people try harder. But Anne says: "The point is not to try harder; it's to resist life less." Improving as a writer is about becoming more aware and paying closer attention to what's already around you, and this conversation is about how to do that. It centers around her famous writing advice: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Timestamps: 0:39 Bird by Bird 2:17 Why writer's block isn't real 3:36 The problem with trying harder 9:06 Every book has three drafts 14:24 Learning to observe the world 15:58 Facing your inner critic 27:59 "Help, thanks, wow" 31:16 You get three pages 35:51 Revenge = fuel 38:26 Anne's #1 writing prompt 48:53 Finding writing ideas 54:57 Writing lessons from movies 1:02:08 The ABDCE storytelling formula 1:05:37 What makes for a good ending? 1:10:57 Dealing with criticism 1:16:28 Writing to be fully alive I've shared the full conversation with Anne Lamott below. If you'd prefer to watch it, I've published it on YouTube, and you also can listen to it on Apple / Spotify. I've shared those links in the reply tweets. This is one of those bucket list interviews I've wanted to do ever since I started How I Write, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
David Perell159,189 次观看 • 1 个月前
Elif Shafak has written 21 books and writes with a level of beauty that will make the birds around you sing louder. She's my favorite kind of guest. Just by being around somebody like Elif, you unlock your imagination and open your eyes to the mysteries of our world. And what's hilarious about her is that she writes so beautifully while listening to head-smashing heavy metal. Timestamps: 2:02 Making the world enchanted 4:39 Writing with wonder 7:22 Elif's writing routine 11:11 Why Elif writes to heavy metal 17:07 What makes for a good character? 34:12 The two kinds of writing 43:27 Writing poetically 48:30 The limits of English 51:46 Writing like you're drunk 55:04 Writers need freedom 1:06:44 The poetry of Rumi 1:10:22 Spirituality vs. Religion 1:17:11 James Baldwin I've shared the full conversation below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the first reply tweet. I've also shared clips in the replies. Enjoy!
David Perell606,516 次观看 • 5 个月前
People stopped liking poetry because we got too good at teaching it. For thousands of years, poetry was central to education and people loved it because we were so bad at teaching it. Then came a group called the New Critics in the 1920s who figured out how to analyze poetry. For the first time in history, poetry was taught right and it killed the audience. How was poetry taught before? You memorized it. You recited it. You sang it. And you didn't teach poetry as something that needed to be understood via analysis. The best way to teach poetry is like this: experience it, perform it, memorize it. Once you've done that, then you can do the analysis. But analysis is secondary to what poetry is. We don't make people analyze pop songs before they fall in love with them, so why do we do that for poetry? — Dana Gioia
David Perell640,580 次观看 • 5 个月前
Lee Child is the man behind the Jack Reacher series. He's sold more than 200 million books, and two of his books were adapted into movies starring Tom Cruise. How popular are his books? In the UK, his series has sold more copies than J.K Rowling did with Harry Potter on Amazon. So at this point, you basically can't talk about contemporary crime and thriller books without talking about Lee Child. This interview is all about how he wrote that Jack Reacher series. To the best of my knowledge, it's the deepest interview he's ever done about his writing process. Timestamps: 0:30 Writing stories in America 7:26 You don't need an outline 12:50 Writing one book per year 17:57 Why the 60s were so creative 18:56 The business of writing 23:05 The key to page-turner books 38:25 How to write good dialogue 43:15 Where to start / end a book 52:18 Writing a violent scene 56:56 Using clothes to reveal character 1:00:43 Why the UK has so many good writers I've shared the full conversation below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the links in the first reply tweet. Enjoy!
David Perell439,879 次观看 • 3 个月前
Spent two hours with Marc Andreessen, who gave me a masterclass on how to think, learn, read, research, and write. Here's what I learned: 1. Read, read, read... then read some more. 2. Many of your best ideas will emerge in fits of rage or frustration. Channel the fury. Smash the keyboard. Lean into the passion. Torch the page with your energy. 3. Marc doesn't have much of a formal writing process. He thinks and thinks, and when epiphany strikes, he hammers out an outline as fast as possible to get his ideas on paper. Then, he turns it into a full article. 4. Marc's motto for writing and thinking: "Strong views, weakly held." Put yourself out there, but stay on the hunt for dissenting opinions from smart and respectful people. 5. Online writing tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncrasies that traditional publishing would not accommodate. Lean into them. 6. The world is awash in bad content. You need to punch through. Snappy one-liners and genuine conviction are two ways to do that. 7. Marc's been reading online for as long as anybody on the planet, and the biggest thing that's surprised him is how political the Internet's become. Something changed between ~2013-2015. The Internet was once an escape from political debates. Now it's a hotbed of them. 8. Writing software is halfway between writing a novel and building a bridge. 9. Play around with communication tools. Push the limits. Doesn't matter what the rules are. When Marc felt constrained by Twitter's 140-character limit, he started replying to his own tweets and invented the Twitter thread. 10. On the quest for good ideas, surround yourself with "lateral thinkers" who can't help but come up with variant perspectives on everything they see. They won't always be right, but they're always challenge your thinking. 11. Media formats are cyclical. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms and Twitter is aphorisms-as-a-service. Hip-hop brought back poetry. Montaigne pioneered the essay format and blogs brought them back into vogue. 12. People should write more manifestos. 13. Marc's nomination for the best living American novelist: James Ellroy. 14. GPT has revealed how much writing is pure pablum. Bland, lifeless, uninsightful, unoffensive, and not worth the price of the ink it was printed with. 15. "With GPT, every writer now has a writing partner who can do an infinite amount of grunt work without complaining." 16. "ChatGPT plagiarism is a complete non-issue. If you can't out-write a machine, what are you doing writing?" 17. Marc writes from the heart. He doesn't do much editing and likes to provide reading recommendations instead of directly citing his sources. 18. The person who writes down the plan in an organization has tremendous power. If you want to find the up-and-comers at a tech company, look into who's writing the plan. Though they may not be coming up with all the ideas, you'll know they have the energy, motivation, and skills to organize and communicate ideas in a written form. 19. Marc uses a barbell approach to consume information. He focuses on what's happening right now while also reading a lot of things that were written 10+ years ago. The content is either timely or timeless, with almost nothing in between. I've shared the full conversation below. If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies below. If there was an Olympic category for most insights per minute, Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 would be a guaranteed medalist.
David Perell2,585,120 次观看 • 2 年前
Martin Scorsese watched a movie every single night. "I'd bring takeout food upstairs and listen to him, and ask him questions. It was like taking a Masters degree in film. That's where I learned he knew every old director. Marty educated me. I did a lot of reading. I knew about those old directors. I had all of our people trained in the history of film and television. I bought every book that was published, including one about the history of the Emmys which listed all the Emmy awards, and I made our people watch every film in the history of the Academy Awards that won best picture, best actress, best actor, best director, and best writer. They got familiar with the actors: Who's Gary Cooper? Who's Robert Mitchum? Who's Lana Turner? Who are these people and what did they contribute? By doing that, our people were so fluent in our business. They could talk television, movies, music. They knew the history because past is prologue. If you know history, you can pretty much predict the future." — Michael Ovitz (From his interview with David Senra and thanks to weisser for sharing this with me)
David Perell370,105 次观看 • 4 个月前
This video of Katie Ledecky swimming with a glass of chocolate milk balanced on her head is one of my favorite things on the internet. It captures something true for all masters: they look graceful because they don't make unnecessary movements. In that way, the elegance of good technique is deceptive. I've been taking swim lessons so I can start swimming laps, and my instructor keeps teasing me about all the extra movements in my stroke, but every time I try to be elegant, I swim super slowly. It's only taken a few hours in the water to appreciate how many years it must have taken Ledecky to reach a point where she can swim so gracefully. Same story on the golf course. I'll sometimes pull up old videos of Tiger Woods ripping effortless 300-yard drives. But whenever I try to hammer the ball like that, my body gets tight and my swing gets jittery. Every skill is like this.
David Perell433,907 次观看 • 6 个月前
You can see something 10,000 times on your phone, but never understand it until you see it in person for the first time. That’s the lesson from the park bench scene in Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon is the arrogant, book-smart intellectual who’s seen little but read everything. Robin Williams is the wise professor who rolls his eyes at Damon’s hubris. The stuff of life can only be fully absorbed through direct experience, he says. This is one reason why school falls short. It conflates regurgitation for understanding. Shakespeare’s plays have been reduced to bite-sized cramming on SparkNotes and exam questions the following day. Or, take entrepreneurship, where certain kinds of wisdom can only be gained in the trenches of a sales call or when you have to fire the executive you swore was going to save your company. Travel, too. Something about the Golden Gate Bridge can only be understood when you feel the Pacific Ocean wind and shiver under a blanket of fog. Something about the life of Moses can only be understood when you stand atop Mount Nebo (where he died) and look down at the Promised Land of Israel. Something about Italian food can only be understood when you slurp “siero” in a Parmesan cheese factory and meet the 4th-generation shop owner. Pixels on a screen aren’t enough. Get out and Do the Thing because certain kinds of knowledge can only be gained through tactile, first-hand experience.
David Perell2,109,149 次观看 • 2 年前
Dana Gioia is one of the world’s greatest living poets. He’s been writing for ~55 years, and this 3-hour interview is all about his approach to writing. Some lessons: 1. What is poetry? Here’s a definition: “Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” 2. And who is the mother of the muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. 3. You can’t understand poetry until you start learning it by heart. Yes, memorizing it. The metaphor of knowing something by heart means storing a piece of wisdom in the center of your being and making it a part of you. 4. Poetry exists in the body before it exists in language. For him, great writing is about putting form to felt sensations. 5. First drafts are an act of madness. They’re messy and chaotic, and it’s worth embracing that. Only in the process of revision does the structure begin to reveal itself. 6. The most valuable ideas arrive suddenly, fully formed but fragile, and they won’t wait for you to be ready. If you don’t write them down immediately, you’ll probably forget them. 7. His artistic process: Confusion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair. 8. Aspiring writers who can’t find the time to write run the risk of living a life of regret, where destiny takes the wheel and steers them off-course. Seneca says, “If you follow your destiny, it guides you. If you resist it, it drags you behind it.” 9. What’s the purpose of art? Most people, most of the time, go through life half-awake. The purpose of art is to awaken us to reality and help us feel our situation. Done right, it excites, expands, and refines our complete human intelligence. 10. Can you write with a full-time job? T.S. Eliot had a day job at a bank. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. Dana Gioia worked a full-time job in New York and wrote in the evenings. 11. Life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. You only have 24 hours to spend every day. If you want to do serious writing while raising a family and maintaining a full-time job, almost every hour of every day has to be budgeted. 12. Poetry should turn. It shouldn’t just climb to an emotional height. It should pivot, contradict, or contain its own rebuttal. But most new poems go something like this: “I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, the end,” or “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, the end. There’s no twist, no turn. 13. You don’t need to be 100% original. All you need to do is assemble parts of the reality that already exists. As George Balanchine said, “God creates, I assemble.” 14. A foundational book in his life: The City of God by St. Augustine. He says there are two cities that exist: There’s the City of Man, which is ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man. And there’s the City of God which is eternal and governed by the rules of God. 15. Great poetry exists at the level of intuition, and it’s the same intuition that academic education tries to suppress. With great poems, like great songs, you feel before you understand. 16. Art is an argument with yourself. Yeats said: “Out of arguments with others, we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry.” 17. Great writing should astonish the creator, and if it doesn’t astonish the creator, it won’t astonish the reader. 18. Robert Frost once said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” 19. Beauty is being able to see the form, the shape underneath reality, and to understand why it is right, even when it is destructive or terrifying or humiliating. The most powerful kind of beauty is to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying. 20. On novels: Most people don’t understand what a novel is — and how revolutionary the form was. So, what’s a novel? It’s a story that tells you simultaneously what’s happening on the outside of a character and what they’re thinking on the inside. I’ve shared the full interview with Dana Gioia below. If you’d rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
David Perell869,380 次观看 • 1 年前
The Greeks had two ways of thinking about time: Chronos and Kairos. "The time used by storytellers is more cyclical, close to the time of nature. The Greeks talked about Chronos. Chronology time. The one we can measure. Then they talked about Kairos, which is deep time. That is the time of storytelling. Kronos is more measurable. It's easy to calculate. You can depend on clocks, calendars, and schedules. But Kairos is deep time, and you need to pay attention to Kairos. If you're interested in the stories of nature, maybe the journey of a rock, you can't just measure it with that tiny element of time. You have to look at millennia; you have to look at this long duration of time. I've always believed that storytellers should be interested in a much more cyclical notion of time."
David Perell308,650 次观看 • 5 个月前
Chamath Palihapitiya took Facebook to 1 billion users, was the youngest ever Vice-President at AOL…and worked at Burger King as a 14-year-old to support his family. Here's what I've learned from him about online writing and media: 1. Start your writing in a punchy way. 2. End your writing in a useful way. 3. Why write in public? “The ability for smart, useful observations to get into the hands of people with fewer ideas but lots of capital has never been better. You can build both a reputation and balance sheet this way.” 4. Different mediums unlock different kinds of writing. Chamath turns to pen & paper when he wants to write analytically, and to Twitter and the Internet when he’s in a more fiery mood. 5. Building a culture of long-form writing is a way to depoliticize a company because prose rewards clear thinking via strong and logical arguments. 6. Give readers a definitive conclusion. Even if they disagree with it, they’ll consider it time well-spent if they walk away with something solid. The worst writing is ambiguous and wishy-washy. 7. Fame brings politician syndrome: Chamath says his writing has become more hedged and timid as his profile has grown, and his struggle as a writer now centers around regaining his early voice and spontaneity. 8. Reading is an effective way to learn, but it's much more effective when you pair it with writing. Whenever Chamath stumbles on a particularly important topic, he writes 1-2 pages about it. 9. When money gets into good ideas, they become good things in the world. The opposite happens when money gets into bad ideas. This is why people with good ideas have a moral responsibility to share them. I've shared the full conversation with Chamath Palihapitiya below. If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies.
David Perell1,438,601 次观看 • 2 年前
Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. When I asked him about writing with AI, he said: "Why would you do that? That's like hiring somebody to have sex for you." We talked about why he knows how his book is going to end, what books can do that movies can't, why animals work so well as characters, and what great endings have in common. Timestamps: 0:28 The envelope method 5:34 Writing good scenes 11:43 Why animals are good characters 19:31 How to hook readers 32:52 Breaking the rules of writing 37:19 Should you write with AI? 44:55 Genre fiction vs. literary fiction 48:56 When should you read reviews? 52:38 Writing lessons from plays 54:59 Beware of describing characters 57:54 Facts don't make for good stories 1:02:40 What makes for a good ending? 1:08:20 Artists can't be indifferent — — Highlights: 1) Commas function like a drummer in a band, providing the rhythm for the sentence. 2) What makes for a good ending? "You want the reader to behold something at the end of a story, yet not have everything fully resolved. The ending should still glow with a degree of mystery, wonder, and invite pondering." 3) Beware of describing people in writing: "Words are terrible at description. If you emphasize a character's nose, you suddenly imagine an enormous nose. If you imagine a little scar, you envision a great cut. It becomes a caricature." 4) Why animals work well as characters in fiction: People aren't cynical about animals. They don't hold the same prejudices about giraffes or rhinoceroses as they will about people from Texas, France, India, or Muslims. We're full of prejudices that simplify our lives but are also very cruel and distort reality. 5) How much should you plan a piece of writing? Yann says it's like travel. It's worth doing research and making reservations, but it's the discoveries you make along the way that give the trip life. I've shared the full conversation with Yann Martel below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!
David Perell54,651 次观看 • 28 天前