My Top 10 Writing Lessons from 2025

Summary

How I Write: “My Top 10 Writing Lessons from 2025”

Host: David Perell
Date: December 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

This special solo episode of How I Write has host David Perell reflecting on the most powerful writing lessons and conversations from interviews with acclaimed writers throughout 2025. Drawing on clips from previous guests, David distills ten core insights about the craft, mindset, and purpose of writing—ranging from nurturing wonder and ambition, to breaking through barriers of convention and self-doubt, to the practical methods and rituals that underpin great storytelling.

Perell walks listeners through vivid stories, memorable lines, and diverse perspectives, illustrating how unique each writer's process can be, yet how universal many of their challenges and discoveries are. Throughout, listeners are encouraged not just to write, but to see, to live, and to strive for true originality by standing on the shoulders of literary giants.

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Key Lessons and Discussion Points

1. Retain Your Sense of Wonder

(Guest: Alain de Botton, 02:25–03:34)

• Wonder is “an essential survival skill”—it’s “jaw dropped…poisoned by the miracle of the world.”
• Rainbows as the “charismatic megafauna of wonder”—each person’s experience of wonder is unique and “utterly bespoke.”
• Quote:

  “If you’d stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you’d have seen a different rainbow. So that’s wondrous.”
  – Alain de Botton (03:24)

2. Writing From Felt Sense, Like an Impressionist

(Reflections on Robert’s Writing, 03:34–05:28)

• Writers like Robert “write with a deep emotional or even spiritual connection,” rendering their felt experience rather than factual reality.
• Comparison to Monet and Impressionists: it’s about capturing “a combination of light, water, and shadow,” not every architectural detail.
• Writing that starts with, “What does this make me feel? And how do I put that onto the page?”

3. Embrace the Mystery: Following Memory Into Meaning

(Guest: Jane Ann Phillips, 05:28–07:51)

• The power of “what we don’t forget” as a clue to identity and values.
• Writing as surrender—“I’m inside the work, following the sentences themselves deeper into the material.”
• Quote:

  “If the writer can pull you in deeply enough, you are experiencing that voice, almost as though it’s happening to you.”
  – Jane Ann Phillips (07:13)

4. Dare to Be Great—Risk Ambitious Art

(Guest: Paul Harding, 10:47–13:15)

• It’s okay—even necessary—to aim to create work as powerful as your greatest heroes.
• Evolve from being “self-conscious” (afraid of judgment) to “self-aware” about your ambitions.
• Reverence for the craft and those who’ve come before, learning by studying the best.
• Quote:

  “You’re only a jerk if you say you did it…but I’m not trying to write a crummy book. Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet.”
  – Paul Harding (11:46–12:14)

5. Study the Greats and Steal With Meaning

(Discussion with Dana Gioia, 16:38–23:13)

• Insights from Gioia on Baudelaire (“the greatest poet of having fucked up your life”), Marshall McLuhan, Bob Dylan, Steinbeck (“the dignity of the outcasts”), Cheever (“a fabulist”), Tolkien (“the English version of War and Peace”), Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
• Collaboration (the Beatles), rhetoric (MLK), and performative power.
• On originality:

  “So much originality is born out of a deep understanding of people who’ve come before…”
  – Host (23:13)

6. Observe Reality: “Don’t Think, Look.”

(Guest: Henrik Carlson, 25:06–26:42)

• Approach writing as a painter approaches a still life—constantly checking your words against reality.
• Don’t get lost in manipulating words; stay grounded in the thing itself.
• Quote:

  “Wittgenstein has this line…‘Don’t think, look.’”
  – Henrik Carlson (26:42)

7. Break Free From Industrialized Thinking

(Guest: Alain de Botton, 28:12–29:51)

• The news and culture can “industrialize our inner lives.”
• Free thinkers celebrate knowing less about what “everyone” knows, keeping mental space for themselves and their art.
• Quote:

  “You are not really a responsible adult until you don’t know certain significant things that people around you think of as very important…congratulate yourself.”
  – Alain de Botton (29:14–29:46)

8. Write With Your Voice, Not Corporate Speak

(Guest: Lulu Cheng Masservi, 32:27–33:23)

• People are “allergic to inauthentic corporate speak.”
• Let personality and authenticity shine, imperfections and all.
• Quote:

  “It’s better for it to be bad and honest…than to release something that’s dead and boring and stale and stiff, because that is just not going to break through.”
  – Lulu Cheng Masservi (32:27)

9. Storytelling: Lightness and Speed

(Guest: Mitch Albom, 34:44–39:48)

• Tell “the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.”
• Strive for engaging, human-centered stories—less worry about exhaustive detail, more about emotional truth.
• Memorable Story:
  Mitch recounts the 1992 Olympics, a runner’s injury, and the father carrying his son, revealing the power of crafting a tale around feeling and meaning:

  “…when he was a little boy, I taught him how to run. I put his feet on my feet, and that’s how I taught him…I remembered that, so that’s what we did.”
  – Mitch Albom (38:52–39:48)

10. Poetry Should Be Lived, Not Just Analyzed

(Guests: Dana Gioia, David White, 40:25–45:13)

• Poetry was once central and joyous—“badly taught” but beloved—until overanalyzed.
• The secret to loving poetry is to experience, memorize, and perform it, not only dissect it.
• Quote:

  “My sense of teaching poetry is fairly simple. Students experience it…they memorize it. And then, once you’ve done that, you can do some analysis. But analysis is very secondary to what poetry is.”
  – Dana Gioia (41:31)

• David White: Poetry is “a secret code to life”—a well-memorized poem can sustain and guide through life’s trials.
• White’s recitation of Mary Oliver’s “The Journey” exemplifies this:

  “…there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own. That kept you company…determined to save the only life you could save.”
  – David White (44:00–45:13)

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Memorable Closing: Life, Love, and “The True Love”

(David White, 46:56–50:46)

• Writing is ultimately a prism for exploring life—love, grief, wonder—beyond the page.
• David White shares the story and reading of his poem “The True Love,” connecting biblical narrative, Hebrides tradition, and the personal quest for reverence and courage in love.
• Quote (poem excerpt):

  “There’s a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours…So that when you finally step out of the boat toward them, you find everything holds you…and if you wanted to drown, you could. But you don’t…You’ve simply had enough of drowning, and you want to live and you want to love.”
  – David White (47:54–50:46)

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Additional Highlights & Techniques

• Impressionism in Writing: Both Robert’s and Monet’s approaches teach writers to translate subjective experience, not merely external fact.
• Diversity of Process: There is no single “right” way to write; surrender to the book or rigorously structure it—each approach is valid if it leads to truth.
• Learning by Memorizing: Host’s anecdote about memorizing poetry lines in a Portland bar—a way to make poetry personal and alive again.
• Breaking Convention: Good writing doesn’t need perfection—Reddit threads or text messages can pulse with authenticity if truly felt and well-observed.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:25 – Alain de Botton on wonder
• 05:40 – Jane Ann Phillips on memory and immersion
• 10:47 – Paul Harding on writing ambitiously
• 13:55 – On influence and finding your “canon”
• 16:38 – Dana Gioia on literary and artistic lessons
• 25:25 – Henrik Carlson on looking at reality
• 28:12 – Alain de Botton on mental horizons and the media
• 32:27 – Lulu Cheng Masservi on authenticity in writing
• 34:44 – Mitch Albom on storytelling and family tales
• 40:25 – Dana Gioia on poetry’s purpose
• 46:56 – David White, “The True Love”

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Notable Quotes

• “Wonder is an essential survival skill.” – Alain de Botton (02:25)
• “It’s strange what we don’t forget.” – Jane Ann Phillips (05:40)
• “You want to evolve from being self-conscious about your writing to being self-aware about your writing.” – Paul Harding (11:14)
• “Baudelaire is the greatest poet of having fucked up your life.” – Dana Gioia (17:23)
• “Don’t think, look.” – Henrik Carlson, quoting Wittgenstein (26:42)
• “You are not really a responsible adult until you don’t know certain significant things that people around you think of as very important.” – Alain de Botton (29:14)
• “If the writing is bad, it’s better for it to be bad and honest…” – Lulu Cheng Masservi (32:27)
• “Tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.” – Host (36:00)
• “Poetry was always something that I felt was a secret code to life.” – David White (43:26)
• “…you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.” – David White, “The True Love” (50:43)

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Tone & Final Reflection

Throughout the episode, Perell is warm, anecdotal, and thoughtful, gently encouraging experimentation and self-discovery. The conversations range from the poetic to the pragmatic, but always circle back to the central idea: Writing is about revealing the world as you feel it and see it. The episode ends on a note of reverence for the art, showing how writing, when honest and deeply seen, becomes a prism for all of life.

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For Listeners

If this episode resonated, Perell encourages you to share it with a fellow writer or anyone striving to express themselves more fully—and to join the conversation with your own takeaways and lessons.

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[Advertisements, intros, outros, and technical segments have been omitted. All content above is focused on the substantive writing lessons and insights shared in the episode.]

Transcript

[Alain de Botton]

Foreign.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Hey, what I want to do is sit down with you and reflect on everything that I've picked up in the recent episodes of How I Write. What are the best clips that if I could just bring them all into one video, what would they be? Rather than running out of studio, we're just going to do this from my own apartment. So. So cheers. Let me show you this new tool that I've been using to write called Sublime. And they're the sponsor of this episode. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I use Sublime to write this post on X, which got almost a million impressions. So it started off with the basic note taking stuff. I was just throwing notes in, but it's the stuff that came after that was really unique. That's what makes Sublime special. You'll see here that I had this mind map and that allowed me to begin to see, see connections that weren't even there. And I was blown away by this. And then it didn't just end there. Sublime has this save1discover100 feature where you can just put in a piece of information and all of a sudden it just starts recommending things. It's like having a research assistant that actually has good taste and these are put in there by actual human beings. And so now I had the mind map, I had all the related ideas and I really started to think about how am I actually going to structure this piece. And Sublime helped me see parts of my structure that I didn't even realize were there to see how ideas were actually connected. See, Sublime is built by people who care about creativity and beauty and not just productivity and efficiency. And you can feel that as you use the app. So if you want to use Sublime in your own writing, well, you can go to Sublime app and use the promo code Purell, and they'll give you 20% off. All right, let's get to the episode.

Robert was somebody who I got introduced to through a publicist and she said, you will love this guy. He has a way of writing about nature, writing about the world like you've never met before. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember I was walking through Portland and I was listening to the audiobook to prep. I was going through the book and I remember just being blown away by how vivid his descriptions of rivers were. He had just published a book called Is a River Alive? This clip is all about wonder, retaining your sense of wonder. So let's get into it.

[Alain de Botton]

I think wonder is an essential survival skill.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Oh, Tell me about wonder.

[Alain de Botton]

Wonder is. Jaw dropped, right? It's the moment where you are just step back, poison by the miracle of the world and the freely given miracle of the world. A rainbow is like. I mean, a rainbow is. I think when you see a rainbow, you still stop.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

And of course, oh, my goodness, the most magnificent rainbow. I just stood there by the window. I was like, wow. How is that? Every time. Every time, that's wonder.

[Alain de Botton]

And every time, rainbows are like. They're the charismatic megafauna of wonder, right? They do it often and. Well, the other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke. That is, it was your. It was David's rainbow. It was no one else's rainbow in the way it appeared to you. Because it's a prismatic function that the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths. But the precise nature of that color and the position and form of the rainbow in the sky is. Is if you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. So that's wondrous.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

What stands out to me about. About Robert is how his writing is impressionistic. What he's doing is he's not trying to convey the literal truth of nature through a scientific lens of saying, this is exactly what's going on. Here's the math and here's the science between how nature works and stuff like that. No, he's looking at sunsets, looking at rainbows, looking at water. And he has this deep emotional or even spiritual connection with nature that comes through. He almost reminds me of the Impressionist painters. I just went to this exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Monet in Venice. And at the museum, they had not just Monet's paintings of Venice, but the paintings of all these other painters. And you could see how the other painters before him, they had painted Venice with a lot of detail. They'd really focused on the architecture, the people, the gondola boats, all those sorts of things. And of course, those are core to Venice. But Monet did something very different. He just. You got the sense. He just sat down and he saw Venice as a combination of light, water, and shadow. There's no people. There's way fewer boats in his paintings. This is what I love about painting in general and the Impressionists is they were thinking about what is my felt sense of what's going on. Not like the factual reality, but what is my felt sense. And they were able to translate that onto the page. And I think that that's what Robert does as a writer, too. To really go out into nature, to sit, to think, to ponder, to listen and ask, what. What does this make me feel? What is my felt sense of going on? Of what's going on? And how do I put that onto the page?

I want to talk about a line from Jane Ann Phillips we recorded in Boston. She was fresh off the Pulitzer Prize for a novel called Night Watch. And she has a line where she says, it's strange what we don't forget.

[Jane Ann Phillips]

That's the first line of Machine Dreams. Yeah, my first novel. And that's being said in the voice of the character who is the mother. That is the character who would have been my mother. It is very strange what you don't forget.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Well, it feels profound. Beyond just being the first sentence, it feels like there's a lot of depth in that, in that as an idea.

[Jane Ann Phillips]

Well, it's a whole. It's this reality of we experience so many things, and yet she's saying that in the context of a very early memory. Why do you remember this one thing in this whole kind of primordial soup of images and things that went on? And it's so interesting, and it's a special. It's a kind of key, you know, a key to who you are and what's happened to you and what matters to you. I feel as though when I. That I'm inside the work, following the sentences themselves deeper into the material.

There's not myself thinking about the material, you know, because what I want to do is be inside the material. And, you know, someone said to me once, when I read your work, I don't feel as though I'm reading about something. I feel as though I'm inside it. And that is actually.

What I want the reader to feel. I want them to be inside the material itself. I mean, when we read a line like I cross the street in your mind's eye, I cross the street. You are that Persona. And if the writer can pull you in deeply enough, you are experiencing that voice. And whatever happens in the world to that voice, almost as though it's happening to you and you're responding to it in your own way, in a kind of unconscious way, maybe that you're not even necessarily aware of, but it forms.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

The connection, you know, when she talks about a strange. What you don't forget. What she's getting at is we all have these childhood memories, maybe good memories, bad memories, weird memories, confusing memories, whatever it is.

[Mitch Albom]

But.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

But there's. We experience so much in our Lives and our memories. Without conscious choice, we say we're going to end up remembering certain things and forgetting other things, right? But what Jane is saying here is that though the memories that end up sticking in your mind hold clues to who you are, what you value, what you care about, how you see the world. It got me thinking about what it would be like to just jot down certain memories, your memories from early childhood, and then say, what clues do these things, these memories, hold into who I am, what I stand for, what I believe in, and all of that. And as we were going through the interview, I found Jane to be a hard person to interview. And the reason is that so many. You know, you can think of any writer as being on the spectrum of a very concrete, well calibrated, consistent process of I do these inputs, and then the output that I get is a book versus people who, just like Jane, they kind of. She says, I'm fully surrendered to the book, right? Like, she gets into it, and it's like her brain shuts off, and the. She is the dog, and the book is taking her for a ride. And she's just asking the book, what do you want from me? What do you need for me to give you right now? There's a real sense of mysticism in her work that I felt. That's not what I feel at all when I write, when I sit down to create. And it's a reminder of just how many different ways there are to go about writing. There's as many different ways to write as there are as many different ways to live. There's no one way to approach this craft, to. To think that there is is just complete nonsense. And fundamentally, to learn how to write is to find people who think like you and learn from them and try implementing this thing or that thing that they do. And then also to find people who think completely differently than you so that you can start asking yourself, you know, maybe I'm boxed in. Maybe the way that I'm doing things is cutting me off from new ideas. And now with Jane, it was about thinking through the mystery of writing and the magic of the creative process when it's really going well. Paul Harding had that in a different way with Paul, I also recorded with him in Boston. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel called Tinkers. What I noticed from him was this idea of daring to be great, of really raising your ambitions and lifting your neck back and saying, you know what? How high can I shoot as I write this novel, as I write this piece, whatever it is, to really.

Say, you know what? I'm gonna try to write something superb, something in the vein of Melville or Shakespeare or somebody like that. I'm actually gonna give that a shot. And I know that that might sound a little weird, but that's what I'm doing.

[Paul Harding]

Everybody has their own personal canon. You think of your own favorite writers, but, you know, compare your writing to them and you just start, you know, you just start thinking.

Why is there such a distance between my favorite stuff that I've read and my own writing? And that goes back to another thing I'm always telling my students is you want to evolve from being self conscious about your writing to being self aware about your writing.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

What's the difference?

[Paul Harding]

One of the ways that self consciousness often precipitates into the classroom is people sort of not wanting to be accused of wanting to write as well as Faulkner, you know, And I say, you're not trying to write a crappy book, are you?

[Dana Gioia]

Wouldn't you like to write a book.

[Paul Harding]

That'S as good as your favorite book? Like, that's something to be self aware of. You're only a jerk if you say you did it, you know, but that idea of like, I'm not trying to write a crummy book. Melville was just trying to write a book as good as Hamlet. You know, Shakespeare is just trying to write a good. A book that was as good as, like, the Joseph and his brother's story in Genesis. Right? Moses was just trying to write a book that was a little bit better than the Babylonian cosmology that he cribbed for Genesis.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

You know what I mean?

[Paul Harding]

Like, that kind of like. And when people read my books and they say, have you been reading Shakespeare in the Bible and Emerson? I'm like, you bet. You're bippy. I have. And I want you to know it. You know, just part of. I want to be. I consider all those people my aunts and uncles, my great aunts and uncles.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Well, I love the idea of.

[Alain de Botton]

The.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Permission to take on a grand project. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Harding]

Because there's a difference between that ambition and kind of being an egomaniac. Because you think I'm kind of all that.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Well, one is. One is rooted in the. The other one's kind of in me.

[Paul Harding]

Like a.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Kind of like a reverence, right? Like a reverence. Like, I want to recreate that. Like, that did something for me. I want to build that. And it's actually not about me. It's actually about the creation itself. The other one is I want to be the person who has written that. And then you care more about the end than the means to get there.

[Paul Harding]

Yeah, I couldn't have put it better. That's exactly right. And the idea that. But then you have that interesting paradoxical experience that you have to be utterly, totally selfless and humble, but also self confident.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

I want to know how the spirit of different writers has kind of been infused into your work. Let's start with Emerson.

[Paul Harding]

Emerson. My favorite sentence in Tinkers is a sentence that after all those years of writing Tinkers, I finally wrote a sentence that when I was like, that is a sentence I think Emerson could have written. And it just was the best feeling in my life. The sentence is behold and be a genius.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

I was just like, oh, that's cool.

[Paul Harding]

That's almost as cool as something Emerson. So it's just like the writing in the spirit. And you know, when you read. One of the things I love about his essays is that they are not arguments, they're not rhetorically constructed like the way that arguments. They're associative and they are written like sermons.

[David White]

Yeah.

[Paul Harding]

If you study Emerson for two weeks in your sophomore survey class and you even hear that he was a minister.

It'S almost mentioned in order to be passed over. But he wrote many. I have a four volume set of his sermons and you see him arriving at these more and more elegant, eloquent, astonishing, again, kind of luminous and numinous moments that are just purely beautiful and inspiring and, you know, and heartening and tonic for your soul, that kind of thing. And I was like, I want some of that quality in my book. I want, you know, Tinkers is harsh and it's stark, but I want it to be beautiful in that way where you finish it and you go, that's really true. That book didn't jive me that, you know, and there's something dignified about all these people's lives whose lives would be in the quote, unquote, real world, wouldn't, would be passed over without a word.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Part of daring to be great is having people who you admire, who you respect, who you really look up to and saying, I want to be the next that person. You know, I think of Tiger woods in his room growing up. He had posters of Jack Nicklaus and he was saying, that's where I want to be. That's what I want to do. But in sports, I saw this. And with writing, I saw it. It wasn't just that Paul Harding was daring to be great. It was also when he found somebody that he really admired. He studied the heck out of them. The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, ah, I'll remember that later. No, I mean, there's so many times when I'm listening to a podcast, I want to save something and I just never end up saving it because typing it into the phone is just too much work, you know? Well, I found a great solution to that problem. It's called Podcast Magic, and they're the sponsor of this episode. So what you do, super easy. Say you're listening on Apple or on Spotify. If you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and then email it to Podcast magicublime app. If you email it, like a minute later, you'll get an email back with the transcript, the context, all the information that you need, and then that way you don't need to write down all the information. So if you find something in the conversation that you really like, well, check out Podcast Magic.

When people ask me if there's one how I write interview that I should listen to, it's the Dana Joya interview that I always give them. That one was so deep. I want you, first of all, to just know that none of this was planned. This was all off the top of the dome. And I want you to really listen for the range of what he studied and the specificity of his answers. I want to try something, and we'll see how this works. What I want to do is I want to just throw different genres and writers at you and ask you to give me a quick response on something that you've learned from them or a lesson that we can glean.

[Dana Gioia]

Okay.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Baudelaire.

[Dana Gioia]

Baudelaire is the greatest poet of having fucked up your life. I mean. And see, a lot of people, you know, love Baudelaire because he's, you know, he is about evil. Some people hate him. You know, you hate him because he's about evil. But all of us fail. All of us have this kind of notion of you're just heading downhill and you can't stop it at times. And Baudelaire turns that into the subject of his poetry. So, you know, it's the great.

Great song of failure.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Marsh McLuhan.

[Dana Gioia]

Marshall McLuhan was.

This religious visionary who thought he was a technological expert. And he understood before anybody else did that the media that we use have spiritual dimensions that we experience, but we don't explain. So he was very famous then for 20, 30 years. Everybody simply mocked Marshall McLuhan. Nobody read him. He was a subject. Then suddenly we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century. And we go, you know, this is exactly what McLuhan told us was gonna happen. Bob Dylan, you know, he's a poet. When you listen to Dylan, he's borrowed all the tunes. It's the lyrics that are there. So I think Bob Dylan, he changed the nature of pop music. He changed the nature of American folk song, of the American rock song. And he gave us the images to understand the kind of weird.

Industrial urban environment that we find ourselves.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

How about the Beatles?

[Dana Gioia]

I think it's interesting that they were never as good separately as they were together. And the Beatles remind us of just the power of artistic collaboration. How sometimes you put a couple of people together and they're greater than they are individually.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

The speeches of Martin Luther King.

[Dana Gioia]

Martin Luther King.

May have been the last great political speaker in the United States. And I think it's because he anchored his talks in the Bible, in his Christian vision in a way that's rhetorically magnificent and morally irrefutable.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Country music.

[Dana Gioia]

I'm not a big fan of country music, but I do love a lot of individual songs. Rock is the music of mating. Country music is the music of having a job and having a marriage. So it's a different set of sorrows.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

John Steinbeck, if you read the Grapes.

[Dana Gioia]

Of Wrath, for all of Grapes of Wrath's imperfections, he has written one of the greatest American novels. Because he's done something that we forget, which is he's shown us the dignity of the poor, the dignity of the outcasts. I think part of the problem we have in the United States is that even the poor have forgotten their dignity. Even the outcasts have forgotten their dignity. You know, Steinbeck, you know, in a sense, has created the epic of the. You know, of the outcast.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Poor John Cheever.

[Dana Gioia]

When I read John Cheever, I was in high school. And I had no idea that there was any place in the United States that people took a train to work or these things. I just thought they were fables that he made up. I loved them because they were wonderful parables, usually of moral falling and moral redemption. And then I came back, you know, I moved to New York, where I lived 20 years. And I lived in Cheever Country. All these people were living lives exactly out of a John Cheever story. And I realized more than ever, he wasn't a realist. He was a fabulist. And he has written some of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

All right. I got more for you. This is great. Tarantino.

[Dana Gioia]

Quentin Tarantino is morally repulsive, cinematically arresting, and, you know, he's a kind of la low cost Baudelaire. You know, he puts his face into the muck and shows you, you know.

Makes you interested in it. Tolkien, I think the Lord of the Rings is the greatest novel in English written about the First World War. And it's about a decent fellow who is dragged into a war which he doesn't want to fight, but he conducts himself honorably, going through great pain, great loss, and interestingly, comes out of it morally strengthened and aware in a way that he wasn't. So, I mean, it is.

The English version of War and Peace.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Well, now you got me thinking about Russian literature. Dostoevsky.

[Dana Gioia]

And in Russia, you've got Tolstoy and you've got Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is a religious visionary. Tolstoy, who is equally religious. Religious, is a kind of social psychological visionary. If I was asked, you know, the, you know, my top ten great novels, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would both be.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Be on it, it's worth asking yourself, who do I want to study? Whose approach to writing, both in terms of their process and their rituals, but also in terms of how they actually put pen to paper. Who do I want to learn from? And it can be whoever you want, but I.

Strongly suggest that you find one or two people who you really admire and just get to know every single thing about how they do things.

One of the reasons why people don't do this, I mean, there's laziness, but if you're listening to how I write, you're not gonna be a lazy writer. You're, you're, you're doing this. But one of the reasons that people don't study the greats is because they want to be original. And they have this idea that, that if they want to be original, if they want to be unique, then they can't be tainted by influences. And I get that thinking. I understand where it comes from, but I think it's misguided. Time and again I see how much of originality is born out of a deep understanding of people who've come before them. Where, how many writers have I spoken to who just know everything about Hemingway, who've studied the language of Shakespeare and the Bible, and, and said, okay, how do I bring that into my work? If you can find writers who you can learn from, who maybe are even a little bit different from how you do things in your genre, so say that you are A screenwriter. And you're learning from poets and speechwriters. The other screenwriters aren't going to be learning from those people. So if you can find these far influences and bring them into your own writing.

What comes across is a kind of originality that you're going for. But you don't need to insist on every single word and sentence and idea that you have being 100% original, because that's just not how.

The greats function. If this video is something that you want to see more of, the best way to do it is to like the video that tells the algorithm, hey, I want to see more stuff like this. And if there's someone in your life, a friend, a family member, someone who would really benefit from these ideas, from these conversations, send the link to them. Send the link to them. If it's the right person, they're going to appreciate it.

The next clip I want to show you is from Henrik Carlson. He's so good at observing things. He's so good at observing reality. I asked him how he does it. What you find is that he just looks at and looks and looks at the world itself and not the paper.

[Henrik Carlson]

Sort of like a painter doing a still life or something. I'm putting something and then I'm painting, and then I can look at it like, is what I'm saying, does that match reality here? And I'm trying to. And there's something about that process where.

Cause I want to suck reality into the writing.

So when I write something and then I look and I thought, now reality actually looks a little bit different because what I'm saying here doesn't match. And I go back and I rewrite and then I look again. Like a painter, right? So you look, you paint, and you compare. Oh, no, it's not actually like that. And you look again. And so you don't even have to have it in your head. You can just like suck it from reality.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

And what's the thing that most people get wrong or that you didn't understand?

[Henrik Carlson]

You might start from something like, you have a conversation, you're talking about a problem, and then you write it on the page. And now it's on the page and you're like, I really don't like how that set sentence sounds. Or maybe I should have a metaphor here and, oh, maybe this adjective. Oh, maybe not. And you start moving the words around and you forget that this is actually trying to represent something. And so I want to, I'm saying, like, spend more time looking at the thing, right? Like wittgenstein has this line which says, like, don't think, look.

So it's just. You don't want to get caught up in your mental models and your representations. You want to, like, always turn to the real thing.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

So with Henrik there, what he's trying to do is he's trying to say, just look at the thing so deeply, so carefully that you're almost not even operating in a place of words. You're like pre words in terms of how intuitively you're looking. You're almost like a child, right? You're just looking and looking and looking. And just by looking, you're putting words on paper. And then after you put the words on paper, you reread it, you look and you say, okay, that's a little bit off. Okay, let's rearrange, let's rearrange, let's rearrange. And it's that process of noticing that he's really trying to teach.

One of the big themes of how I write is how to see the world without so many of the barriers or guardrails that are put onto us, either by society or ourselves. What Alain de Botton said is that a lot of those barriers can come from the news itself. What the news does is it gives us words and phrases, and it packages ideas for us to think inside of. You could call it, oh, this is basic propaganda, or you could just say, hey, this is how the world works. This is how we need to make sense of the world at scale. But that's what's going on. And Alain de Montoin speaks really well about this. So I'll show you this clip, and then we'll talk about it a little bit more.

[Alain de Botton]

And of course, it shapes the horizon, the mental horizon, in an unbelievable way. The news media. It gives us a sense of what you're supposed to be thinking about. You know, back to supposed to, back to supposed to. And it's so powerful. So people will say. People will routinely say things like, well, of course, we're living in this very sad age. And sometimes I think, okay, let's just take a step back here. Like, says who? Like, when does age get anointed? And, like, compared to what? Like, you know, the 4th century in Abyssinia or, you know, the 12th century in Syria. And they're like, well, because of certain things that have happened in, you know, Place X that CNN has alerted them to. And, I mean, look, you can see how it happens, and we're all prey to that. But any artist worth their salt does not think this way. I Mean, this is a very programmatic, you know, industrial way of thinking. Our inner lives have been industrialized.

[Paul Harding]

Wow.

[Alain de Botton]

And commercialized. And that's no good for, you know, the free thinker. I think you're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain significant things that people around you think of as very important. You know, if there's a singer that you don't know about at all, if there's a movie that you just, you know that people know about it, but you. You just don't know about it. You just. You just haven't crossed that threshold. Congratulate yourself. You're doing well.

[Jane Ann Phillips]

Your.

[Alain de Botton]

You're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

With Elaine there, we saw how even our thoughts, our basic ways of making sense of the world could be prepackaged and industrialized. And, you know, you meet these people, you go out and you can just hear in their language where you'll hear two or three sentences of what they're saying, and all of a sudden, you could just make sense of their entire worldview. And it's like they're not even thinking for themselves. They're regurgitating some prepackaged worldview that they picked up somewhere, usually through mass media. And what Elaine is saying is that do not do that. When you do that, you close yourself off to so much truth and beauty and freshness in terms of your ability to see the world.

And that leads me into the next clip from Lulu Cheng Masservi. She is a master at public relations and corporate writing. And what she's really picked up on is that we now live in this world where people are just allergic to corporate speak. I mean, there is so much of that sort of public relations voice that we've read, and we can just tell that it doesn't feel sincere. It feels inauthentic. It feels completely hollow. And as readers, we want to run away from that. And AI is just accelerating that because it makes it so easy to speak in that voice. I have a friend, for example, who he is trying to use the Internet to especially Twitter to really get his message out. And he'll send me the things that he writes, and I'm like, dude, I feel like whenever you write, you almost reduce your own intelligence and extract your own personality from the piece in order to try to appeal from to people, but it ends up doing exactly the opposite. Like, I feel like I read this and it's not you. It's this. It's this husk of who you are. It's completely hollow. If you actually wrote in the way that you texted me, if you actually wrote in the way that you spoke to me when we're hanging out at lunch, your writing would have so much more substance and so much more vigor.

[David White]

Do that.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

And when it comes to writing, a lot of us end up in this mode of perfection where we're trying not to have typos, where we're trying to do everything perfectly. And what Lulu is saying here is, don't do that. Your goal as a founder, your goal as a writer, if you want to reach people, we need to feel you. And people would rather have mistakes, they'd rather have imperfections than this perfect polish that so many people think you needed to have in order to be a successful writer.

[Lulu Cheng Masservi]

If the writing is bad, it's better for it to be bad and honest, right? Like, do you ever feel like when you're having a conversation with someone and you're laying yourself bare and the person isn't articulating themselves well, or you're not articulating yourself well, but you're trying and the emotion is coming through and the intention is coming through, and the person is left with the feeling of something as opposed to if you were to try to have it over text message with the perfect words, it's just completely different feeling. And I would rather see writing that is suboptimal, that has personality, that has intent and has conviction, than writing that is like, textbook. Correct. You know, the Orwell rule for writing that's like, better to break all the rules than to do something barbaric. Better also to break all the rules than to release something that is dead and boring and stale and stiff, because that is just not going to break through.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

This is kind of a weird thing for me to say, but I sometimes wonder if good writing is overrated, at least in the way that we're taught to think about it. I mean, how much good writing shows up in Reddit threads from people in their underwear that is filled with typos, the punctuation is terrible. But how much good writing is there because they're saying something that's honest and true? Maybe what really matters is getting away from the idea that we need to be absolutely perfect in our writer, in our writing with no typos and really thinking about, how do I just communicate in an uninhibited way?

There's a real lightness that comes with good writing. And that leads me into the next clip from Mitch Albom. We're going to start talking about storytelling and. But wow, when I think of someone with a light grip in the world of writing. I think of Mitch. Mitch, so chill, so relaxed, not a tinge of anxiety hanging out with him. And it comes through in this sense of joy that he brings to the stories that he tells. So how does he do it? Well, he learned from his grandpa.

[Mitch Albom]

I was a kid at camp who they would pick to tell the ghost story, you know. Oh, Mitch tells it. Yeah, tell the story. And the way that I learned that was at the dinner table, because my family had holiday celebrations, and we had a pretty extended family, second generation, you know, immigrants. So some of my older uncles and aunts were immigrants or first generation. And I would listen to them after dinner. You know, they would all sit around the table, all the kids would scatter. But I would sit at the table. For some reason, I was just interested in watching them tell stories. And I would notice there was a distinct difference between my aunts and my uncles. My aunts would always get caught on the details. So they'd do like, was it 1945? Well, no, maybe it was 46. When was Manny born? Was he born in 46 or was it 45? And, you know, the uncles would get impatient. They'd go, sigh, who cares?

[Paul Harding]

Let's go.

[Mitch Albom]

Let's go.

[Paul Harding]

Get to the point.

[Mitch Albom]

Yeah. And then the uncles would tell the war stories, and my Uncle Eddie in particular. So there we were. See, we were coming over the hill, and it was dark, and we heard the shots. And then I turned to the guy next to me, I said, they're shooting at us. And I'm saying, that's how you tell a story.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

That's a. I heard something recently. I'm curious to hear your take on that. The key to storytelling is to tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.

[Mitch Albom]

Yeah, I like that. Or as my mother said to me once when she read my book, she said, I like your writing, Michi. And so she called me, because you don't have any of those long pages with all those. The details in it that I don't ever like to read when I read books. And I said, okay. I think she was talking about the Tom Clancy, like, this is how a submarine works kind of thing. And, you know, there'd be three straight pages of how submarine widgets fit together and all that. And that, I think, is the slow parts, fast that you want to get through.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

So there. We heard how Mitch thinks about telling stories, but now how about how he actually tells a story? I want you to listen to this story from the 1992 Olympics. And I want you to think about some of the advice that he just shared about telling good stories. And then.

As you listen to this, see how he implements it.

[Mitch Albom]

I was in the, I want to say it was Barcelona at the Olympics and Carl Lewis was going to run in 100 meter final. It was a Saturday and.

Everybody was going to watch his race, including me. So I'm sitting there, I got there like three in the afternoon or whatever and I'm just sitting there waiting five hours and meanwhile they're running some heats. I'm kind of leaning like this, watching. And the gun goes off. Race running about halfway around the track, this one runner pulls up hamstring, you know, and goes down to the track, okay? Happens all the time, you know, especially if you cover track and field. So everyone else keeps running and they finish the race. And this guy is in his lane and you can see he's suffering. And he gets up and he falls kind of back down. He gets. He said, man, he really tore something. Then suddenly out of the blue, a guy, kind of a heavyset guy comes running out of the stands and onto the field. And he gets behind this guy and he lifts him up.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

Oh, wow.

[Mitch Albom]

And he starts walking him in the lane around the track. And at some point when they come around the final curve, he actually has him up on his feet. So his feet are behind him and each step that he's taking, he's kind of walking because they're staying within the lane. Because if you go outside the lane, DQ disqualified. Now he's starting to come around the curve. Everyone in the stadium's like, yeah, yeah, like this, you know, and cheering. And by the time he gets across the track, everybody gets a big round of applause for him. I go running downstairs and try to find this guy and I see the guy who went in the stand ran out of the stands and me and a handful of other reporters race up to him and I said, who are you? Why did you do that? He said, I'm his father. And I said, well, why did you run out of stands? He goes, well, I know how hard he trained. He's trained his whole life for this. And I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line, he wouldn't be recorded as having participated in the Olympics. You know, he just, his name might not be in the books. And so I knew he just had to finish. And I started asking him questions about, you know, his background. He said, well, I taught him how to run. And when he was a little, I said, why'd you put him on your feet? He said, well, when he was a little boy, I taught him how to run. That's how I taught him. I put his feet. Feet on my feet. I'm choking up when I'm telling the story. I put his feet on my feet, and that's how I taught him how to run. And so I remembered that. So that's what we did.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

How many people graduate from high school or college and still read poetry? And it's very strange because poetry is one of the longest lasting human art forms. It is core to how we think, how we operate, how humanity has progressed going back to the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, whatever. Now we've somehow found a way to make poetry seem boring to people. And Dana makes an interesting point that we did it by getting too good at teaching poetry. Huh? I'll show you.

[Dana Gioia]

For thousands of years, poetry was at the center of education. It was taught quite badly. As a result, everybody loved it. And then about 1930s, 1920s and 30s, a group of brilliant Southerners called the New Critics figured out the way to analyze poetry. And they're absolutely right. They figured it out. They saw how it worked, and they created this critical school that lasted for half a century. For the first time in history, poetry was taught right? And it killed the audience because it was a kind of a visual analysis of the dead silent page. How was poetry taught before you memorized it? You recited it. You recited it in chorus. You used it to teach history, used it to teach these various subjects. And you didn't really teach poetry as a quintessentially literary art. That had to be understood through literary analysis. So my sense of teaching poetry is fairly simple. Students experience it.

They then perform it, they memorize it. And then once you've done that, you can do some analysis. But analysis is very secondary to what poetry is. If you made anybody who listened to.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

A pop song, that's exactly what I was thinking about.

[Dana Gioia]

Analyzed the chord sequences and basically the, the. The sounding of the chords.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

No, you gotta be at the club and be like, I love this song. And then you figure out what's going on later.

[Dana Gioia]

And what's the proper response to a song? It's to dance. It's to tap your foot, is to sing along. And I've seen this again and again. If you take a bunch of kids and you allow them to bring all their performative energy into poetry, they love it.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

This conversation with Dana completely changed my relationship with poetry. And I'm not saying that the way I engage with it is the right way. But I do want to share with you because this is what's worked for me. I just find a string of sentences, paragraphs. I was at a bar in Portland. I was having a pint to Guinness, and I was looking at the ceiling. They had all these poems on the ceiling. And what I ended up doing was just writing down the lines of poetry that I liked. And then I just spent a few weeks memorizing them. And for me, that's what's made poetry come alive. Not this very erudite approach to poetry, which has just never worked for me, but just memorizing the things that I like and trying to have fun with it. I don't know what it is, but poetry for so many people isn't something that's fun, and that is a great tragedy. That is a great tragedy. Poetry is something that kids like. It's something that appeals to almost our base senses in a way.

Now, whenever I meet a poet, I ask about, how have you gone about memorizing poetry? And here's what David White had to say.

[David White]

Poetry was always something that I felt was a secret code to life. I memorized because I loved the poetry, actually, I loved the beauty of the poems. And I spent a lot of time alone, like Wordsworth, as a kid, out in the fields, in the woods. And I loved to walk along and recite a poem to myself. And so I just started building the repertoire that way. And they would help me at times when I was. If I was stuck in something, I would recite a piece. For instance, earlier this year.

I had to pay real attention to break through a very difficult boundary in my life. There are lines by Mary Oliver in a poem called the Journey, where she says, one day you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. One day you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life, each voice cried, mend my life. But you didn't stop, you knew what you had to do. Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations. Though their melancholy was terrible it was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind. The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice, there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own. That Kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save.

If you have that in your memory, that is an incredibly powerful ally.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

You hear what he said there? He said, poetry is a secret code to life. And this gets at the core of what poetry is. There's so much that poetry gives us that.

Can help us explain the unexplainable, help us find words for things that we would never be able to express otherwise. So this is where I'm going to close this episode. I'm going to play a clip, and this clip means a lot to me because.

In 2024, the coolest thing that I did was I got to officiate one of my best friend's weddings. And we were looking and looking and looking for something that I could say that reflected the relationship of this couple. There's a poem that David White wrote called the True Love. And the reason that I was so excited to go meet him was to talk to him about this, to hear him recite the poem, to have a conversation about what that poem meant to me, meant to the couple. We'll close with this because it gets to what makes how I write so wonderful, which is we talk about writing, of course, but ultimately we talk about the stuff of life. We talk about love, death, grief, loss, joy, sorrow, pain, triumph, elation, and despair. Whatever it is, whatever it is, writing becomes a prism to talk about all those sorts of things. Somehow this conversation about his poem the True Love gets at that.

[David White]

As a child, I was really. Even though.

I wouldn't have been considered a religious child.

I was really moved by all the biblical stories. And that was helped by the fact that at our Sunday school.

The teachers there were really fine storytellers. So it felt like I was going to story time every Sunday. But it was all of these biblical stories and.

[Dana Gioia]

Yeah.

[David White]

And it was just enchanting. And then we had these books actually, with. On the left hand side, there was the biblical text, and then there was a big empty square on the other side. And they gave you a stamp when you turned up, which you'd lick. It was about as big as your face, actually. The stamp took every last drop of saliva in your mouth to like the stamp. Then you'd place it opposite, you know. And I often feel many of those images are stamped right through me, actually.

[Henrik Carlson]

Wow.

[David White]

And then the other image is from my biography also of a man in the Western Isles of Scotland, where they had this old tradition of having prayers for every part of the day. Prayer for opening the curtains, letting the light into the house. You know, prayer for unsmooring the fire and getting the ashes going again, and a prayer for going out the door. And there used to be an older fellow came down to his fishing boat in front of our marine biology station there. And I used to watch him while I was drinking my tea in the morning. And before he touched an item of his gear, he would always take his hat off and press it to his chest and say a prayer to the boat and then to the waters around. And that was a beautiful question for me for years, was, I have no equivalent of that in my life. What would it be if I had that equivalent, that kind of reverence for my work and what carries my work? For him, it was the ocean. So they all came together in the poem. There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours. There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours. Especially if you have waited years and especially if you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I'm thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every day on the gray stones to the street shore of baying seals, who would press his head to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water. And I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them, and how we're all waiting for that abrupt waking and that moment, we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love. So that when you finally step out of the boat towards them, you find everything holds you and everything sustains your courage. And if you wanted to drown, you could. But you don't. You don't. Because finally, after all these years and all this struggle, you simply don't want to anymore. You don't want to anymore. You've simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love. And you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.

[Host (possibly a writer or podcaster)]

I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you like the show. And if there's somebody who you know, a friend, a family member, someone who's a budding writer, a budding intellectual. They're really trying to improve their communication. I would very much appreciate if you share the show with them. I want to grow the show and what I'm trying to do is find the best guests, do the best possible interviews, and.

When the show grows, it's a heck of a lot easier to do that. Now if there's anything that you picked up from this episode that you want to share, let's get a conversation going on in the YouTube comments, something that you've learned about life, something that you've been thinking on with writing, how you're applying some of the principles from either this episode or how I write in general. Let's just get a conversation going in the comments. I'll respond to the best ones and I'm curious to know what it is that you have to say. But hey, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for tuning into the show, for sharing the show and we'll do this again soon. Ciao.