To uncover interesting ideas, continuously make yournext point whatever interests you most. Skip everything that bores you.

When something bores you, it probably bores your readers too. And if something entertains you, it probably entertains them too. You're a proxy for your die-hard readers.

That’s the irony of self-indulgent writing: writing for y... See more

In addition to interesting talking points, you're also looking for surprising ideas.

Surprise is anything that contradicts what readers know or expect you to say. It makes them think, “Wow. That’s unexpected.”

You generate surprising talking points using essayist Paul Graham’s method: First, learn the basic knowledge of a topic. Then, if you can fin... See more

As you're writing, how do you know which thoughts are most valuable? What separates good ideas from bad ones?

My approach is to focus on ideas that are interesting or surprising. These are the ingredients of novelty. Novelty is what keeps readers reading. They tend to be:

• Counter-intuitive


• Counter-narrative


• Shock and awe


• Elegant articulations

Under each talking point in an outline, I start by writing partially-formed thoughts.

It’s more efficient to speedrun through a bad first draft and improve it later than to try starting from completion.

It’s normal if few ideas come to mind immediately. You’ll discover that the majority of your ideas arrive while writing—not before. You write in or... See more

I recommend writing a terrible first draft as quickly as you can. Your goal is to speedrun—to blast through the laziness and the blockers to just get garbage onto paper. This shortcuts you to the rewriting phase, which most people find far less painful. It's strange how well this works.

That's why, in my bad first draft, I use placeholders any time ... See more