David Perell@david_perell
"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.
