Monday Musings - Monday Musings (Big, Big Day)

Hi friends,

Big news to share: Today, I'm launching my new podcast called How I Write.

I started working on it in September of 2021, and almost two years later, it's finally live. You can think of it like a modern, Internet-native version of the Paris Review interview series. I'm kicking things off with three episodes today:

1. Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok, on The Story of Marginal Revolution: For the past 20 years, they have run the world's largest economics blog. This is the story of how they publish every day, generate ideas when they're stuck, and plan to teach millions of people the basics of supply & demand. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)
   ​
2. Jimmy Soni, on Interviewing Elon Musk, Writing Biographies, Lessons from Peter Thiel, and The Art of Research: A master of biographies and a professional speechwriter. If you want to write serious, research-backed non-fiction or build your writing career while working a full-time job, this episode is for you. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)​
   ​
3. The Cultural Tutor, on Writing Every Day, Growing a Twitter Audience, and Reading Old Books: The man started writing online ~15 months ago and has ascended to 1.5 million Twitter followers. Until now, he's been anonymous. Never showed his face. This is a masterclass in how to write for the Internet, source reading material, and build a writing habit. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)

What's This Podcast All About?

​

You can read what an author writes anywhere, but only on this show will you hear how they write.

Imagine if all of your favorite writers recorded their own audio versions of Stephen King’s On Writing. That’s How I Write. It’s like Chef’s Table for writers. We go behind the scenes to uncover the meta-mechanics of writing, the lifestyle behind it, and all the ways you can make money at your keyboard. By learning how your favorite writers work, you’ll see your own creative process with fresh eyes.

I started writing online almost a decade ago, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Since then, I’ve published close to 1 million words on the Internet. After seeing some success, I founded Write of Passage to help others transform their lives by writing online. This podcast is core to that mission, and it’s inspired by my own struggles as a writer.

I’ve been studying great writers for years, and I’ve learned that their styles are as diverse as the human genome. Hemingway’s sentences are short; Faulkner’s are long. Mary Oliver’s work is poetic; Nietzsche’s is aphoristic. Brené Brown's strength is her research; J.K. Rowling's is her imagination. David Foster Wallace’s prose is juicy, loquacious, and self-referential; James Clear’s is simple and direct.

Writing methods are just as diverse. Some writers are consistent. Tyler Cowen has published something every day for 18 years, and Seth Godin doesn’t skip a day either. Other writers lay dormant, then erupt with creativity. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just six weeks, and Mary Shelley wrote the initial manuscript for Frankenstein during a summer holiday in Switzerland. George R.R. Martin takes on long and meandering projects while Stephen King swears by the rigor of a daily word count.

​How I Write is about helping you find what works best for your own writing.

This show isn’t just about methods and styles, though. It’s also about what it means to be a writer today. How can you earn a living? What about building an audience? Should you use GPT?

The Internet has fundamentally changed writing. Wielding the power of independent publishing, an army of writers on Substack have waged war against the mainstream media. People are making a name for themselves by building audiences on social media. Tim Ferriss has parlayed the fame he earned as a writer into a small fortune as an angel investor. Stripe’s writing-first culture has guided them to a stratospheric valuation. Memos from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett move markets and influence billions of dollars worth of cash flows. Throw in the advent of artificial intelligence, and you can see that a tempest of change is upon us.

How I Write is your compass for navigating these changes. It’s a show by writers, for writers, built for the age of the Internet.