Announcing: Writing Examples

Today is launch day! We built this website to celebrate great writing.

It’s 100% free. Each article deconstructs a piece of writing from an iconic writer. The goal is to give you X-Ray vision into what makes sentences and paragraphs come alive (so that you can improve at your craft).

Every example has an analysis of why the writing works. Analytical often means dry. But instead of going technical, we’ve gone technicolor. There are text-explainers, summary graphics, and videos that come together to make the writing instruction lively and multi-dimensional.

It’s a place where you can discover how great writing comes together. Where we lift up the hood and see the mechanics in action. It isn’t about giving you a set of rules to follow. It’s about showing the diversity of ways writers approach their craft, so you can develop your own style.

What are some of the articles about? You’ll learn how to describe a party like F. Scott Fitzgerald, how to tell a story like George Orwell, how to write a speech like John F. Kennedy. There are other articles inspired by the likes of John Steinbeck, James Clear, Winston Churchill, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Steven Pressfield, and Jerry Seinfeld.

Writing Examples is a crusade against the sterility of contemporary writing. So much of the advice you read says the same thing: “Be direct. Cut the fluff. Get to the point. Stick to short sentences.” And yeah, sure, this advice has merit. It’s useful in certain cases, but the problem is writers take these rules to be universal, which has homogenized writing styles. Even in my own writing, there’ve been so many times where I’ve stripped away my own voice in the name of “correctness.” I regret that.

The truth is, there is no one way to write well, just as there is no one way to speak well. The way you speak in a boardroom is different from the way you speak on a first date, which is different from the way you speak with your childhood best friends. Writing is similar.

Writing Examples is the opposite of Grammarly. It celebrates the wild, wacky, and the weird because it’s the bedrock of personality. The site’s explicit purpose is to inject some High Noon Chutzpah back into the world of writing. To teach you how to write with distinctly human fingerprints in a world that’s about to be flooded with AI-generated content.

Forget playing it safe. That’s the most dangerous thing you can do in a world of instant writing. I want you to write with personality. I want you to play with punctuation. I want you to ditch the corporatized hogwash. I want to expand your sense of what great writing can be. And I want you to have fun doing it.

But there’s more to the mission. Writing Examples is a protest against today’s Internet, where people spend the majority of their time reading ad-polluted articles and doom-scrolling the same few social media sites. Remember when we used to surf the Internet? When every site was its own wave to ride? Now, we’re like phone-addicted zombies, we mindlessly scroll Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram until we feel bad about ourselves — only to repeat the cycle a few hours later.

Writing Examples is different. Heartfelt writing deserves a heartfelt presentation, so every element of the site has been designed from scratch. Energetically, we wanted to honor the gravitas of classic writing without the sleepiness of a drab old library shelf.  We said no to ads. We said no to pop-ups. No hijacking your attention. None of the flat white backgrounds that make the Internet feel so homogenous. And we said no to anything that feels like your 5th-grade English class.

Writing Examples isn’t about what’s trending. It’s about learning from the great writers of times past, most of whom you know, many of whom you probably haven’t taken the time to read.

The ultimate goal is to make Writing Examples a one-stop shop to learn about any kind of writing you can think of.

Now, I dare you to dive into the site and get to work. Here's the full site

WritingExamples.com

The Sam Altman Interview

You know him as the CEO of OpenAI — but he's also an avid writer.

We spoke not once but twice about how Sam captures ideas, clarifies his thinking, edits his writing, decides what to work on, and uses ChatGPT.

Timestamps:

1:47 Will LLMs change how we write?
8:39 How does Sam use ChatGPT?
11:26 How Sam became less anxious
17:24 Sam once dreamed of being a novelist
18:37 Lessons from Peter Thiel
21:35 Lessons from Paul Graham
26:02 The book Sam Altman wants to write
28:37 Advice for startup founders
30:20 How Y Combinator shapes OpenAI
35:55 How Sam chose to work on AGI
37:35 Writing strategy memos at OpenAI
41:34 Why isn’t ChatGPT a better storyteller?
44:20 Sam's obsessive note-taking method
47:12 Will AI put writers out of work? If you'd rather listen to the episode, you can do that here...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how…
open.spotify.com/episode/4zskFs…

Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know.

He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting.

Some of his rules for writing:

1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter.

2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place.

3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters.

4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time).

5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you.

6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something.

7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise.

8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable.

9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant.

10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.

11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.

12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object.

13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep.

14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof.

15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it.

16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."

17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same.

18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them.

That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry.

I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets. If you'd rather tune in on YouTube, here's the full link.

Neil Strauss once got a call from the FBI.

They wanted to learn about seduction (he's written a lot about it).

He's published ten New York Times bestsellers and ghostwritten for celebrities like Kevin Hart and Rick Rubin.

15 things he taught me about writing:

1. A desire for universal praise kills your voice. Great writers always work keeping very specific role models in mind. They want to live unto — write up to — their heroes.

2. In your first draft, be vulnerable. Then edit so that your vulnerability is interesting to other people.

3. Notice, process, share: Writing starts with the eye (where you notice), moves to the mind (where you process), and ends with the fingertips (where you share).

4. Write with uncommon honesty. Edit with uncommon brutality.

5. None of Neil Strauss’ books would exist without him brain dumping interesting experiences into a doc in the first 24 hours. How many ideas have you lost because you didn't write them down?

6. The first paragraph, the first page, and the first chapter are crucial because they establish the vibe and tempo you have to adhere to…till the last word.

7. Don’t rush your main idea. It probably came to you in bits and pieces over time, so don’t hit the reader in the face with it. Take them to the main idea via stories. You don't need to say everything at the beginning.

8. Your writing develops a vital zing when you realize no one cares. Your job is to make them care. Start with this attitude and your brain will subconsciously erase unnecessary set ups and cut to the chase.

9. Create systems to protect you from your lower self. For example, a part of your animal brain wants to scroll Twitter for 10 hours and bathe in the glow of the timeline. But great writers side with their higher self over the lower. Neil uses an app called Freedom to keep distractions at bay.

10. There's a point where you stop telling the book or the essay what you want it to be, and it starts telling you what it wants to be. Don’t ignore this message.

11. The first draft is for you. Be uninhibited and let your ideas flow like lava.

12. The second draft is for the reader. Make what matters to you matter to the reader. Ask questions like: "Where are they bored? Where are they confused?"

13. The third draft is for the haters. Clean up your prose. Get the facts straight. Take the bullets out of the gun. Then... ship.

14. When we begin a book–or any artwork or creative endeavor–the goal is not to execute a plan. It’s to surrender to the art itself. To let the art create itself, with you as a conduit.

15. Writers need a sacred space. A place or a time of the day that’s sealed off from the outside world, with no distractions…where you can enter undisturbed flow states.

I've shared the full conversation with @neilstrauss below.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies. Listen to the episode below...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nei…
open.spotify.com/episode/0OkUE9…

25 million people, every single year, download Shaan Puri’s podcast. What has Shaan figured out about storytelling?

He spilled the beans in our new chat. Here's how he does it:

1. A story is a five second moment of change. A story is not a sequence of events; it's about transformation. Weave in U-turns and unexpected flips.

2. Write like you talk. Natural, conversational, led by stories.

3. A formula for a great story: Intention + Obstacle. At all moments, the listener should know what the hero wants and what's stopping them from getting there. This one's from Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network.

4. Work backwards from the emotion you're trying to create in the reader. Then let the structure follow.

5. Aim for strong reactions. If you can get the reader to widen their eyes, raise their eyebrows, and/or burst out laughing, they will share your work.

6. Don't write to the faceless masses. Write to one specific person. BuzzFeed writers used to write to "Debbie at her Desk," the bored woman at her desk who wanted a 5-minute distraction.

7. “Likeability” is downstream of vulnerability. The more honestly you share your challenges, the more invested your reader gets. Write your heart out.

8. Don't be the 9,000 IQ guy. Stop competing in imaginary intelligence contests and start telling stories. Big words alienate but tight narratives pull people in.

9. Forget resumes and portfolios. Create a “binge bank” instead. A binge bank is a set of videos or essays that people can binge on. Stack up material so that when people do go down your rabbit hole, they come out the other side a fan.

10. Mere practice gets you nowhere. But intentional practice leads to exponential progress. Always learn from your attempts and make intelligent tweaks on the next try.

11. Comedy is great, but definitely don't make every sentence a joke.

12. Comedy is a pretty easy way to improve your writing. The essence of all comedy is surprise. Study your favorite comedians. Read books like How to Write Funny and The Hidden Tools of Comedy.

13. For better storytelling, Shaan recommends two books: Storyworthy and Building a Storybrand.

14. How to make headlines juicy: use specific and odd numbers, focus on the first three words and the last three words, use "you" whenever possible, and know that longer is typically better than shorter.

15. Your writing should only be as long as it is interesting. An uninteresting 20 second reel will fail; an interesting 30-minute essay will win. But you must be honest while gauging how objectively interesting your piece is…in a world with infinite content.

16. Most people think writing is about transferring information but writing is just as much about transferring emotion. Emotion gets people to take action (like, share, buy…).

The first 40-minutes of this conversation with @ShaanVP is all about storytelling. Then there's an hour more about the genius of Dave Chapelle and how to write with zest.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies… Listen to the podcast here...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-p…
open.spotify.com/episode/3wqtAD…

Ali Abdaal finished first in his class at Cambridge, became a doctor, and then built a YouTube channel with 5 million followers.

Here's what he's taught me about creative work:

1. Get going, get good, get smart—in that order.

2. If you're stuck, embrace the FBR Method: Fast, Bad, Wrong. Ali wrote the first draft of his book in seven days flat. Quantity leads to quality.

3. Prolific over perfect: If you want to get good at something, you have to put in the reps.

4. Be a Guide, not a Guru: Your writer's block will disappear once you stop trying to be the person who knows everything, and start being a friendly guide instead. Tell your story. Share what's worked for you. You don't need to have all the answers.

5. Do the verb instead of being the noun: Your identity can limit you. Make videos instead of being a "YouTuber." Publish essays instead of being a "writer." Labels tie you down. Action frees you up.

6. Work hard to find the work that doesn't feel like work. The more time I spend with Ali, the more I realize that he's always working in a way that doesn't feel like work to him.

7. Search for the work only you can do: Ali couldn't find a competitive edge in academia. As he once said to me: “The only way to win the academic game was just to work really, really hard because at the highest levels of academia, I had no natural advantages.”

8. You can thrive as a communicator without a bunch of new ideas. Interpreting existing ideas in a fresh, distinct, and personal way is more than enough. Just think of your favorite teacher from school. How many of their ideas were original? Same with writing.

9. Be real, not perfect: Ali's videos aren't 100% scripted. He speaks off the cuff, as if he's talking to a friend.

10. If you're stuck on an article, ditch the Google Doc and text a friend about what you're trying to say instead.

11. You don't need to be an expert to share what you've learned along the way. C.S. Lewis once said: “The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.”

12. Algorithms are designed to put the right things in front of the right people at the right time. Put them to work for you.

I've shared the full conversation with @AliAbdaal below.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies.
"I've never had any goal around subscriber count or around views, revenue or anything like that. And all of that stuff has happened as a side effect of showing up and doing the work and controlling what's within my control."

Here's the YouTube link.

Morgan Housel has written 4,000 blog posts and sold 4 million copies of The Psychology of Money.

As a writer, he's the best storyteller I know too.

Here are his principles for writing:

1. Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

2. Writing is an efficiency game. Whoever says the most stuff in the fewest words wins.

3. You have five seconds to catch somebody's attention on the Internet. If you didn't catch them with the headline or in the first two sentences, they're gone.

4. If you're stuck on a piece, go for a walk.

5. If an idea comes to you while you're out walking, email it to yourself immediately.

6. People don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

7. A good story is like leverage for ideas. An idea on its own might be boring, but if you tell a good story about someone interacting with that idea, you can get people to nod their heads and pay attention.

8. Great writing begins with great reading.

9. If you want to write better and more memorable sentences, ask yourself: "If somebody was reading this on Kindle, would they highlight this sentence?" If the answer is no, consider removing it.

10. Everyone should write. Why? Because everyone is full of ideas they’re not aware of. This means they’re also unaware of the value of their ideas, and this value can only be unlocked via writing.

11. Start with one brave sentence and see where it goes.

12. Big words mask little thoughts. They’re an attempt to fool the reader into thinking you’re smart when you have nothing smart to say.

13. Writing for others is work, and it shows. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows.

14. Morgan calls this Selfish Writing: write to solve your own problems, and the audience will get pulled in because of your emotional involvement. But if you pander to the audience, they will sense your lingering indifference, and leave.

15. The Power Law of Success: if you do 30 things, 29 of them are going to be irrelevant. One of them will completely change everything. Keep writing—volume is your friend.

16. Most books, even by proven authors, are flops. Mark Twain wrote 28 novels. You haven't heard of most of them, but that doesn't matter because he wrote two classics: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

17. Mark Twain used to read aloud to his family and watch their reactions. If he saw them getting bored, he’d cut that part out. If he saw them getting excited, he’d double down on that section.

18. Success takes time. Don’t rush it. Morgan spent 14 years as a professional writer before he published his first book. In that time, he wrote more than 4,000 blog posts.

19. Morgan tells the story of two trees. One grows in the shade of a mother tree, growing slowly because the sunlight is cut off. The other, planted in a field with no barrier, receives full sunlight and grows faster. But the first one develops denser wood due to the slower rate of growth. There’s a natural growth rate in nature, and in creative pursuits.

20. Make your writing concise.

21. Concise does not mean short. It means a high density of value to words.

Okay, one more... Out of all our conversations, one interaction stands out because it so eloquently captures the essence of his approach. When I asked about his marketing strategy for selling books, he said: "Write a good book."

"Well, how do you do that?"

"Only write things that you personally find interesting."

I've shared the full interview with @MorganHousel below.

He's been writing for a decade and a half, and this interview is a deep-dive into his process for coming up with ideas, refining them, sharing them, and building a career as an author.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies below…
Morgan once said: "Ken Burns is more popular than history textbooks because facts don’t have any meaning unless people pay attention to them, and people pay attention to good stories."

Here's the full interview on YouTube.

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, @pmarca would be a guaranteed medalist.
Marc, on Twitter: "It's the most wonderful and horrible thing in the world. I'll follow on a single tweet and block on a single tweet, and I block extremely liberally."

Mean Girls is so popular because it reveals the dark parts of our psychology. People who don't know what they want adopt other people's desires until their models become their enemies.

Thread: The movie begins with Regina George as the high school queen bee. Cady is new to the high-school world. She’s naive to the social hierarchy of her new world. Cady isn't in touch with her authentic desires. Instead of developing her own wants, she takes on Regina's as her own.

Successful entrepreneurs are masters in the art of repetition. They identify the most important variables for their company, codify them into mantras, and relentlessly repeat them without ever losing excitement. The value of repetition has long been known in religious domains — where depth is prioritized over novelty. The sermons get repeated. The prayers don’t change. Through repetition, the tenets of faith grow from an intellectual experience to a visceral and embodied one.

Frank Slootman has taken three companies public, one of which was the largest software IPO of all time.

Here's his playbook for business: Slootman has led three companies: Data Domain, Service Now, and Snowflake — the largest software IPO in history, at a $70 billion valuation.

His Amp It Up philosophy is built on three pillars: increase the tempo, raise the standards, and narrow the focus.

Surprised by how many great scientists were intensely spiritual too. Makes me wonder if reason and religion are fundamentally connected, even though we see them as opposites. Some examples: David Bowie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla.

At the highest levels of success, good taste becomes a differentiator, but I know so few people who work seriously to improve their taste. Though reasonable minds can disagree on what quality looks like, hierarchies of value absolutely exist. This becomes obvious once you start creating things.

Whenever I set goals, I send them to one of the best entrepreneurs I know. Every time, he tells me they're not ambitious enough. Then we work together to set a bigger vision.

Feel like setting bigger goals is the closest thing to a free lunch that exists. Immediately reminded of this line from @tylercowen.

What's the most well-written book you've ever read? Some books that arrest my heart and lift me into the heavens every time I pick them up:

• Shantaram
• Anam Cara
• When Breath Becomes Air

René Girard wrote that our similarities cause more conflict than our differences.

How can this be?

Let me explain, with a story from "American Psycho." The business card scene in American Psycho begins in an upscale Wall Street boardroom, with a young and successful banker named Patrick Bateman. He's surrounded by bankers who look just like him. They wear the same suits, go to the same barber, and dine at the same restaurants.

Atheists today champion ideals of human rights, equality, and the protection of victims. They proudly reject religion, but fail to see how they're "Christian" through and through.

The philosopher René Girard shows us why. As a kid, I used to march around my religion classes thinking I was brilliant for rejecting Biblical ideas. I used to say things like, "Moses didn't really part the Red Sea" or "Cain and Abel weren't real historical figures." The “Man in the Sky” idea of God was comical to me.

Reading the Bible is table stakes if you want to be an educated Westerner.

Here's why: Before we begin, here's some context about me: I’m not here to convert you. Your faith is your faith and I'm not here to change how you think. Rather, I’m here to improve how you think and share what I've learned. If it gives you any comfort, know that I’m not a believer.

Why do elite colleges pump students into the same five industries: law, medicine, tech, investing, and management consulting?

For answers, let’s turn to the philosopher René Girard. Modern childhood is structured like a conveyor belt. Every kid progresses at the same speed, no matter how much they learn. Follow the conveyor belt and you’ll be successful. High school leads into college, which leads into graduate school, which leads into a prestigious career.

Why do so many people stick with jobs they hate, even after they've made a lot of money? For an answer, let's turn to the philosophy of René Girard.

We don't desire utility. We desire being. We don't just want objects for the utility they provide. We want objects for what they say about us.

Feeling like we need to write like novelists is one of the worst practices we pick up in school.

Better to write clearly. Be direct. Use simple language.

Don't try to include vivacious language and purple prose until you've mastered the art of writing clearly. Yes, you can write with style. Yes, your writing can be fun. And yes, your writing can express your personality.

But please don't try to LARP as Shakespeare. You don't need to bewilder the reader with loquacious paragraphs and flabbergasting sentences.

Simplicity is just fine.