Harlan Coben is the master of the plot twist. He's published 35 novels and sold more than 100 million books. This conversation is all about how he writes. Here are the highlights: 1) Keep enough fear to stop yourself from phoning it in. He says: "Every writer I know who thinks they’re really good actually sucks." 2) Write your first draft knowing nobody gets to see how bad it is. This is your chance to break every writing rule because nobody's going to read what you wrote 3) How do you create suspense? By answering questions, then making the answers open bigger questions. 4) Write dialogue people would want to overhear. Ask yourself: “If I were sitting at a pub, is this the conversation I would want to overhear?” If the answer is no, make it better. 5) Give your dialogue a reason to happen: Don’t just put two people in a pub and have them talk. Imagine someone has keeled over, or a fight has broken out, and they’re debating whether to intervene. Now the conversation has a purpose. 6) Start in the middle, where there’s already a story happening. Don’t have your character walk into the church, sit down, and notice the flowers. Put him in the back pew watching the only woman he’ll ever love marry another man. Now we’re engaged. 7) Find the one detail that brings the whole scene to life: A group of mystery writers once debated the scariest sound in the world. Warren Murphy said: you’re alone in a cabin in the woods, and upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. That’s the moment you’re looking for. 8) Make room for quiet, or your loud moments won’t mean anything. If your story is always storming, a rainstorm won’t matter. Think of a placid pond: a small rock makes a ripple. But throw a boulder in a churning ocean, and nobody will notice. 9) Know your ending so you can afford to get lost along the way. Harlan says: "I know I’m driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles. I might take a detour through the Panama Canal and stop in Tokyo, but I know where I’m going. That gives me freedom. I can go off the main road because there’s a destination in the GPS. Knowing the ending lets me explore more without panicking that I’m completely lost." 10) Don't tell people what you're writing before you finish it. If you're at a cocktail party and start explaining your book, you'll almost feel the air coming out of the balloon. You'll get satisfaction without doing the work when all your satisfaction should be coming from finishing the book. 11) Don't expect to be good when you start writing: Harlan's first published novel was the fourth he'd written. You could have the skill of LeBron James, but if you’ve never played basketball, you’re going to suck when you get on that court. Why would writing be different? — — Timestamps: 0:34 How to find your next idea 4:02 Know your ending first 10:21 Why talent isn’t enough 13:45 Only bad writers think they’re good 18:30 What keeps Harlan going 23:47 Books vs TV adaptations 28:48 The mistake most writers make 35:06 What makes for good dialogue 43:08 Your themes find you 47:39 What he learned from Hitchcock 57:01 Making the boring parts interesting 59:58 How Harlan writes chapters 1:02:23 Main vs secondary characters 1:04:37 Don’t talk about your book 1:06:46 Why routines stop working 1:10:12 Stop making excuses 1:12:30 Genre vs form I've shared the full conversation with Harlan Coben below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen to the episode on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!

R.F. Kuang has written seven books, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and trained at some of the world's top universities: Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. Her wisdom-per-word ratio is also off the charts. Some highlights from our conversation: 1) Emotions are like colors. Mix them! Emotions are never one-dimensional. Bring together fear and courage, love and revulsion, joy and panic. This collision of feelings is closer to how emotion actually works. 2) Practice literary shapeshifting. Become a new person, a new persona, and a new type of author with every project. Do not confuse your habitual voice with your authentic voice: there is no single way of constructing sentences that must define you. Treat language as a fluid and flexible tool. 3) There's no correlation between how good writing feels in the moment and the quality of the product. We mistake effortlessness for genius, flow, or divine inspiration. So don't evaluate a day’s work by the pleasure of producing it. Judge whether the sentences escaped your pre-existing patterns and helped you think something through. 4) Good writing comes from being attentive to what's happening around you and writing with specificity about those observations, rather than relying on the theoretical. Throughout the day, ask: “Where is this feeling sitting in my body? How am I physically responding to this?” Those questions force you beyond the abstract label and toward something more specific than the reader could easily imagine for themselves. 5) Use your zero draft to discover the beating heart of the story, not to prove that you can already write it. Research, brainstorm, follow your nose, and collect whatever feels surprising or “crunchy.” At this stage, coherence is less valuable than emotional resonance. 6) Draft in layers. Let the early draft remain “balls on sticks.” Add the setting, architecture, faces, furniture, and drape colors in later passes. A person’s visual appearance is often the least interesting thing about them. 7) Use the outsider’s perspective to make language strange again. Nabokov could play, stretch, and innovate with English because he was fascinated by the oddities and opportunities of particular word combinations. 8) Be suspicious of “volunteer words for volunteer thoughts.” Volunteer words are the phrases that offer themselves immediately because they are already floating around in your head. They repeat common discourse and carry ideas that are easy to digest; you are filling the page from your pre-existing dataset rather than articulating something you have actually observed or thought through. 9) If you're stuck, put the subconscious to work. Open a blank document, type a title, word, or phrase, then save and close it. Return after the problem has had time to work on you in the background. 10) Serious writing doesn't require solemnity. Soaring observations about history or human nature can sit beside potty jokes. 11) AI can offer readily available words for readily available thoughts, but readily available thoughts do not push boundaries. It may reproduce impressive human patterns, but “you won’t get your next Pale Fire from an LLM.” 12) Thinking about the audience as you write a first draft is a death sentence. The moment you start writing while looking over your shoulder, you stop taking the story where it needs to go. Timestamps: 0:29 Writing your emotions 6:44 Observing people 15:20 Why easy writing doesn't work 23:09 Building unique voices for each book 30:47 What Kuang learned from debate 32:52 Why primary sources matter 35:33 AI & writing 40:54 How to start a book 45:16 Trust your subconscious 50:25 Copy the writers you love 52:57 Being goofy 57:34 Find a driving question 1:01:36 What every writer needs to learn 01:04:38 Book and movie recommendations I've shared the full conversation with R.F. Kuang below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to it all on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!

Matt Haig is famous for writing "The Midnight Library" which sold more than 10 million copies and has more than 2.5 million reviews on Goodreads. He unapologetically writes for a big audience. That's a taboo thing to say in the writing world even though basically every writer wants more readers. So the question is: Are you betraying the craft if you explicitly try to reach as many people as possible? We also talked about how to tell better stories, how AI will change writing, and what to think about whenever you write a first draft. Timestamps: 0:29 How Matt writes his books 6:14 What AI can never copy 8:21 How books will change with AI 13:32 Short words hit harder 15:24 Why first drafts matter 19:52 What a story is really for 26:36 What to do when your books don't sell 36:22 Lessons from writing kids' books 45:31 There's always another level 50:37 Matt's relationship with publishers 53:13 Trust your own taste I've shared the full conversation with Matt Haig below. You can also watch the full thing on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, and I've shared those links in the replies. Enjoy!

The decline of beauty in everyday life shows up in even the smallest things, like tickets, where we’ve let our obsession with efficiency win out over personality and artistic expression. Like the ticket from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which I've shared in the first photo. It's an iconic building that could have so easily inspired a beautiful ticket design, but they opted for the most economical option instead. Each example of this decline isn't a big deal, but the world becomes less charming and enchanted when people stop caring about craftsmanship. For some alternatives, scroll through the photos. The second one shows old Japanese train tickets, the third one shows an old circus ticket, and the fourth one is a World Series ticket from 2002, which felt magical when I got to hold one as an eight-year-old. So yes, there’s definitely been a decline. And maybe we’re okay with it! But it’s worth remembering that this decline isn’t inevitable. There is another way.

What do writers talk about when they get together? I was curious, so I arranged a conversation between two of the best writers I know: Elif Shafak and Robert Macfarlane. There's something mystical about both of their work. It's like they've found a way to transcend the limits of reason and tap into something deeper and more imaginative. Elif is the president of the Royal Society of Literature and has written 21 books, while Robert is a professor at Cambridge who writes about the wonders of the natural world: rivers, mountains, trees, and birds. Timestamps: 0:44 Turning feelings into words 4:58 Linear vs. non-linear writing 9:05 Listen well to write well 20:25 Why write about nature? 24:21 Language, rhythm and cadence 29:07 Do writers need to be bored? 35:43 Bad writing advice 43:23 The limits of reason 47:56 Give readers a new way to see 50:25 Find the big in the small 57:54 How to become a better writer I've shared the full conversation with Elif Shafak and Robert Macfarlane below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

I think a good amount of the autistic phenotype causality goes the other way. After a few hundred hours of being deep in math I can barely look at people’s eyes, look at my own shoes. During a highly social month I’m an extrovert

Tom Junod says there's one thing humanity has ever done right, and AI can't do it. He explains why: "The only thing maybe that humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing." "Anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this onward stamping of this blind genius being that is humanity." "Bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That's the soul. You see the soul do its work over the course of human history." "Why the fuck would we ever want to give that up? It's the one thing that we can do."

"Wonder is an essential survival skill." We walk past nature without giving it a second thought. Robert Macfarlane reminds us of the wonder behind a rainbow: "When you see a rainbow, you still stop. That's wonder. Rainbows are the charismatic megafauna of wonder. They do it often and well." "The other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke. It was no one else's rainbow, because it's a prismatic function: the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths. If you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. That's wondrous." "And science finesses the real into wonder. Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world, just understand a little bit better how it works." "I don't see science and wonder as opposed."

"Seinfeld said comedy is when you decide it's a funny story." "Life is not funny. You just decide. What happened today to you is awful and miserable, but you decide it's a funny story when you tell it to your friends at the bar, and they laugh, and you feel, okay, I'm over it." -Andrew Sean Greer (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

I think you can even go deeper than this. Ideologies like nationalism have dissipated. Give someone an opportunity to move countries to make more money and live a better life, most people will take it and not look behind. The internet has created a global status market. You can see how people live everywhere, and compare yourself to people far outside your country or profession. That weakens the old national and occupational identities

>In aesthetic fields, highly trained people often develop tastes that are uncorrelated with the tastes of the masses to signal that they're part of the in-crowd. In the world of architecture, this is known as "the design disconnect." Studies have shown that the tastes of architecture students are diametrically opposed to the tastes of the general public. The same pattern holds in other artistic mediums. ive written about this and it is not limited to architecture or artistic domains, it is one of public vs private taste. public taste allows people who are not experts to judge artifacts within the domain, because the artifacts are legible to non-experts. think fashion, painting, music, whatever artifacts are generally viewable.

"We've become so arrogant as human beings, and we have turned ourselves into consumers of nature." Elif Shafak on how we've stopped appreciating nature: "We take it for granted, but a grain of sand, a drop of water, the seemingly small, the seemingly insignificant actually says so much about the universe, because everything is interconnected." "I did a lot of research about the Yazidi minorities. In the month of April, if children are running around, jumping up and down as children do, the Yazidi grandmothers gently warn them. Why? Because according to them, in the month of April, the earth is pregnant. And so when you walk, you need to walk softly, you need to tread gently." "Now, to our rational modern minds, this is just an irrational thing. Of course the earth is pregnant. You're going to see all these flowers blooming, the fruits. This idea that you need to tread gently because it's alive, you can't stomp on it." "Only a culture that has not disconnected itself from nature can come up with this kind of storytelling."

its a great indictment of contemporary elites that we have none living lives a tenth as beautiful as Sir. John Sloane built the bank of england building, and turned his home into a collection that has outlasted him for nearly 200 years.

Humor takes you a lot farther on the east coast than the west coast. I’ve always felt this, so I asked Google to rank the top 20 comedians and sure enough, none of a single one was born out west.

Feels weird to say this but I haven’t particularly enjoyed either of my trips to the Louvre. Of course it’s grand and impressive, but something about the museum is very overwhelming. Maybe it’s the crowds. Or maybe it’s the layout, which is hard to follow. Or maybe because there’s so much pressure on A Day at The Louvre.

Better to have a little bit of the real thing than a lot of the fake thing. Something is off about all these low sugar, high protein ice creams. It’s dessert. You’re supposed to enjoy it. The French have this right. A good chocolate mousse is rich enough that you’re satisfied with just a little. Bite for bite, it’s actually more indulgent but you don’t need very much, so it’s alright.