How to Write Essays That Spread

Since we started Every three years ago, I’ve published over 230,000 words. Google claims that the average business book has roughly 50,000–60,000 words, so by that metric I’m somewhere around my fourth or fifth book.

It’s been… a journey.

If I take a deep breath and close my eyes, I can place myself back in my San Francisco apartment where my wife and I were living when Divinations first launched. We had a nine-foot bookshelf that stretched to our ceiling, and I moved our kitchen table next to it so I could soak in some calming vibes while I twisted my brain into knots, trying to find the right sequences of words that would make this crazy dream of becoming a “real writer” come true.

Nathan Baschez 📧@nbashaw

When I sit down to write for https://t.co/NPoXsFyHMV I like to pretend I’m having a seance 🕯🔮

December 16th 2019, 3:56am EST

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We were running on fumes financially, so we had to move out of that place and in with my in-laws to keep the dream alive. In retrospect it was a pretty wild bet. There were many late nights in my office—a garage filled with boxes of all our stuff, my desk, a space heater, and that bookshelf—that lasted until 2, 3, even sometimes 4 a.m.

Thankfully, it worked out. When I hit publish on this piece, it will get delivered to around 75,000 inboxes. The business is in a great place. My co-founder Dan and I were able to find enough of the right sequences of words to grow a respectable audience and, more importantly, attract some wonderful kindred spirits along the way to write with.

I won’t lie: I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the past three years. I am a deeply flawed writer. But I do feel confident that I’ve learned some useful things about writing essays that spread on the internet. Now that I’m starting to focus more on Lex, I figure it’s a good time to spill the beans.

Here are the frameworks, metaphors, aphorisms, and various other forms of advice that I find myself returning to when I struggle with writing.

Why essays spread

Every article has thrust and drag. The thrust of a piece is what motivates readers to invest the energy necessary to extract its meaning. It is the reason they click. Drag is everything that makes the reader’s task harder, such as meandering intros, convoluted sentences, abstruse locution and even little things like a missing Oxford comma.

When your writing has more thrust than drag for a group of readers, it will spread and your audience will grow. Achieving this takes practice and experimentation.

The idea of thrust and drag may seem obvious, but it helps to decompose the problem of growing an audience into its component parts. Do you know what people want to read about? Can you channel that knowledge into compelling writing? These are independent variables, so work on one at a time.

Sources of obsession

How can you know what people want to read about? This is the hardest part about writing, at least for me.

My theory is that most people read deep non-fiction writing in order to cultivate an obsession. Some obsessions last weeks, others last decades. People are willing to skim and graze random articles, but that’s not the kind of readership you want to attract. You want people to care.

The best advice I have for finding these people is to not try too hard. We’ve all seen the writers who are pandering to a recent trend or copying a “proven” format. It usually doesn’t work, because in order to feed someone’s obsession you need to be able to go unusually deep. This takes a lot of energy, and the benefits from writing are sufficiently uncertain to make it a bad bet to do so if you’re only doing it to grow an audience.

A better (and more fun) strategy is to work unusually hard to cultivate your own obsessions. Run experiments! Do research! Try things! And, of course, write about it. When you’re pursuing your own curiosity, it matters less if others immediately care. The work becomes its own reward.