How David Perell Writes an Essay

David Perrell will be a guest on Dan’s podcast, How Do You Use ChatGPT?, in early 2024. As a prelude, we’re re-publishing this illuminating interview with him about his writing process. —Kate

How do you find something interesting to write about? Put another way, how do you make your writing interesting? David Perell knows.

If the internet is a great online game, Perell is one of its grand warlocks. He’s fashioned a career as “The Writing Guy,” writing essays, building a popular podcast, and creating the premier course on writing on the internet, Write of Passage.

To make his writing interesting, he relies on an ingredient known as surprise. He wraps surprise into each sentence of his essays. He gathers it by constant searching, and he searches by echolocation. He throws out his verbal candidates in conversations and on Twitter at a prodigious, unrestrained clip. He’s looking for ideas and ways of expressing them that raise eyebrows, that generate so many reactions they can’t be ignored. 

Perell is a small investor in Every, so it should be said I have reason to be impressed by him. But it’s not just me—Perell is deeply influential. If you read this article closely, you’ll hear echoes of David’s system in the approaches of other writers like James Clear and Robin Sloan. There is much about it that I—we—can learn from.