Dave Perell’s interview with Henrik Karlsson is the one of the best things I’ve seen about writing. It’s full of intuitions I’ve felt in my body for years, distinctions that I had no words for until I heard Henrik speak. He reveals so much that no one’s ever told me about writing — many of the things that make writing as urgent as eating, exercising, and making love.
I’m loathe to add to the bloated amount of online content about writing. But Henrik’s take is so unique that I want to internalize and promote it.
I tried to distill Henrik’s speaking in this interview into a set of writing instructions. This failed. Henrik describes a process so complex and teeming with life that it cannot be summarized as a list of tips and tricks. Instead, he evokes a series of verbal environments that I can stand inside for a while, emerging with a new perspective and different words to put on the page.
What impresses me so deeply about Henrik’s process is how multi-sensory and kinesthetic it is. He talks about visualizing ideas and making choices based on movements of energy in his body. He also engages his intellect by questioning his mental frameworks and cultivating confusion. Following is what landed for me about all this as I watched the interview.
Living with ideas for a long time
Henrik is patient. He lets ideas for essays simmer, sometimes for years, until he can write them “from a deep source of knowledge and experience.” This emerges from reading, conversation, note-taking, and journaling over time.
Since Henrik writes professionally, he sometimes feels obligated to crank out essays on a schedule. But this means faking excitement about a topic, which never works. Instead, he takes the time to follow the trail of his curiosity, trusting that this will lead to “something that just wants to be born through me.”
This patience allows time for ideas from different fields to collide and combine in novel ways. Though he calls himself a “literary guy” who loves poetry and visual art, his essays include references to machine learning, large language models, and mathematics: “Reading widely and in strange directions usually sparks a lot of ideas for me.”
Writing from urgency and curiosity
Eventually an animating question emerges that connects to something Henrik cares about deeply, such as becoming a better husband and father. At this point he’s driven to answer the question. This feeling manifests as moving energy in his body, a signal that “the material is ready to move into writing something.”
Henrik never chooses topics based on what other people will like. Instead, he writes from “a deep personal need.” Making this distinction calls for vigilance. Sometimes he notices a passage creeping into an essay that’s simply an attempt to be “cute” and deletes it.
Henrik reminds himself that he’s not trying to prove his worth or trying to win anything. He just keeps asking What’s going on here? and allows himself to ramble: “A lot of trying to be smart and trying to go straight to the point is a fear of looking stupid.”
This attitude takes him to a liminal space:
Even the need to be comprehensible can even be a problem….Sometimes the really interesting things you don't really even know how to express. It's right at the edge of language.
Giving fragile ideas a space to live
“Young ideas are so fragile,” says Henrik. He treats them with exquisite care, protecting them from criticism in their early stages.
This is true even when an idea is hazy and pre-linguistic. (“I want to write an essay that, like, has a feeling that it's pink.”) At one point he wondered about writing an essay without words.
This attitude leads to the paradox of staying “porous” and “firm” at the same time. Great artists are “very open to the world,” says Henrik, “but they're also not going to let the world dictate who they are and where they're going.”
Looking, testing, cultivating confusion
Henrik quotes Wittgenstein: "Don't think, look.” Don't get trapped in abstract mental models (“knowledge shields”). Instead, ground your thinking in precise observation. Watch to see how events unfold in the world outside your head. Be like a painter who’s working on a still life: Spend as much time staring at the stationary objects as moving your brush on the canvas.
Henrik also questions himself to test assertions: Is this really true? How do I know? What’s a concrete example? What’s a counter-example? For this reason, many of his essays are based on case studies — close observation of his personal relationships.
This inquiry becomes possible through writing. Putting words to ideas makes them “brittle” — capable of being broken. Merely speaking about ideas doesn’t offer this level of rigor. Conversations are subject to the decay of forgetting and faulty recall (That’s not what I remember saying; I think what I actually said was…) When words are frozen on the page or screen, there’s no doubt about what you actually said.
Testing leads to confusion, which is valuable. “I want to confuse myself,” Henrik says. Confusion actually allows him to suspend his knowledge shields and open up to more information. Insight comes from getting further confused and pushing through to the other side: a simplicity that’s based on rich, messy data, real-world data. The “zone of confusion” is “where light comes in.”
Writing from fear and solitude
Good writing often comes from going deeply into the things we fear and discovering what’s holding us back. When he’s being less than fully present with his wife and children, for example, Henrik takes this as a cue to put words around it.
The courage to look closely is also grounded in the body. “I've had to almost move to a different part of my body to write in that way,” says Henrik. “I have to go to some place where I relax a little bit, where I let go.”
Long walks (some lasting for hours) also help. For Henrik, walking and writing are intimately linked, two poles of an underlying process. Walking allows ideas to collide and combine in his subconscious. As he tunes into the rhythm of his movement, specific words and passages surface in his mind. These are things he’ll commit to writing.
Walking is intentional loneliness. Extended solitude allows Henrik to drop his social roles and expectations. When these fall away, his thinking takes new paths. He accesses different parts of his brain.
Another form of solitude is staying offline. “I spend at least half of my days with no Internet connection on,” says Henrik.
Noticing when clusters form
Over time, Henrik finds that more images and words cluster around an essay idea. The animating question becomes a magnet that attracts associations. Eventually the idea acquires “borders” and becomes “a thing.” This allows Henrik to keep the most relevant material and delete everything else.
At this point Henrik has a “vantage point” or “landscape” — a perspective on all his notes and journal entries about an animating question. Now the essay begins to take shape in his mind. He means this literally: The proto-essay becomes a “geometrical” thing, a series of units or centers that combine to “form a strong wholeness.”
Moving clusters to release emotional energy
Henrik moves these centers around until they acquire a color and emotional energy. Again, this is something he feels in his body.
Sometimes the desired order is musical, based on a rhythmic pulse of relaxation, tension, and sudden surprise. Henrik gives the example of writing an essay about Van Gogh. This piece flows for a while with long passages about several of the artist’s works. But at certain point Henrik wants “a short sentence” and a snap: “That was the last painting that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.”
Capturing the energy
Filled with energy, Henrik types out the first draft of an essay quickly. He has an emotional stake in the piece now. He wants the momentum of the text to reflect the visceral energy he feels in the moment. If he finds himself laughing or crying, he trusts that readers will feel it, too.
“A good piece of writing needs to have drive or a narrative tension,” Henrik says. In a novel, this comes from a character who desperately wants something and faces obstacles to getting it. In an essay, drive comes from starting with a burning question and revealing your mistakes and dead ends on the way to answering it.
Doing the beginning and ending last
Henrik tackles the introduction and conclusion of an essay last, after he’s confident that the other centers have snapped into place. However, there’s still room for discovery at this point. Sometimes moving one of the centers to the top reveals the core insight of the piece — an enlightening surprise.
Writing to recreate neural networks
Though it’s a power tool for thinking, writing imposes an artificial structure on our experience. Writing is relentlessly linear, a string of words and sentences that move in one direction, from the top of the page to the bottom. But this is not the way our mind works. Sensory data tiggers clusters of neurons to fire in unison across different regions of the brain.
This leads to a constant challenge for writer — crafting our lines so that they expand back into clouds and networks again. Henrik compares this to walking a spider’s web, which has no beginning or end: What thread can he take to reconstruct the whole web in the reader’s mind?
Breathing life into truisms
Knowing that David Perell is a Christian, Henrik brings up the New Testament. Can we see it as an extended essay, he asks, one that includes a kaleidoscope of literary forms — poetry, parables, stories, sermons? Over centuries these elements have been sequenced to evoke powerful feelings.
This is how Biblical authors overcome another writing challenge — making truisms come alive. At one level, the most important things we have to say sound like clichés: Be kind. Be a good spouse and parent. Honor your commitments. Good writers turn such “boring” and “obvious” statements into “complex, piercing, poetical ways to make that thing alive in you."
Going for ecstatic truth
Though Henrik’s essays are rigorous and precise, their cumulative effect is “ecstatic truth.” This differs from the “static truth” we find in a list of facts such as an accountant’s spreadsheet. Getting to ecstasy calls for novel ways of framing facts and maybe some artful invention as well.
In one my favorite essays (A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox), Henrik reveals how he does this:
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less.
Making sacrifices
Though Henrik is a young man, he’s already done many things: programming, performing music, running an art gallery. After soul searching, he put those aside to focus on writing. This is where he can go deep. This is where he can feel most alive.
Now Henrik’s days are devoted to a handful of priorities — publishing on Substack, being with his family, and renovating their property on a small island in the Baltic Sea.
As writers we make sacrifices. Writing takes a lot of time. It rules out other activities, even projects that we might enjoy. And it’s easy to sacrifice the wrong things when we don't take the time to figure out what matters the most. For more about doing this, see Henrik on Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on.
Running experiments
Henrik’s creative process is evolving:
I’m always playing around with things….How does my writing change if I write by hand, if I walk as I write, if I listen to this music or that music, or if I write really early in the morning or really late at night?
By running such experiments, Henrik opens up more of the “head space” that’s generated by walking, journaling, reading, and conversation. As he structures his life to cultivate “left field thinking,” Henrik finds that these activities fuel each other: “The writing feeds into me being a better dad, and being with the kids gives me ideas for the writing.”
Writing as personal transformation
Writing well is not a skill set, Henrik says. It’s about becoming a certain kind of person. It means lowering your barriers to sensory input and boldly connecting to your lived experience. Opening yourself in this way allows reality to change you.
Henrik also claims that writing makes him smarter:
A useful consequence of writing seriously for 3.5 years is that I’ve become notably more intelligent. Not the underlying hardware, of course — that is slowly falling apart; I have, statistically speaking, lost about ~5 grams of brain mass since I started Escaping Flatland….By burning more cycles on reviewing my thoughts, I can wring more out of my shrinking hardware. When I read what I wrote five years ago, and when I look at the decisions I made back then, I seem a standard deviation more stupid than now.
As the drafts of his essays expand, Henrik’s pieces become artifacts with an independent existence. The text accumulates wisdom until his best essays “end up smarter than I am.”
Henrik says more about writing as transformation in Ethos and imagination. Here he explores the process of turning ideas into forces that shape our behavior.
Writing to summon your personal tribe
Henrik’s Substack is a place to bring his “full, idiosyncratic, authentic self.” That’s my experience also. This is a space where I can shine a light on hidden parts of myself, surface tough questions, and write with raw honesty about the answers.
Henrik had been taught to write for a mass audience, which means cranking out pieces that are optimized for SEO and leaving out “the weird stuff.” He abandoned that for writing long, dense, and deeply personal essays. Some readers were turned off by this. But those that remained became “his people.” Many of them shared Henrik’s work with their friends, and now enough people subscribe to Escaping Flatland for him to do it full-time.
Also see Henrik on How I write essays.
Wow - so much to think about here. I need to read one paragraph at a time very slowly. Thanks for sharing this from Henrik.