I Interviewed 40 Writers in 2025 (Here's What I Learned) Summary — How I Write

David Perell reflects on 40 interviews from his “How I Write” podcast in 2025, distilling the most striking lessons from writers across genres — poets, novelists, essayists, and business communicators — into a single episode that moves from craft to the deeper questions of attention, memory, ambition, and what writing is ultimately for.

Wonder is not optional; it is an essential survival skill, a jaw-dropped recognition of the world’s freely given miracles.
A rainbow exemplifies wonder: it is utterly bespoke to the observer, shaped by the precise angle of light through water, so that stepping a yard sideways yields a different rainbow — no two people ever see the same one.
MacFarlane’s writing is impressionistic, not scientific; he captures the felt sense of nature — light, water, shadow — the way Monet painted Venice, stripping away architecture and people to reveal the emotional and spiritual resonance beneath the surface.
The practice: go into nature, sit, listen, ask “What does this make me feel?” and translate that felt sense onto the page.

Her opening line — “It’s strange what we don’t forget” — points to the unconscious selectivity of memory: the fragments that persist hold clues to identity, values, and worldview.
Phillips writes by surrendering to the material; she does not think about the book from outside but follows sentences deeper inside it, aiming for the reader to feel inside the experience, not reading about it.
Her process is mystical and non-linear — “the book takes her for a walk” — a reminder that there are as many ways to write as there are ways to live, and learning craft means studying both writers who think like you and those who don’t.

Harding urges writers to raise their ambition: “Why is there such a distance between my favorite stuff and my own writing?” — shift from self-consciousness (fear of presumption) to self-awareness (honest recognition of the gap).
He treats literary forebears as “aunts and uncles”: Emerson, Shakespeare, the Bible, Melville — studying them not to imitate but to absorb their spirit, aiming to write sentences Emerson could have written.
The paradox: total selflessness toward the work paired with total self-confidence in the attempt; ambition rooted in reverence for the creation, not ego for the creator.
Practical method: when you admire a writer, study them exhaustively — read their sermons, letters, marginalia — until their moves become part of your own repertoire.

Gioia rapidly diagnoses what he learned from a pantheon: Baudelaire (poetry of failure), McLuhan (media as spiritual environment), Dylan (lyrics as poetry for industrial modernity), the Beatles (collaborative alchemy), King (rhetoric anchored in moral vision), Steinbeck (dignity of the outcast), Cheever (fabulist of suburban moral fall and redemption), Tarantino (cinematic arrest, moral repulsion), Tolkien (WWI refracted through myth), Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (social-psychological and religious visionaries).
Originality is born from deep influence, not isolation; the “lie” that you must avoid influences to be original produces derivative work — true originality comes from digesting far-flung masters (e.g., a screenwriter studying poets and speechwriters) and synthesizing them.
Poetry was killed in schools when the New Critics replaced memorization, recitation, and chorus with silent visual analysis; the proper response to a poem is to dance, tap your foot, sing — experience and perform first, analyze later.
Perell’s own shift: memorizing lines he loves (found on a pub ceiling in Portland) made poetry alive; analysis followed pleasure.

Writing as observational drawing: put words down, look at reality, compare, rewrite, look again — like a painter doing a still life, “sucking reality into the writing.”
Most people get trapped in rearranging words on the page, forgetting the words are meant to represent something real; Wittgenstein’s injunction — “Don’t think, look” — captures the discipline.
The goal is a pre-verbal intimacy with the subject, looking so deeply that description becomes transcription rather than invention.

News media supplies the mental horizon: it tells us what we are “supposed to be thinking about,” anointing certain events as significant while erasing centuries of context.
The result is an industrialized, commercialized inner life — “programmatic thinking” that artists and free thinkers must resist.
A marker of intellectual autonomy: not knowing things everyone else treats as essential (a singer, a movie, a headline) — congratulate yourself; you have kept a portion of your mind your own.

Corporate speak and AI-generated perfection create a “husk” — hollow, inauthentic, and instantly recognizable; readers flee it.
Better to write badly with personality, intent, and conviction than to produce textbook-correct prose that is dead and boring.
The Orwell rule inverted: better to break every rule than to release something stale; Reddit threads full of typos often carry more truth because they are uninhibited.
Lightness in writing comes from writing the way you speak to a friend at lunch — imperfections included.

Albom learned narrative pacing from his uncles: aunts got lost in details (“Was it 1945 or 1946?”); uncles cut to the chase — “So there we were, coming over the hill, shots ringing…” — tell the slow parts fast, the fast parts slow.
His mother’s praise: “You don’t have those long pages with all the details I don’t like” — the Tom Clancy submarine-manual problem.
Demonstration: the 1992 Barcelona Olympics 100m heat — a runner tears a hamstring, his heavy-set father runs from the stands, lifts him, walks him around the track on his feet (so he stays in lane and finishes), the stadium roars — the father explains: “I taught him to run by putting his feet on mine; I remembered that, so that’s what we did.” — Albom chokes up telling it; the story earns its emotion through restraint and a perfect closing image.

Whyte memorized poetry as a child walking fields like Wordsworth, building a repertoire that became an ally in crisis — e.g., Mary Oliver’s “The Journey” recited when breaking through a life boundary.
Poetry memorization is not academic; it is survival equipment — lines surface unbidden when you need them, giving language to the unnameable.
Perell’s closing moment: officiating a friend’s wedding, he used Whyte’s poem “The True Love,” which weaves together a childhood stamp-collecting ritual, a Scottish fisherman’s morning prayer to the boat and sea, and the biblical storm on Galilee — all converging on the quiet, terrifying, ordinary moment of stepping toward the one you love: “You’ve simply had enough of drowning. And you want to live and you want to love. And you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.”