Alain de Botton's Advice on Writing: Writing Is Revenge

Alain de Botton wrote Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Architecture of Happiness, and The Course of Love. He founded The School of Life (nearly 10 million YouTube subscribers). His books mix philosophy, psychology, and autobiography in forms that resist classification.

His writing advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, Advice to Writers, a Medium breakdown of his three-step method, and various interviews.

Writing Is Processing Pain

"Some people drink their pain away. Some people talk their pain away. Some people exercise their pain away. Some people achieve their pain away. And some people want to write it away."

De Botton began writing as a teenager trying to master emotions that felt bigger than him. "I felt a basic sense of relief which has not changed to this day at turning an emotion into an idea, at putting words to feelings. And they just lessen."

Two things interest him: pain and pleasure. Writing is "controlling pain in order to lessen it, controlling beauty in order to keep a hold on something that is fugitive."

His first book, Essays in Love, was an attempt to understand sensations around romantic love that had been "very painful and mysterious." Readers wrote to him saying, "How did you know that about me?" His answer: "I have no idea about you, but I'm just keeping a track of me."

Faithful self-observation turns out to be universal. "All of us are this incredible library of sensations, this incredible data source."

The Archaeology of Fragments

De Botton compares writing to archaeology. "In archaeology, you come across a little broken bit of a pot. And you know that there are other bits of the pot. They're going to be somewhere in the area and you have to dig through the dirt to assemble them."

"A book is an arbitrary construction dictated by the book industry. It's a certain number of words, it's glued together, blah blah blah. No one thinks in terms of books. We think in sentences, images, fragments."

He is working on a book that began with a single image: a man emerging from a dental hygienist in Wimpole Street in London, in some despair and inner turmoil. That is all he has. But the image acts as "a powerful magnet that draws in filaments from elsewhere."

His 17th century hero La Rochefoucauld worked the same way. The Maxims is roughly 200 fragments. "To say one never flirts is itself a form of flirtation." "There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing." These are "psychological glimpses of a truth." Two lines long.

De Botton still considers the short, honest observation to be the fundamental unit of his work. Books are collections of them, assembled over time.

Suffering and the Origins of Good Writing

De Botton references Proust: if you could give someone a choice between meeting Plato for an evening or going out with someone who will make them suffer, "the person should spend the evening with the woman who will make him suffer."

Breakup albums prove it. Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Phil Collins' Face Value. Great music emerging from being torn apart.

"The good writing is partly on the side of madness, death, dislocation, chaos and just otherness." When things go well, you unite with the world. But when you are desperate, you read life against the grain. You find truths that lie outside "the normal satisfied smug perfume."

"The work of art is like the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress. It is an alternative to, in a broad sense, losing your mind."

Neil Gaiman insists you write what you actually think and feel. De Botton goes further: write what hurts. The pain is the material.

Be More Honest

De Botton defines writer's block as "a conflict between the shame and the desire for honesty." What you are supposed to feel diverges from what you are actually feeling. The feeling goes numb.

"If there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were going to be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say, and how would you write? That's the thing you should write."

He thought he wanted to be a novelist. Tried to write novels based on 19th century conventions. Then thought, "Screw it to all those rules," and produced Essays in Love, which was "much weirder, more original, and some people like it."

Now he wakes up every morning and writes whatever he most wants to write that day. Around 800 words. He does not think about books. He thinks about pieces of prose. "And I don't care what it's about. And I just want it to feel like the thing that I most want to write that day."

He currently has 22 books on the go. He drops pieces into whichever bucket fits.

The Three-Step Sentence Test

His method for each sentence: Is it simple? Is it precise? Is it interesting? If it passes all three, move on. If not, rework it.

His accessibility test: could his mother, who never went to university, understand it?

"What makes people very boring as conversational partners is they've stopped wondering how their words might sound to somebody else." Start with what you want to say, then find a bridge to the reader.

Writing as Living

The majority of a writer's work happens away from the keyboard. Thinking in the shower. Walking in the park. Lying awake at 4:00 a.m.

"The really good work could be happening on a Sunday night at 4:00 a.m. Real work is feeling, thinking. And it may not happen in the standard places."

"Sometimes you'll read somebody's writing and think, wow, I really want to write like that. And then you realize that actually you can't just write like that. In order to write like that, you have to think like that. In order to think like that, you have to live like that."

You cannot separate the quality of your writing from the quality of your inner life.

Paintings and the Visual Mind

De Botton draws heavily from visual art. Cy Twombly's chalk images: "a portrait of what thinking looks like." Rothko: "what melancholy looks like, what dejection looks like, what humiliation looks like."

His synesthetic connection: if your chair turned into a person, what kind of person would it be? Objects communicate values. Architecture communicates ways of living. Stendhal said beauty is the promise of happiness. When something is beautiful, it promises not just an aesthetic experience but a way of life.

Neil Gaiman tells writers to read outside their genre. De Botton extends the principle beyond reading to seeing.

Key Takeaways

• Writing processes pain. Put words to what hurts and it lessens.
• Think in fragments, not books. An image, a sentence, an aphorism. The book assembles itself later.
• Suffering catalyzes insight. The best writing comes from dislocation and desperation.
• Writer's block is a honesty problem. The cure is to stop performing and say what you actually feel.
• Test each sentence for simplicity, precision, and interest.
• The inner reader matters. Bridge your personal truth to something the reader can absorb.
• Living is writing. Your prose can only be as deep as your inner life.
• Engage with visual art. Paintings, architecture, and design expand a writer's vocabulary for emotion.

Writing begins with self-knowledge. The raw material is your own pain, your own pleasure, your own confusion. Athens exists for the phase after honesty: the phase where you compress and refine.

Sources: de Botton's How I Write episode, Advice to Writers, the Medium three-step method, and Kalampedia. Athens is an AI writing editor.