Henrik Karlsson's Advice on Writing: The Most Underrated Writer on the Internet

Henrik Karlsson writes the Substack "Escaping Flatland." His essays move between stories about his farm in Denmark, the diaries of Delacroix, and Wittgenstein's philosophy without ever feeling forced.

He came from LessWrong and Reddit, writing intellectual posts that were, by his own admission, "brittle." His wife would easily poke holes in them. The breakthrough came when he stopped staring at the page and started staring at reality instead.

The Five-Step Method

Karlsson's process is deceptively simple and extremely slow.

Step 1: Explore. "A mistake I've often done and which never ends well for me is that I'll get really excited about an idea and then I just sit down and start typing almost right away. There's something that is unmoored. It's not grounded in me yet."

He lets ideas live inside him for months. Sometimes a year. He reads, has conversations, writes notes, returns to them weeks later, questions himself, rewrites. "It takes time to make something your own and to move past the simplistic way of thinking about things."

The exploration ends when something coalesces into what he calls an animating question. The topic becomes urgent and personal. "Maybe this will help me become a better father or husband. Something that's really alive and important to me."

Step 2: Collect. The animating question acts like a magnetic field. Notes from years of reading start organizing themselves around it.

Step 3: Order. Karlsson thinks of essays as geometrical objects. Each unit has its own "color" and "feeling." He arranges them by lying on his sofa, picturing the clusters in his head, and moving them around until they snap into place.

"I can almost feel the energy fields between them. I'll put it next to that one. No, there's no energy there. But if I change the order - wow, I felt this energy released in my body. That's the right order."

Step 4: Write the core. "There's stakes, there's emotion going into it, and I want to capture that energy. If I'm excited, there's going to be momentum in the text. If I can get myself to laugh and cry, that's going to happen for the reader too."

He sometimes dictates instead of typing. Lying on the sofa, eyes closed, talking through the essay out loud.

Step 5: Edit. The opening and ending are written last. "If I start writing an opening and I know this is going to be an opening, I get really pretentious. I get really tense. It's overworked." The opening usually reveals itself inside the draft - a throwaway line that, when moved to the top, makes everything come together.

Don't Look at the Page. Look at the Thing.

"Spend less time looking at the page and more time looking at the thing that you're describing."

Writers get trapped on the page. They fiddle with word choices, hunt for metaphors, rearrange adjectives. They forget the writing is supposed to represent something real. Karlsson compares it to still-life painting. "I'm putting something in front of me and then I'm painting and then I can look at it - is what I'm saying, does that match reality here?"

Does this sentence match what actually happened? No? Rewrite it. Look again. Rewrite again. "You're sucking reality in, and reality is much smarter than you are. It's got more nuance."

Wittgenstein: "Don't think. Look."

He does literal still-life exercises. Stand in front of a flower and describe it, then correct the description. "Oh, it's a white flower. Is it really white? No, there's actually something else going on in the middle. And how many leaves are there really?"

The Confusion Is the Point

"I'll start with a simple idea and then I'm like, wait, I don't know if that assumption is true. And now I'm a little confused. And maybe I should bring in another example. And why doesn't that example fit at all? And I get more and more confused."

A mentor told him to ride through it. "You'll start with something simple, you get more and more confused, and just trust it. Eventually it will collapse down into simplicity again, but you have to ride through it."

He connects this to military training in accelerated expertise. Trainees are put in simulations designed to prevent them from forming stable mental models - "knowledge shields" that are good enough to explain most data, causing you to ignore everything that contradicts them.

"If you want to have an accelerated learning curve, you want to avoid forming knowledge shields. The way to do that is to put yourself in situations where you get so confused that you can't form any coherent stable mental models."

Write About Obvious Things in Non-Obvious Ways

"The deep truths are somewhat obvious. You should try to be a good father. You should be kind. You should honor your commitments. If I wrote a post that said you should be kind, that wouldn't work. But it's a much more important thing to say than something clever."

The challenge is making the obvious feel alive. "Sometimes the really interesting things, you don't even know how to express. They're right at the edge of language." A story placed before an insight makes the insight land differently. An unexpected juxtaposition cracks open something the reader thought they already understood.

David Foster Wallace: "90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked." Karlsson disconnects from the internet while writing. He walks and dictates. "Even the need to be comprehensible can be a problem. Sometimes the really interesting things - I want to be able to stay with the really fragile thoughts."

Writing as Summoning a Culture

Karlsson's breakthrough post was titled: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox."

Before it went viral, he had 50 readers. Then interesting strangers from around the world started emailing him. People who had read the same books. People working on the same problems. "I'm putting these words out and they are summoning a culture, a friend group."

He stopped writing for a mass audience. He let his essays get weird and long. "But the few people who read it, they were my people. They really loved it. Then they started sending it to their friends."

"Not a big successful blog, but just have a few blog posts out there so your people can find you."

The Text Becomes Smarter Than You

"I'll sit in March, write something down, and then in June I'll go back to it. Now it's a different Henrik who has written on that piece. I'm a different person, and I don't even remember all the considerations that went into the first draft. But the text remembers them."

The text carries feedback from his wife, from friends, from books he read between drafts. "The text ends up carrying more wisdom than I have over time."

The page holds what you have forgotten. It pushes back when you try to oversimplify. It rewards you for returning.

For more on systematic approaches to prose, see Ward Farnsworth's advice on writing. And for the structural patterns that underlie great essays, read Michael Dean's 27 patterns to fix bad writing.

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