David Perell's Top 10 Writing Lessons from 2025

David Perell spent 2025 interviewing more than forty writers on his How I Write podcast. Novelists. Poets. Journalists. Essayists. Screenwriters. At the end of the year, he sat down and asked himself: what stayed? What moments from these conversations changed how I write?

He shared the answers in a solo episode. These are not the flashiest moments or the most viral clips. They are the ones Perell revisits when he needs to be reminded why writing matters.

Here are the ten lessons, organized by what they teach about the writer's craft and character.

1. Wonder Is a Survival Skill

Robert Macfarlane told Perell that wonder is not a feeling. It is a survival skill. "Wonder is jaw-dropped." The rainbow you see is unique to your exact position on earth. The physics guarantees it. No one else has ever seen or will ever see the exact rainbow you are seeing.

Most writers lose wonder as they gain expertise. They have seen enough sunsets and read enough books that the world stops surprising them. Macfarlane says you have to fight that. Actively protect the capacity to be astonished by ordinary things. The writer who has lost wonder produces competent prose with no charge. The writer who maintains it produces sentences that make readers stop and look up from the page.

This is the foundational lesson because it underlies everything else. Without wonder, there is no motivation to look closely. Without looking closely, there is nothing original to say.

2. The Memories That Stick Reveal Who You Are

Jayne Anne Phillips pointed out something that Perell had never considered: the memories you cannot forget, the ones that persist from childhood without any effort to maintain them, are the key to your identity as a writer.

"It's strange what we don't forget."

These involuntary memories are not random. They are signals. They tell you what matters to you at a level deeper than conscious choice. The smell of your grandmother's kitchen. The way light fell through a particular window. A sentence someone said to you when you were eight. These memories chose you, not the other way around. And they contain the material that only you can write about.

The practical application: instead of searching for topics, examine the memories that already haunt you. They are waiting to be written. They have been waiting for years.

3. Evolve from Self-Conscious to Self-Aware

Paul Harding spent fifteen years on a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize after dozens of rejections. His central distinction: "You want to evolve from being self-conscious about your writing to being self-aware."

Self-conscious writers worry about perception. They ask: how does this look? Self-aware writers ask: what am I doing, and is it working? The first question produces anxiety. The second produces craft.

Harding's standard is demanding: maximum density, maximum readability. Every sentence packed with meaning but easy to read. This sounds paradoxical. It is. Meeting the standard requires you to believe that your reader deserves the best work you are capable of. Not the best work that is convenient. The best work, period.

He draws his ambition from the writers he admires. Melville aimed to write something as good as Hamlet. Shakespeare aimed for the Joseph story in Genesis. The ambition was not ego. It was respect for the form. If the greatest writers aimed this high, what excuse do you have for aiming low?

4. Know Your Heroes Deeply

Dana Gioia told Perell that mediocre writers have a shallow relationship with the tradition. They have read the famous books. They know the famous quotes. But they have not gone deep enough to understand how those books were built or why those quotes work.

Deep knowledge of your literary heroes prevents the most common failure in writing: unconscious imitation of surface features. A writer who has only read Hemingway's short stories might imitate his short sentences without understanding the emotional compression that makes them work. A writer who has studied Hemingway deeply understands the principle behind the style and can apply it with their own voice.

Gioia's own range includes Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and American popular song. The breadth is not showing off. It is the raw material for a distinctive voice. The wider your sources of influence, the less likely your writing sounds like any single one of them.

5. Look at Reality, Not Your Mental Models

Henrik Karlsson's advice is the hardest to follow: "Don't think, look."

The instinct is to observe the world through pre-existing categories. You see a neighborhood and label it gentrifying. You meet a person and label them extroverted. You experience a feeling and label it anxiety. Each label is a shortcut that replaces direct observation with a mental model.

Karlsson says to write from observation, not from models. Compare your words against what you actually see, hear, and feel. Adjust until the description is accurate, not just plausible. Plausible descriptions come from models. Accurate descriptions come from looking.

This discipline is what separates writing that feels generic from writing that feels true. Generic writing describes the world as the reader already imagines it. True writing shows the reader something they recognize but had never put into words.

6. Your Thinking Has Been Industrialized

Alain de Botton warned Perell that most writers do not realize how little of their thinking is their own. "Our inner lives have been industrialized."

The news tells you what to care about. Social media tells you what to be outraged by. Education tells you which frameworks to apply. By the time you sit down to write, the majority of your opinions were assembled by institutions whose interests do not align with yours.

De Botton does not advocate conspiracy thinking. He advocates awareness. Know where your thoughts came from. Ask whether they are genuinely yours or inherited. The writer who does this work produces essays that surprise because they are not simply recirculating the same ideas everyone else absorbed from the same sources.

This is especially relevant in the AI era. AI models are trained on the internet's consensus. If your thinking already matches that consensus, AI can write your essay. If you have done the work of questioning the pre-packaged thoughts, AI cannot replicate what you produce.

7. Alive Beats Perfect

Lulu Cheng Meservey works in corporate communications. She has seen more polished, lifeless writing than anyone should have to endure. Her conclusion: "Better to break all the rules than release something dead and boring."

Perell says this lesson hit him hard because he is a writing teacher. He teaches rules. He teaches frameworks. Meservey reminded him that rules serve the writing, not the other way around. A sentence with a broken rule and genuine personality beats a sentence with perfect grammar and no soul.

This is not an argument for sloppiness. It is an argument for priorities. When polish and personality conflict, personality wins. When correctness and conviction conflict, conviction wins. The reader will forgive a comma splice. The reader will not forgive boredom.

8. Emotional Truth Over Exhaustive Detail

Mitch Albom's storytelling principle: tell slow parts fast and fast parts slow.

A car crash takes two seconds. Describe it in two hundred words. A decade of routine takes ten years. Describe it in one sentence. The allocation of words should match the emotional weight of the moment, not its duration on the clock.

Albom learned this from family storytellers, not from journalism school. The grandmother who held you captive at the dinner table did not give every year equal time. She lingered on the moments that mattered and skipped the years that did not. She was right.

Most writers make the opposite mistake. They give proportional time to proportional duration. This produces writing that is thorough and boring. Albom's principle produces writing that is emotionally accurate, which is the only accuracy readers care about.

9. Experience Poetry Before Analyzing It

Dana Gioia returns with a second lesson. Poetry has been ruined by over-analysis. Classrooms teach students to dissect poems before they have experienced them. The result: a generation that can explain what a poem means but has never felt what a poem does.

Gioia's prescription: memorize first. Recite. Perform. Let the poem live in your body and your voice. Only then analyze it. The sequence matters because analysis without experience produces commentary. Experience without analysis produces intuition. The writer needs both, and the order determines which one leads.

For prose writers, the implication is the same. Read a great essay aloud before you study its structure. Feel the rhythm before you diagram the argument. The embodied experience of great writing teaches you things that intellectual analysis cannot reach.

10. Memorized Poetry as an Ally

David Whyte closes the list with the most personal lesson. He memorizes poems and carries them as companions. Not for literary performance. For life.

A memorized poem shows up when you need it. In a hospital corridor. At a funeral. Watching your child walk away. The poem does not solve the moment. It accompanies you through it. Whyte calls poetry "a secret code to life."

For Perell, this lesson expanded what writing is for. Not just communication. Not just thinking. Writing as a portable form of wisdom that lives inside you and speaks when you need it most.

The Meta-Lesson

Perell's year of conversations with writers produced one overarching insight that runs beneath all ten lessons: writing is not about words. It is about attention, courage, honesty, and the way we make sense of being alive.

Wonder. Memory. Ambition. Observation. Independence of thought. Personality. Emotional accuracy. Embodied experience. The ten lessons circle these qualities because they are what separates writing that matters from writing that merely exists.

AI can generate words. It cannot pay attention with wonder. It cannot examine its involuntary memories. It cannot question whether its thinking has been industrialized. These are human capacities, and they are the subject of every lesson on this list.

For more on David Perell's own writing philosophy, including the Shiny Dime, CRIBS framework, and Personal Monopoly, read our full breakdown of his approach.

This post draws from Perell's solo episode My Top 10 Writing Lessons from 2025. Athens is an AI writing editor that helps you develop the attention and honesty these lessons demand - by showing you exactly where AI changes your words, so you can keep the ones that are yours.