Tom Junod's Advice on Writing: Say the Unsayable

Tom Junod is the kind of writer other writers study. His 2003 Esquire piece "The Falling Man" - about the unidentified man photographed mid-fall from the North Tower on September 11 - is one of the most celebrated works of American magazine journalism. His profile of Fred Rogers, "Can You Say...Hero?," became the basis for the Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. He won two National Magazine Awards for feature writing, a feat almost nobody pulls off.

In a long conversation on David Perell's How I Write podcast, Junod laid out the principles behind his process. What stands out is how physical and emotional his approach is. This is not a tidy method. It is messy, obsessive, and rooted in the belief that writing is an act of discovery, not transcription.

Here are the nine principles worth stealing.

1. The Tonic Chord Principle

In music, the tonic chord is the point of resolution. Everything pulls toward it. Junod applies the same idea to writing: always search for the resolution of discordant elements.

The world hands you contradictions, competing facts, ideas that refuse to sit comfortably together. Your job is not to ignore those tensions. Your job is to organize them into coherence. Writing improves thinking precisely because it forces you to reconcile what does not initially reconcile.

This is the opposite of the hot take. A hot take picks one side and amplifies it. The tonic chord principle says: hold all the notes at once, then find the chord that contains them. The resolution does not have to be neat. It has to be honest.

2. Say the Unsayable

Junod's bluntest piece of advice: "Be brutally honest. Write the thing you're not supposed to say."

If someone tells you a subject is off-limits, that is a signal, not a stop sign. The most important writing lives in territory that makes people uncomfortable. Not because discomfort is valuable for its own sake, but because the things we avoid saying are usually the things that most need to be examined.

"The Falling Man" is the defining example. In 2003, the photographs of people falling from the World Trade Center were effectively forbidden. Newspapers that ran them on September 12, 2001 received furious letters. The images were pulled from archives. The subject was treated as something too painful, too disrespectful, too raw to confront.

Junod confronted it anyway. He tells the story of seeing the photo for the first time on September 12, 2001, in a drugstore on Shelter Island. He opened the New York Times and on page seven was a man falling from the North Tower. "He seems almost in repose," Junod says. The contradiction between the man's apparent calm and the fact that he was hurtling to his death at 150 miles per hour captured Junod immediately. He knew within seconds that he would write that story. He waited two years for someone else to do it first. Nobody did. The result was not exploitative. It was one of the most humane pieces of journalism written about September 11 - precisely because it refused to look away from what everyone else was avoiding.

If you notice yourself flinching away from a sentence, that sentence probably matters. Write it. You can always cut it later. But you cannot edit what you did not have the nerve to put on the page.

3. The Opening Sentence as Guide

"He leaves this earth like an arrow." That is the first sentence of "The Falling Man." Junod says it set the trajectory for the entire piece. Not just the tone. The structure.

His principle: the first sentence enables you to write the story. The last sentence enables you to stop. Everything between is the working out of a promise made in that opening line.

This is not the same as writing a hook. A hook grabs attention. An opening sentence establishes direction. Consider the first magazine story Junod ever wrote. It was the weekend before his wedding, he was profiling a local newspaper columnist for Atlanta magazine, and he sat at the table and typed: "Okay, I admit it. I wanted to skewer him." That sentence set a confrontational, confessional tone that carried the entire piece. The editor called him in after his honeymoon and said, "How did you learn to do this? You could be Tom Wolfe." Junod did not know who Tom Wolfe was. But he knew the opening sentence had made the rest possible.

For practical techniques on crafting strong openings and other sentence-level skills, see our collection of 30 writing tips that actually work.

4. The Hair-on-Your-Arms Test

Junod describes a physical test for good writing. When a sentence is working, really working, you feel it in your body. The hair on your arms stands up. You get a shiver. Your chest tightens.

That bodily response indicates genuine discovery. You have written something you did not know you knew. You have found language for something that previously existed only as a vague feeling.

This sounds mystical, but it is practical. If your body is not responding to what you wrote, your reader's body will not respond either. The test also tells you what to keep during revision. Protect the sentences that made the hair stand up. Cut everything else.

5. Hunt Contradictions

The best stories contain ambivalence. They hold opposing truths without collapsing into one side. Junod actively hunts for this quality in his subjects.

He looks for what does not add up. What is "off." The gap between what someone says and what they do. The moment where a neat narrative breaks down. These unreconciled tensions are where the real story lives.

Fred Rogers is the perfect example. Junod was assigned the story as a joke - the "bad boy" sent to profile the good guy. He walked around the block from Esquire's office on 55th Street to Rogers's apartment on 56th. Rogers answered the door in a bathrobe. That gesture - total openness to a writer known for skewering his subjects - disarmed Junod completely. "I was desperate to be trusted," he says. "I didn't even know it." The resulting piece is devastating precisely because it takes Rogers's goodness seriously without ever turning away from the strangeness of that goodness. It ends with the two of them praying together. Junod says that encounter opened a spiritual dimension in his writing he had never accessed before.

For your own writing: if you find yourself oversimplifying, stop. Ask what does not fit your thesis. The answer is usually where the real insight is hiding.

6. Embrace Rewriting Maniacally

Junod describes his revision process as borderline obsessive. He does not polish drafts. He explodes them. He tears pieces apart and rebuilds from the wreckage.

Earlier in his career, he was a perfectionist about first drafts. He would try to get every sentence right on the first pass, which meant writing slowly and painfully. Over time, he shifted to a different model: write fast, then rewrite maniacally. Get the raw material on the page, then sculpt.

This is not editing in the normal sense. Editing implies small corrections: fix a word here, tighten a phrase there. Junod's rewriting is structural. He moves entire sections. He cuts paragraphs he spent hours on. He rewrites openings five, ten, fifteen times.

The practical takeaway: stop trying to write perfectly on the first pass. Give yourself permission to produce rough material, then commit to the revision process. This is where AI works best as an editor rather than a writer. The raw material has to come from you. The revision process is where outside eyes - human or AI - can show you what you cannot see yourself.

7. Practical Tricks When Stuck

Junod is refreshingly honest about getting stuck. He does not pretend that inspiration arrives on schedule. He has a toolkit for pushing past resistance.

• Write "This is a story about..." repeatedly. Fill in the blank differently each time. Do it twenty times. By the fifteenth attempt, you are past the obvious answers and into the territory where the real story lives.
• Write in second person, then convert. Addressing "you" creates an urgency and directness that first or third person sometimes lacks. Write the passage as if talking to someone, then convert the pronouns later.
• Write in ALL CAPS. It sounds absurd. But changing the visual texture of your writing on screen can unstick something in your brain. The shouting quality of all caps pushes you toward bolder, less cautious sentences.
• Curse profusely, then edit. Let yourself be vulgar, angry, raw. Say the thing in the most unfiltered way possible. Then clean it up. The cleaned-up version will retain an energy that a cautious first draft never has.

The common thread: all these tricks work by lowering the stakes. They give you permission to write badly, which is the only reliable path to writing well.

8. The Emotional Cycle

Junod describes the emotional arc of writing a piece in four phases: "I'm shit, I'm a genius, I'm shit, I survived."

Phase one is the blank page and the certainty that you have nothing to say. Phase two is the breakthrough, the moment where something clicks and you feel invincible. Phase three is the realization that the breakthrough was not as clean as you thought, that the piece still has enormous problems, that you might not be able to fix them. Phase four is finishing. Not triumph. Survival.

The value of knowing this cycle is that it normalizes the suffering. Every writer goes through it. Junod, with decades of acclaimed work behind him, still goes through it. If you are in phase one or phase three, you are not failing. You are on schedule.

The cycle also explains why so many people quit. They hit phase three - the second "I'm shit" - and assume the piece is broken beyond repair. It is not. It is just in the valley. Push through.

9. Writing Assumes a Soul

Junod's argument about AI is simple: writing assumes the existence of a soul. AI writing assumes no soul exists. He makes this vivid with a story about his writing shed on Shelter Island. He organized his bookshelves chronologically - from the Epic of Gilgamesh through the Bible through modernism to the present. The arrangement tells its own story: humanity messing up again and again, and yet for every catastrophe there is a writer bearing witness. "That's the soul," Junod says. "The part of us that needs to bear witness to the truth." Why would we ever give that up?

You do not have to share this philosophical position to find something useful in it. The practical point is that the value of writing comes from the struggle. The hair-on-your-arms moment. The willingness to say the unsayable. These emerge from a human being wrestling with language, not from a machine processing tokens.

A Family of Secrets

Junod traces his obsession with truth-telling to his childhood. His father was a strikingly handsome man - "like A1 steak sauce" was how Junod described his tan, with green eyes "like traffic lights." The family looked beautiful from the outside. Marble steps. A picture-perfect house. But something was off.

When Junod was five or six, his father took him for a hot fudge sundae. On the way, they stopped at a woman's house. Junod was asked to wait outside. The door was locked. He tried to get back in to retrieve his comic book. He could not. His father came out with the woman. They both fussed over the boy. He knew, with the certainty of a child who cannot name what he knows, that he could never tell his mother. They went for the sundae. The day ended as it was supposed to. But something had happened that was not supposed to.

"I never talked about it until I wrote my book," Junod says. Growing up in a family of secrets taught him that the unsayable is where the real story always lives. Every profile he has written since contains a secret, something that is not supposed to be said, that he tries to say.

Write in Paragraphs, Not Sentences

Junod thinks in paragraphs, not sentences. He credits Faulkner for this. A sentence is a unit of information. A paragraph is a unit of thought. The distinction matters because it changes how you build momentum.

Perell told Junod that he writes paragraphs the way musicians make albums, not singles. The power is in the sequence. When you write sentence by sentence, each line stands alone. When you write in paragraphs, the sentences flow into each other. They accumulate force. You cannot pull a single sentence out because the power comes from the whole.

Build Trust, Do Not Scorch Earth

Early in his career, Junod wrote from an adversarial stance. He would get access to a subject, find the contradiction or the flaw, and expose it. The pieces were powerful but the approach was unsustainable.

Over time, he evolved toward an honesty-based model. He builds trust with subjects not by promising a flattering portrait, but by promising an honest one. The Fred Rogers profile could not have been written by a writer who scorches earth. It required trust, patience, and a willingness to be changed by the encounter.

Applying Junod's Principles

These nine principles do not form a tidy system. They are more like a set of permissions. Permission to be honest. Permission to write badly. Permission to rewrite obsessively. Permission to feel terrible in the middle of the process.

If you take one thing from Junod's approach, make it this: write the thing you are afraid to write. Not for shock value. Not for controversy. Because the unsayable is almost always the most true, and the most true is almost always the most interesting.

Then rewrite it fifteen times.

For more on the craft of revision, see our summary of Several Short Sentences About Writing, our collection of 30 writing tips that actually work, and our argument for why AI is better as an editor than a writer.