This post is a quick sketch / copy-over of some tweets where I use the phrase “people-shaped”, which I think is something I want to revisit.
A while ago (4 years ago, wow) I wrote a post after I had a conversation with a friend who was struggling with having a large writing project in mind. I told him he ought to write essays. He asked how to scope them, and I said to talk to people. Talking to people challenges you to prioritize, and to figure out what’s most compelling about your ideas.
It now occurs to me that this is a specific instance of a more general solution to problems, which is to make your problems people-shaped. This applies at all scales. Readers are people-shaped. You, as a writer, are people-shaped.
(2024nov25: it’s so funny to read the above paragraphs considering that I have been in this exact position the last year or so, and probably my problem is that I haven’t been talking to people enough. I’m going to rectify that. Simultaneously, I’m going through my blog and looking at the blogpost titles and thinking, so few of these titles look like they fit naturally inside of conversations. And I think a big part of what “people-shaped” looks like is that it fits naturally inside conversation.)
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Lots of people find people-shaped ideas more intuitive than abstract shapes. This explains both ancient mythology and children’s books.
whenever I try to put together some kind of “master resource” it almost always ends up being overwrought and tedious. when I write something like a personal recommendation doc for a friend, it almost always ends up being useful for other people and way easier to share too.
the phrase i’d use to try and explain this is “people-shaped”. People have people-shaped instincts, intuitions, preferences. Personal letters are people-shaped. Grand manifestos, typically less so.
“one of the best things about a scene of twitter friends is that people can use each other’s tweets as setups. we might write threads in replies to each other, or use someone’s tweet as a jumping off point. all of this helps make our writing people-shaped
you can do this on your own, and/or with strangers, I used to, but it’s a very weird thing to do. it gets way easier when you have the supportive context of even a couple other people who get what you’re doing
i’ve been helping dozens of people with their creative process over the past year, and if I had to summarize all of it into a single sentence, it’s something like “you and your work are not correctly positioned to receive the support it needs to flourish, lets fix that”
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one of the most useful things twitter does for me is it gives me a sense of the shapes of conversations people are having. my sensitivity to this is what lets me ‘cut through’ where other writers with better domain-expertise etc sometimes struggle. My best post that makes use of this is Most People… will update when I have more examples
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To be added: Made To Stick, evocativeness, salience
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2025sep3 via @vgr on substack notes: “The best reason to not use AI in writing is similar to the reason why lecturing with a whiteboard is better than slides. Humans absorb complex information at about the rate humans can write it on a whiteboard. But if you make good slides accounting for this factor, and modulate speech tempo, the difference vanishes and you get to use more types of info like pictures or diagrams that would take too long to draw live…”