The What and the How
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Anything you write or speak consists of a logical progression of points that add up to a theme. In an outline, you identify what points to make. But to execute on an outline, you have to decide how to make them.
For example, here’s a piece from Alex Epstein titled “How Fossil Fuels Cleaned Up Our Environment.” What I love about this piece is how Alex goes about making this counter-intuitive point. He uses the gimmick of a time traveler who visits us from the 18th century and marvels at how much better the air, water, climate safety, and disease protection area.
Here’s another examples, this time from my response to Marc Andreessen’s article, “It’s Time to Build.”
I could have just started by saying something like, “Hey, Marc just published an essay. Here’s what he said. Now let me share my thoughts.”
But, first, that would’ve been boring. And second, I knew I wanted to indicate a moral perspective on how we treat builders right from the start. So my first outline point was something like: “There is a widespread animus toward builders.”
That’s the “what.” Here’s the “how”:
When I was 17, I saw the South Park movie in theaters. In one scene, Bill Gates — at that time, still the head of Microsoft — gets his head blown off by some military general. The theater erupted in applause. Hundreds of people cheered like a medieval crowd witnessing a beheading. It was chilling.
Fast forward twenty years. We get a leading Democratic presidential candidate demanding we “break up Big Tech.”
Thankfully, Republicans stepped up and…oh, wait, no…they mostly agreed. “Google is bigger now than Standard Oil was when it was broken up,” Senator Ted Cruz fumed.
President Obama famously said, “You didn’t build that.” But the real motto of 21st Century America is: you’d better not build that…and if you do, you’re gonna pay.
Good writing requires a rigorous, clarifying “what.” But great writing is distinguished by a compelling, memorable “how.”
So here’s two mistakes you should avoid and one tip on how to improve your “how.”
Mistake 1: Sacrificing the “what” to the “how”
I have a bad history of falling in love with a “how” and trying to bludgeon it into a “what.” Or, to put that in a more straightforward way, I’ll often try to to build the logic of a piece around an example or story or analogy I really like.
But that’s a disaster. If you don’t say something true and clarifying, it doesn’t matter how clever your “how” is. The “what” always comes first. Always.
Mistake 2: Ignoring the “how”
The result is so-called academic writing where you just get a cascade of dry sentences intended to support your point. The problem is, no one will read it!
And often I find that writers who ignore the “how” often do it because they aren’t helping the reader clarify their view of the world—the writer is regurgitating ideas they learned from someone else, and if they get too fancy with the “how,” they worry they’ll mess up the recipe, which they don’t first-handedly understand.
Pro-tip: Think about the “how” before you draft
Unless you’re the kind of writer who can just bat out compelling prose, I highly recommend adding a stage between outlining and writing where you go through your points a deliberately think about how to make each point in a surprising, remarkable, memorable way.
What qualifies as a compelling “how”? Here is a non-exhaustive list:
Surprising facts
Stories
Analogies
Visuals
Humor
Anything that provokes curiosity
Now…go forth and write!
