Escaping Flatland
Henrik Karlsson's essay publication on writing, family life, learning and ideas.
Where Escaping Flatland comes up1 episode or test
Escaping Flatland went from about 50 readers in December 2021 to a following built on long, odd essays. Once he stopped simplifying for a mass audience, the few who loved the pieces shared them, and interesting strangers began emailing. Lesson: write from a real personal need, on topics lived with for years, and let a devoted niche start the flywheel.
- 1Write odd, long piecesStopped simplifying for a mass audience
- 2Few readers love themToo odd for most people
- 3Fans share themGrew from about 50 readers, Dec 2021
- 4Kindred strangers emailEmails and calls spark new ideas
From Henrik Karlsson interview
What was said about Escaping Flatland
1How Escaping Flatland found its readers
Writing weirder, longer pieces for fewer readers started a sharing flywheel. In December 2021 Escaping Flatland had about 50 readers. Once Karlsson stopped simplifying for a mass audience, his pieces became too odd for most people, but the few who loved them shared them, and growth compounded from there.
Strangers who had read the same books began emailing him. He describes honest, odd writing as pulling in the people who fit the writer and changing him in turn.
Put the whole message in a long title, since most only read that. Karlsson treats a blog post as a search query that travels across the social graph and finds people who care about the same things, so the important information goes in the title.
Quote: "long titles are underrated".
Share rough ideas so interesting readers write in, then talk on calls. He gets ideas from collisions between distant fields, such as machine learning or mathematics pulled into poetry, and from odd books off the beaten path. Publishing rough ideas brings emails from interesting readers, which he follows up with calls.
He also builds in unhurried time, like four-hour walks, so everything can collide in his subconscious.
2Starting from a personal need and living with the material
Start from a real personal need, never a topic people will like. Each piece is rooted in something where clarity would improve his life or help his family, such as how to be a better father or why he feels overwhelmed. Those stakes give the essay its drive.
His best pieces feel like going down into a cave to confront a fear.
Give an exciting idea about a year before writing it. Writing straight after getting excited produces an ungrounded draft. He reads, makes notes, revisits them months later and talks it over until the material meets an urgent question, which he feels as energy in his body.
His best pieces all came from topics he had read about and discussed for years. Quote: "I can't write about it I have to like give it a year".
Protect young ideas from critique until they have grown. Early ideas can be almost nothing, a colour or a feeling, and social reaction kills them. He keeps them in his diary and on long walks, saving critique for later.
He cites Jony Ive at Steve Jobs's funeral on young ideas being fragile, and David Lynch lowering image fragments into his subconscious.
3Shaping an essay: the question, the order, the fast draft
- 1Hold an open questionPulls stories and arguments into structure
- 2Write 50 linked notesA web in Obsidian, no start
- 3Order clusters by feelingSwap them until energy releases
- 4Draft the core fastTyped or dictated in one pass
- 5Write opening lastUsually already there mid-essay
From Henrik Karlsson interview
An open question the writer needs answered gives the essay momentum. Like a character wanting something in a novel, the writer needs an answer and won't rest until the loop closes. The question acts like a magnetic field, pulling stories and arguments from his notes into a structure.
Without an open question a text is "just one thing after another". Forcing excitement works a little, so he lets curiosity pile up instead.
Turn the web of ideas into one path across it. He writes around 50 linked notes in Obsidian without choosing a start or end, then picks a path that hits the important points, so the reader senses the whole net through one walk.
He compares the network of ideas to a spider web.
Order the clusters by the state they put the reader in. He lies on the sofa, pictures each cluster with a colour and feeling, and swaps them until he feels energy release. A story before an argument can leave the reader ready for Aristotle.
He sees an essay as a series of centers forming one wholeness. A left-field insight after the story can then turn the truth upside down, like improvised jazz.
Draft the core in one fast pass, even by talking it out. Once the order clicks he types quickly to keep the piece one whole, since separately written parts often fail to cohere. Sometimes he dictates with eyes closed, several times, until it snaps into place, then edits heavily.
For a piece about his best friend he talked with no plan, like a therapy session, felt a border around one part, and cut everything else. It became one of his two favourite pieces of the year.
Write the opening and ending last; the opening is usually already there. Knowing a paragraph is the opening makes him pretentious and tense, and he can burn three hours on one that doesn't survive. In Looking for Alice, a throwaway mid-essay line about Gertrude Stein ("No, I just like Alice") moved to the top and pulled the essay together.
He says he doesn't know if this holds for everyone, only that it works for him.
Promise less in the opening so you can explore and overdeliver. His piece on the childhoods of exceptional people promised patterns from 40 books and felt like forced labour. A piece that began with "almost all my favorite books were not meant to be published" promised only some thinking and wandered into education and cognition.
He still likes the big pieces and says the labour is sometimes worth it.
4Sucking reality into the writing
Test every claim against three or four real cases. Each piece is checked against examples from his life, friends' lives, diaries or biographies, and rewritten when a case doesn't match. Most of that material never reaches the page.
Ideas he worked out only on the page, as on Less Wrong and Reddit, stayed brittle and his wife poked holes in them. Quote: "reality is like much smarter than you are. It's got more nuance."
Interview yourself in the margins to get past habitual language. He writes questions beside his notes: what does that mean, do I believe this, give me three examples, is there a counterexample. When examples don't fit the claim, he writes about why.
His wife edits the same way, saying "let's throw that out, but that's interesting" and starting a conversation. Together they check claims against biographies and his diary.
Alternate looking and writing, like a painter with a still life. He stares at a plant, writes what he sees, and corrects it repeatedly; the white flower turns out not to be white and the leaf count is wrong.
His reminders are Wittgenstein's "don't think, look" and Delacroix's diary, which records shadows that are yellow in one place and purple in another.
Ride through the confusion until the idea compresses into something simpler. He starts simple, adds examples that break the idea, gets lost, then it collapses into a new, simpler formulation. After about 30 hours on one piece he realised his whole framing was wrong.
He compares it to his wife's cleaning, where everything comes out first. A mentor told him a messy middle meant he was halfway there. He also keeps such dead ends in the essay, since cutting them removes sincerity.
5Courage and writing without the need to be liked
Courage, not technique, is the main limit on good writing. His writing deepened after a friend's suicide when he was 15 and again during three lonely weeks in Bolivia. He quotes David Foster Wallace that 90% of a writer's effort can go to being liked, which "results in bad fiction".
To forget anyone will read it, he spends at least half his days offline and writes on paper or dictates while walking the road. He strikes lines he catches writing because they are cute.
Make obvious deep truths land by building them into an experience. He writes about truths like be kind or be a good father, which sound boring stated flat, by constructing a story or poetic sequence that carries them to the reader.
He compares this to New Testament parables. Quote: "the boring thing needs to be pierced through to your heart".
Write while the feeling is live, until you laugh or cry. If he feels something deeply and writes fast inside the feeling, it seems to reach the reader. Looking for Alice began as advice to a friend; years later he found half the advice shaky, but it works because readers feel his love for his wife.
David Perell notes you are the only reader you can observe closely. Karlsson says tricks that make people cry are the fake version.
6How Karlsson uses LLMs
Store your bad writing habits in a prompt and let an LLM flag them. LLMs produce about 1% of his words. He keeps a prompt listing overused words and habits to check, asks for ten versions of a phrase to get out of his head, and uses it for grammar as a second-language writer.
He says he has seen interesting AI images and music but no good literature yet.
One of The World's Most Under-Rated Writers — Henrik Karlsson
In December 2021 it had about 50 readers, and strangers who had read the same books began emailing. Once he stopped simplifying for a mass audience, the odd, long pieces were shared by the few who loved them, which started a flywheel.
Writing weirder, longer pieces for fewer readers started a sharing flywheel. In December 2021 Escaping Flatland had about 50 readers. Once Karlsson stopped simplifying for a mass audience, his pieces became too odd for most people, but the few who loved them shared them, and growth compounded from there.
Strangers who had read the same books began emailing him. He describes honest, odd writing as pulling in the people who fit the writer and changing him in turn.
Put the whole message in a long title, since most only read that. Karlsson treats a blog post as a search query that travels across the social graph and finds people who care about the same things, so the important information goes in the title.
Quote: "long titles are underrated".
Share rough ideas so interesting readers write in, then talk on calls. He gets ideas from collisions between distant fields, such as machine learning or mathematics pulled into poetry, and from odd books off the beaten path. Publishing rough ideas brings emails from interesting readers, which he follows up with calls.
He also builds in unhurried time, like four-hour walks, so everything can collide in his subconscious.
Start from a real personal need, never a topic people will like. Each piece is rooted in something where clarity would improve his life or help his family, such as how to be a better father or why he feels overwhelmed. Those stakes give the essay its drive.
His best pieces feel like going down into a cave to confront a fear.
Give an exciting idea about a year before writing it. Writing straight after getting excited produces an ungrounded draft. He reads, makes notes, revisits them months later and talks it over until the material meets an urgent question, which he feels as energy in his body.
His best pieces all came from topics he had read about and discussed for years. Quote: "I can't write about it I have to like give it a year".
Protect young ideas from critique until they have grown. Early ideas can be almost nothing, a colour or a feeling, and social reaction kills them. He keeps them in his diary and on long walks, saving critique for later.
He cites Jony Ive at Steve Jobs's funeral on young ideas being fragile, and David Lynch lowering image fragments into his subconscious.
An open question the writer needs answered gives the essay momentum. Like a character wanting something in a novel, the writer needs an answer and won't rest until the loop closes. The question acts like a magnetic field, pulling stories and arguments from his notes into a structure.
Without an open question a text is "just one thing after another". Forcing excitement works a little, so he lets curiosity pile up instead.
Turn the web of ideas into one path across it. He writes around 50 linked notes in Obsidian without choosing a start or end, then picks a path that hits the important points, so the reader senses the whole net through one walk.
He compares the network of ideas to a spider web.
Order the clusters by the state they put the reader in. He lies on the sofa, pictures each cluster with a colour and feeling, and swaps them until he feels energy release. A story before an argument can leave the reader ready for Aristotle.
He sees an essay as a series of centers forming one wholeness. A left-field insight after the story can then turn the truth upside down, like improvised jazz.
Draft the core in one fast pass, even by talking it out. Once the order clicks he types quickly to keep the piece one whole, since separately written parts often fail to cohere. Sometimes he dictates with eyes closed, several times, until it snaps into place, then edits heavily.
For a piece about his best friend he talked with no plan, like a therapy session, felt a border around one part, and cut everything else. It became one of his two favourite pieces of the year.
Write the opening and ending last; the opening is usually already there. Knowing a paragraph is the opening makes him pretentious and tense, and he can burn three hours on one that doesn't survive. In Looking for Alice, a throwaway mid-essay line about Gertrude Stein ("No, I just like Alice") moved to the top and pulled the essay together.
He says he doesn't know if this holds for everyone, only that it works for him.
Promise less in the opening so you can explore and overdeliver. His piece on the childhoods of exceptional people promised patterns from 40 books and felt like forced labour. A piece that began with "almost all my favorite books were not meant to be published" promised only some thinking and wandered into education and cognition.
He still likes the big pieces and says the labour is sometimes worth it.
Test every claim against three or four real cases. Each piece is checked against examples from his life, friends' lives, diaries or biographies, and rewritten when a case doesn't match. Most of that material never reaches the page.
Ideas he worked out only on the page, as on Less Wrong and Reddit, stayed brittle and his wife poked holes in them. Quote: "reality is like much smarter than you are. It's got more nuance."
Interview yourself in the margins to get past habitual language. He writes questions beside his notes: what does that mean, do I believe this, give me three examples, is there a counterexample. When examples don't fit the claim, he writes about why.
His wife edits the same way, saying "let's throw that out, but that's interesting" and starting a conversation. Together they check claims against biographies and his diary.
Alternate looking and writing, like a painter with a still life. He stares at a plant, writes what he sees, and corrects it repeatedly; the white flower turns out not to be white and the leaf count is wrong.
His reminders are Wittgenstein's "don't think, look" and Delacroix's diary, which records shadows that are yellow in one place and purple in another.
Ride through the confusion until the idea compresses into something simpler. He starts simple, adds examples that break the idea, gets lost, then it collapses into a new, simpler formulation. After about 30 hours on one piece he realised his whole framing was wrong.
He compares it to his wife's cleaning, where everything comes out first. A mentor told him a messy middle meant he was halfway there. He also keeps such dead ends in the essay, since cutting them removes sincerity.
Courage, not technique, is the main limit on good writing. His writing deepened after a friend's suicide when he was 15 and again during three lonely weeks in Bolivia. He quotes David Foster Wallace that 90% of a writer's effort can go to being liked, which "results in bad fiction".
To forget anyone will read it, he spends at least half his days offline and writes on paper or dictates while walking the road. He strikes lines he catches writing because they are cute.
Make obvious deep truths land by building them into an experience. He writes about truths like be kind or be a good father, which sound boring stated flat, by constructing a story or poetic sequence that carries them to the reader.
He compares this to New Testament parables. Quote: "the boring thing needs to be pierced through to your heart".
Write while the feeling is live, until you laugh or cry. If he feels something deeply and writes fast inside the feeling, it seems to reach the reader. Looking for Alice began as advice to a friend; years later he found half the advice shaky, but it works because readers feel his love for his wife.
David Perell notes you are the only reader you can observe closely. Karlsson says tricks that make people cry are the fake version.
Store your bad writing habits in a prompt and let an LLM flag them. LLMs produce about 1% of his words. He keeps a prompt listing overused words and habits to check, asks for ten versions of a phrase to get out of his head, and uses it for grammar as a second-language writer.
He says he has seen interesting AI images and music but no good literature yet.
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