The Cultural Tutor

Personally messaging everyone who liked earlier threads drove the first 100,000 followers. After a failed tutoring business, he wrote two or three threads a day in his first weeks and, with each new one, messaged every person who had ever liked or retweeted a previous thread, and asked bigger accounts for advice. He had 1,000 followers after two weeks and 100,000 after about six weeks.

It was unglamorous grinding: he once spent three hours messaging people after a late-night thread. He wrote those early threads without second-guessing them.

How I Write▶ 36:36

One thread on minimalist design gave the account critical mass. The thread on the danger of minimalist design went out when he had about 15,000 followers and got half a million likes. It took about five minutes to write, against his usual 2 to 12 hours per thread.

He calls it the result of about 10 years of thinking. He says he would now rewrite every word of it because his opinions have changed.

How I Write▶ 24:53

He kept to one daily thread and turned down everything else. After reaching 100,000 followers, a patron funded his writing at about £25,000 a year. He turned down a paid newsletter and other offers as distractions and reached 1.5 million followers in about 15 months.

How I Write

He borrowed self-help accounts' hook craft and aimed it at serious topics. He noticed that strong history and art accounts wrote dull openings, so only people already interested read them, while tips-and-routines accounts got 50,000 to 100,000 likes purely from how they wrote the hook. He learned their headline lessons and applied them to art and history, with Harry Dry as his coach.

"They figured out how to write hooks that everyone wants to read."

How I Write▶ 1:11:45

Open with a specific claim a reader could prove false. Harry Dry's simplest copywriting rule, "make it falsifiable," replaced openings like calling a work one of the world's greatest paintings. His thread opening with the claim that Hokusai's Great Wave is not a painting but a woodblock print drove much of his early engagement.

A testable claim gives a scrolling reader a reason to stop and check whether it is true. He says he applies the rule ruthlessly.

How I Write▶ 1:12:28

Write the idea the day it strikes, because its pull fades. He notes two or three ideas a day in a Word document but almost never consults it, because weeks later he can't recall why an idea mattered. Each day he picks the idea that grips him and treats it as now or never.

When gripped he skips food and sleep and will stay up all night. "I know if I don't write this today, I'm never going to write it."

How I Write▶ 16:08

One fixed daily objective replaces any routine or productivity system. He sleeps until late afternoon, usually writes around 2:45 a.m., uses no scheduling tools and keeps no routine, but the thread gets written every day. He treats it as life or death: "It's over if I don't get it done."

He calls productivity hacks excuses that get "in between you and the paper," and uses an unremarkable laptop because gear is a distraction. The cost is real: missed dinners and meetings and strain on partner, friends and family.

How I Write▶ 5:59

Saying you have no time to write means you don't want to. He argues every action expresses a priority and there is a half hour in anyone's day, with phone time the obvious source. He has written nearly every day since age 10, even taking a notebook camping, until it became an unbreakable habit.

He frames it as needing to write rather than wanting to: "If you need to write, nothing will stop you."

How I Write▶ 6:45

Read old, time-tested books to stop thinking what everyone else thinks. He avoids reading anything from the last 50 years, since reading what the crowd reads leads you to write what the crowd writes. He suggests Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, bought for £1 in a charity shop, instead of Atomic Habits.

Boethius was effectively a bestseller for about 1,200 years, and even a bad old book shaped the world you write about. "Father time is the best recommendation there is."

How I Write▶ 47:07

Read hard, then spend hours doing nothing so ideas connect. His answer to where ideas come from is to "really really read and then spend five hours doing nothing," walking or looking at the floor. Doom scrolling blocks the brain from making connections in the background.

He separates this from meditation or yoga, which he calls practised doing nothing. He sees the writer as a conduit, and his best threads came when he just started typing.

How I Write▶ 21:46

Write about questions you personally want answered. He calls himself his own number one audience member and writes about art because he wants to understand it. He wrote a thread on why we wear ties because he was wearing one and wanted to know.

He sees writer's block as coming from writing what you think you should want to write rather than what you care about; an essay on Messi versus Ronaldo gets Googled, not written.

How I Write▶ 1:01:17

Fix one technical flaw per piece and keep judgment ahead of work. He picks one weakness, such as awkward syntax, sentence length or word choice, and works on it in the next paragraph he writes. Following Leonardo da Vinci's advice that "judgment must always exceed the work," his first thought on publishing is that it could have been much better.

Feeling pleased with finished work, he says, breeds complacency. Da Vinci's advice was collected by Francesco Melzi in the treatise On Painting.

How I Write▶ 57:47