Derek Thompson
Staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Hit Makers
Where to hear and read about Derek Thompson1 episode or test
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Hit Makers, a former professional actor who turns hard subjects into clear, musical prose. The habit most worth copying is writing every piece for the clueless self he was six hours earlier, then breaking each idea into a binary tension.
write it as if you're writing for someone as simple minded as you were 6 hours ago.
All Aspiring Journalists Should Watch This Video — Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson: the story and the lessons
1How Derek Thompson went from actor to Atlantic writer
Thompson trained as an actor before he became a writer. He wanted to act more than write and acted professionally in Washington until about 24. His last play was at Arena Stage, while he was already at The Atlantic.
He calls applause every night the best feedback loop he has known, and compares theater to Twitter with no trolls. It taught him to see his work through other people's eyes.
The Atlantic made a reluctant 22-year-old its economics writer. He cared so little about economics that he threw out the business section of the Washington Post. The stakes were low, since failure meant going back to being an intern.
He compares it to a catcher who dreams of the Yankees and is told to play second base. The job gave him his method of writing for his own earlier ignorance.
Hit Makers grew out of a move from macroeconomics to culture. After 2011 to 2012 the recovery was slow and dull, and the interesting questions moved to music and streaming. The core mystery became why people like what they like.
The book's answer is that hits braid the familiar and the new: people like new things that are sneakily familiar. He wrote it because the topic was interesting, important and novel, not to solve his own distribution.
A fair critique of Hit Makers changed how he values clarity. A critic said the book's thesis was not clear enough. It hurt at first because he had put so much time into it and was thin-skinned about it.
He now says the critique was "totally right", and that his clearer articles tend to be his most successful.
2Derek Thompson's daily writing routine
Thompson boxes his writing into 8:30 to 3:30, like John Updike. After that come the gym, board games, the dog walk and dinner with his wife. The hard edge stops him promising to catch up at night.
He calls the idea of being productive at 10 p.m. a lie he refuses to tell himself. He treats the window as a box of pressurized creativity.
He makes everything outside writing routine so novelty goes into the work. Same coffee, same breakfast, often the same lunch, and the dog walk at the same time. His theory is that his novelty-seeking then has nowhere to go but the page.
He says the routine is an aim, not an achievement, and that the novelty story may be one he tells himself.
He writes in a dark basement, lit by the screen. He writes best in near darkness with tunnel vision on the screen, sometimes with a candle. He never writes by hand, and an idea can appear at his fingertips before he knows he has it.
He calls his conditions "almost vampiric". His friend Ross Andersen of The Atlantic is the opposite, a walking writer who gets ideas in nature.
He builds each article from two sets of notes on a blank page. One set of notes holds interviews and another holds articles he has read, kept in a notes app. He then opens an empty page and merges them into the general structure of the piece.
The synthesis happens on the blank page, not inside the notes.
He expects ten thrilling aha moments for every real breakthrough. His ideas come while making coffee or walking around the house, not in the shower. He lets the bad ones go without harsh judgment.
He compares writing to baseball: you swing again and again, and sometimes one home run scores a thousand runs.
3How Thompson makes hard subjects clear and interesting
He writes every piece for his 9 a.m. self. He learned economics in a day by reading and interviewing, then wrote for the person he was six hours earlier. Plain language forces the question of whether he actually understands the subject.
He says jargon and acronyms can stand in for real understanding, and that plain writing also widens the audience.
He breaks a complicated idea into a binary tension. His brain turns a question into thesis, antithesis, synthesis. On masks, the tension was that high-quality masks work but mask mandates often don't, and that split became the spine of the article.
He reached it after talking to mask and aerosol researchers and reading much of a meta-analysis that seemed to say masks do nothing.
He carries a tricky claim with one simple metaphor. To show that masks work and mandates fail can both be true, he imagined babies refusing broccoli. Broccoli still works, but a broccoli mandate would fail in many families.
His editors' biggest critique is that he overuses metaphor.
Thompson defines interesting as novel plus important. Math is important but not novel, and tabloids are new but not important. He aims for the overlap.
The formula came when a young journalist asked him what interesting meant.
He writes like a slightly sharper friend, not a writer in a tuxedo. He once thought every sentence had to prove his intelligence. Now he wants sentences that click into the reader's own self-talk.
He says young writers wrongly treat prose as a three Michelin star showcase.
He boils complex subjects down to a bumper sticker that keeps the nuance. The hardest craft is a simple message that still holds the nuance of the full story. Complicated subjects are where simplicity is hardest to find.
He saw how much the balance mattered only after writing Hit Makers.
He treats every sentence like a scene that is a fight. Acting taught him that every good scene has opposition and small turns. He asks how a line can mean something unobvious.
He is pathologically agreeable and dislikes disrespecting people, so he states views he finds horrific as a steel man before explaining why he thinks they are wrong.
4How Thompson makes ideas memorable and musical
Thompson gives big ideas names so they travel. He coined workism, hygiene theater and the abundance agenda. People sometimes remember an idea's name better than the idea itself.
He wants his software to run on as many people's hardware as possible, and writing that does not dissolve on the tongue.
He keeps Greek rhetorical devices on a sticky note. He breaks an idea into its most elegant binary and writes it as A B B A, as in "women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights."
The aim is to be "just musical enough to disguise the music".
He adds repetition to make any idea sound like music. Rhythm, verses and choruses all repeat in songs, and listeners replay songs in their heads. Repetition is the first thing he adds.
He calls repetition the "god particle of music".
He reads a writer in bulk until their rhythm comes out of him. After Philip Roth died he read American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theater and others in a row. Roth's layering of one feeling over another then showed up in his own piece on online dating.
He says it felt like the ghost of Roth writing through him. He describes the Roth cadence as his own impression and allows that Roth fans may disagree.
He asks interview subjects what they would see if they were there. He took the habit from Robert Caro. A reader who can see the scene grasps things about the subject that the writer need not state.
He says writing loses the capture of reality but gains enhancement through symbolism.
5How Thompson handles being wrong in public
He starts with a half-formed rant, then hunts for facts. The Dark Side of Moneyball began as a feeling that baseball had gotten boring. He then found singles at an all-time low and strikeouts at record highs, and tied it to Finite and Infinite Games.
The rough piece drew an electric response. He sees writing as Darwinian: readers and experts send back evidence, and the idea either fits or dies out.
He says being wrong is useful only if readers trust your search for truth. Writers should be wrong more often, but trust sets a limit. Being wrong 99.99% of the time would destroy credibility.
He argues that seeking truth keeps a writer open, while insisting on truth closes the mind.
He listens only to critics who are rooting for him. His standing note asks readers to respond, disagree and point out his confusions. He ignores critics who only want to dunk.
He calls audience a lagging indicator of trustworthiness.
He refuses to tie his identity to a bad review or a big win. After a public error the sting fades, and by Friday Monday's feeling is a ghost. Meditation taught him that every feeling is temporary, including the pleasant ones after a good article.
He admits he may give up some happiness this way, but each article brings a new mountain to climb.
All Aspiring Journalists Should Watch This Video — Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson explains how he turns hard subjects into clear, memorable, musical prose, drawing on a theater background and a strict daily routine. The habit worth hearing is writing every piece for his clueless 9 a.m. self and then breaking each idea into a binary tension.
Thompson trained as an actor before he became a writer. He wanted to act more than write and acted professionally in Washington until about 24. His last play was at Arena Stage, while he was already at The Atlantic.
He calls applause every night the best feedback loop he has known, and compares theater to Twitter with no trolls. It taught him to see his work through other people's eyes.
The Atlantic made a reluctant 22-year-old its economics writer. He cared so little about economics that he threw out the business section of the Washington Post. The stakes were low, since failure meant going back to being an intern.
He compares it to a catcher who dreams of the Yankees and is told to play second base. The job gave him his method of writing for his own earlier ignorance.
Hit Makers grew out of a move from macroeconomics to culture. After 2011 to 2012 the recovery was slow and dull, and the interesting questions moved to music and streaming. The core mystery became why people like what they like.
The book's answer is that hits braid the familiar and the new: people like new things that are sneakily familiar. He wrote it because the topic was interesting, important and novel, not to solve his own distribution.
A fair critique of Hit Makers changed how he values clarity. A critic said the book's thesis was not clear enough. It hurt at first because he had put so much time into it and was thin-skinned about it.
He now says the critique was "totally right", and that his clearer articles tend to be his most successful.
Thompson boxes his writing into 8:30 to 3:30, like John Updike. After that come the gym, board games, the dog walk and dinner with his wife. The hard edge stops him promising to catch up at night.
He calls the idea of being productive at 10 p.m. a lie he refuses to tell himself. He treats the window as a box of pressurized creativity.
He makes everything outside writing routine so novelty goes into the work. Same coffee, same breakfast, often the same lunch, and the dog walk at the same time. His theory is that his novelty-seeking then has nowhere to go but the page.
He says the routine is an aim, not an achievement, and that the novelty story may be one he tells himself.
He writes in a dark basement, lit by the screen. He writes best in near darkness with tunnel vision on the screen, sometimes with a candle. He never writes by hand, and an idea can appear at his fingertips before he knows he has it.
He calls his conditions "almost vampiric". His friend Ross Andersen of The Atlantic is the opposite, a walking writer who gets ideas in nature.
He builds each article from two sets of notes on a blank page. One set of notes holds interviews and another holds articles he has read, kept in a notes app. He then opens an empty page and merges them into the general structure of the piece.
The synthesis happens on the blank page, not inside the notes.
He expects ten thrilling aha moments for every real breakthrough. His ideas come while making coffee or walking around the house, not in the shower. He lets the bad ones go without harsh judgment.
He compares writing to baseball: you swing again and again, and sometimes one home run scores a thousand runs.
He writes every piece for his 9 a.m. self. He learned economics in a day by reading and interviewing, then wrote for the person he was six hours earlier. Plain language forces the question of whether he actually understands the subject.
He says jargon and acronyms can stand in for real understanding, and that plain writing also widens the audience.
He breaks a complicated idea into a binary tension. His brain turns a question into thesis, antithesis, synthesis. On masks, the tension was that high-quality masks work but mask mandates often don't, and that split became the spine of the article.
He reached it after talking to mask and aerosol researchers and reading much of a meta-analysis that seemed to say masks do nothing.
He carries a tricky claim with one simple metaphor. To show that masks work and mandates fail can both be true, he imagined babies refusing broccoli. Broccoli still works, but a broccoli mandate would fail in many families.
His editors' biggest critique is that he overuses metaphor.
Thompson defines interesting as novel plus important. Math is important but not novel, and tabloids are new but not important. He aims for the overlap.
The formula came when a young journalist asked him what interesting meant.
He writes like a slightly sharper friend, not a writer in a tuxedo. He once thought every sentence had to prove his intelligence. Now he wants sentences that click into the reader's own self-talk.
He says young writers wrongly treat prose as a three Michelin star showcase.
He boils complex subjects down to a bumper sticker that keeps the nuance. The hardest craft is a simple message that still holds the nuance of the full story. Complicated subjects are where simplicity is hardest to find.
He saw how much the balance mattered only after writing Hit Makers.
He treats every sentence like a scene that is a fight. Acting taught him that every good scene has opposition and small turns. He asks how a line can mean something unobvious.
He is pathologically agreeable and dislikes disrespecting people, so he states views he finds horrific as a steel man before explaining why he thinks they are wrong.
Thompson gives big ideas names so they travel. He coined workism, hygiene theater and the abundance agenda. People sometimes remember an idea's name better than the idea itself.
He wants his software to run on as many people's hardware as possible, and writing that does not dissolve on the tongue.
He keeps Greek rhetorical devices on a sticky note. He breaks an idea into its most elegant binary and writes it as A B B A, as in "women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights."
The aim is to be "just musical enough to disguise the music".
He adds repetition to make any idea sound like music. Rhythm, verses and choruses all repeat in songs, and listeners replay songs in their heads. Repetition is the first thing he adds.
He calls repetition the "god particle of music".
He reads a writer in bulk until their rhythm comes out of him. After Philip Roth died he read American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theater and others in a row. Roth's layering of one feeling over another then showed up in his own piece on online dating.
He says it felt like the ghost of Roth writing through him. He describes the Roth cadence as his own impression and allows that Roth fans may disagree.
He asks interview subjects what they would see if they were there. He took the habit from Robert Caro. A reader who can see the scene grasps things about the subject that the writer need not state.
He says writing loses the capture of reality but gains enhancement through symbolism.
He starts with a half-formed rant, then hunts for facts. The Dark Side of Moneyball began as a feeling that baseball had gotten boring. He then found singles at an all-time low and strikeouts at record highs, and tied it to Finite and Infinite Games.
The rough piece drew an electric response. He sees writing as Darwinian: readers and experts send back evidence, and the idea either fits or dies out.
He says being wrong is useful only if readers trust your search for truth. Writers should be wrong more often, but trust sets a limit. Being wrong 99.99% of the time would destroy credibility.
He argues that seeking truth keeps a writer open, while insisting on truth closes the mind.
He listens only to critics who are rooting for him. His standing note asks readers to respond, disagree and point out his confusions. He ignores critics who only want to dunk.
He calls audience a lagging indicator of trustworthiness.
He refuses to tie his identity to a bad review or a big win. After a public error the sting fades, and by Friday Monday's feeling is a ghost. Meditation taught him that every feeling is temporary, including the pleasant ones after a good article.
He admits he may give up some happiness this way, but each article brings a new mountain to climb.