Full Guide: How To Start Writing Long Form (Essays, Articles, Newsletters, etc)

For those who don’t care about short form and have deep ideas they want to articulate online

Long-form writing is so back.

At least for now. My articles are doing mindblowingly well on X.

People are saying it’s “just a trend,” but a friend of a friend is in charge of this stuff at X, and articles seem to be keeping people on the platform longer, which is what the social media companies want.

And, long-form content in general is just… better. Very few people can abuse it. It builds trust more. You can’t just tell ChatGPT to generate 1000 articles and expect there to be enough attention to go around like there is with short-form. If you want to stand out, it requires you to think. I will continue to stay bullish on Substack, X articles, YouTube, and podcasts - because the value in them lies in perspective. It lies in the craft of writing and articulating ideas in a way nobody else could. I’m tempted to just drop short form entirely, but I’m unsure if I’ll do that. I want to, though.

With that said, I think it’s timely to just give out my entire process.

I can’t promise anything with this, but if you’re looking to start talking about your interests on the internet, this is a great place to start.

I don’t want this to be a “how to go viral” guide. I want this to simply act as a foundation anyone can start with to begin writing long-form content in an impactful way.

To start, we are not going to focus on the actual nuances of writing and wordcrafting. I think that is best left for your own experimentation and allowing your taste to develop over time.

With that, it sucks to stare at a blank screen and not know what to say. If that’s the case for you, I want you to think of writing as thinking.

How do you “think?”

You question.

We’ll start with this short writing process, then we’ll go deeper and deeper:

• Choose any idea – from a book, video, thought in your head, or anything else you read or see.
• Ask at least 3 questions (what, how, why) – question the idea until you reach an impactful perspective.
• Write without judgment – write out the idea without worrying about formatting.
• Become the reader – act as if you are scrolling for entertainment and read your post.
• Question and object – poke holes in your writing from the readers perspective to expand on points.
• Format for engagement – capture attention, make it readable, edit for impact.

So, you run through that process for the newsletter as a whole, and you run through it when you are writing each section or key point. When you experience writer’s block, run through that process.

A newsletter, or any form of long-form content (this works for youtube scripts, podcast outlines, and articles as well), is one main idea as the topic composed of multiple sub-ideas as the key points in the form of a narrative.

The quality of the entire piece and the quality of the writing itself are downstream of what ideas compose the piece and how novel/impactful they are. If you don’t start with incredible ideas in an outline or braindump, the piece may not be that good.

This is how I think of writing newsletters.

I choose one idea as the main topic.

I choose 3+ ideas as the key points.

Those ideas tend to follow a Problem → Insight → Solution framework as the overall structure of the newsletter (I choose ideas that would fit for each of those).

Then, I discover or research more ideas that I can plug into each section.

So:

• 1 Topic Idea (title or headline)
• 3+ Key Point Ideas (section headlines)
• 3-5 Filler Ideas Per Key Point (body text)

String them together as a story (problem → solution) and you have a great newsletter, article, podcast script, YouTube script, book chapter, etc.

That’s all that content is. Playing legos with great ideas and weaving them together into something compelling.

When writing a newsletter, the reason you get stuck staring at a blank page is because you don’t have an idea that fits into the puzzle you are putting together.

At that point, staring at the screen longer isn’t going to help you. Reading a book, reading an article, listening to a podcast, conversing with AI, contemplating on a walk, or any other method you can experiment with to surface ideas.

In other words, writing a great long-form piece usually doesn’t happen by sitting at your desk for a few hours. It’s more of a lifestyle. A creative lifestyle with high ideaflow.

Let’s make this more practical.

Generating A List Of Topics

How do you know what idea to choose for the topic of the newsletter?

The process is the exact same as writing short-form content.

You are simply being more selective with what idea you want to dive deeper into.

You can get ideas from:

• Your content map (article on how to create that)
• Your best performing content (meaning the idea is validated and will probably do well as a newsletter)
• Researching top posts from your favorite accounts (again, these are validated, but you’re creating your own perspective on that topic rather than plagiarising, obviously)
• Reading old books, curated blogs, or other “idea-dense” content

We want to strike a balance between performance and excitement (what other people want VS what you want to write about). If you aren’t excited, that won’t show in your writing. If it doesn’t perform… well, you don’t grow or have the potential to grow.

I personally like doing a large brain dump of potential newsletter ideas. I have 5-10 that I can choose from to outline at the start of any week.

However, this is not set in stone. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m writing about this week until I sit down and start researching my past content, notes, ideas that have been on my mind, or decide to rewrite an older newsletter that I have more to say about.

From personal experience, it helps if the topic rates high on the scales of reach, relevance, and resonance.

Is the topic so niche that it won’t be able to reach a new audience?

Is the topic relevant to people’s personal lives or something happening in the world?

Is the topic something people can truly benefit from and make a part of their lives?

Think about those questions for now.

They’ll come in handy as we continue on.

The Outline – The Most Important Part

This may not make sense until you experience it, but a weekly long-form outline works wonders for your creative thinking.

Because creativity thrives within constraints.

When you have a goal to achieve (newsletter) and rules to achieve it (outline) your mind silently strategizes on how to reach that goal. You notice things in life that you didn’t notice before. When you read a random book or watch a video, even if it’s not remotely close to your topic for that week, you pick up ideas that can be included in the newsletter.

This is why it is incredibly important to outline your piece at the start of the week. You need enough time for your mind to generate the best ideas for the newsletter.

When you have an outline, you need to ensure that when you scroll socials, read, watch, or listen to media, you are ready to write down an idea that can be used somewhere in the newsletter. This is how you “synthesize” ideas.

The best ideas are ones that slightly relate to your topic of choice.

As an example, I previously wrote a piece called “the easiest way to get ahead in life” with the idea stemming from this post that did well.

That has potential for reach, relevance, and resonance.

Now, you’d expect the key point ideas inside the outline to be related to skill acquisition and learning, right?

Wrong.

I could talk about that, but everyone talks about that. I wanted to create something few people have read before but still retain impact.

Throughout the week, I read 2 articles that I really liked on the topics of taste is the new intelligence and robots replacing work.

While reading, I noticed that both of those had extremely unique ideas that are at least slightly related to “getting ahead in life.” So if I could string them together under a new frame, I’d have a piece that reaches a lot of people with deep ideas that most people don’t even see in the common discussion. That allows me to stand out in a rather broad space.

So, the 3 Key Point Ideas I used to start the outline were:

• Introduction – you don’t just learn any ‘high value skill’ (to build curiosity around the main topic)
• Section 1 – how robots automating work allows us to focus on art and craftsmanship (to shift what kind of skills to learn)
• Section 2 – the greatest skill being curation, not creation (to give a solution to the problem posed at the start)

This is how most of my best newsletters are written.

Now, there is no quick fix to this process.

Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not effortless. It takes all of your thought power.

I can’t tell you what ideas to choose or where to get them or how to articulate them in from your own brand/perspective, but I can give you some pointers as to what ideas to look for.

Getting Ideas To Flow Within Each Section

As you can tell, the ideas that compose a long-form piece occur hierarchically.

The key point ideas must somehow relate to the main idea.

The filler ideas must somehow relate to the key point ideas.

All of the ideas must fit within a generic story structure (problem → insight → solution). You can go on tangents, but you need to bring yourself back to the point before you lose people.

When I dissect my own writing or others’ writing, I notice a pattern of types of ideas.

These “types” of ideas can be placed in 2 categories:

Starter / Transition Ideas:

• Big ideas
• Quotes
• Statistics
• Problems or pain points
• Personal experiences

When I don’t know how to start a section, I cycle through these in my head and either try to think of an idea or use one that I already have written down for this purpose.

Explanatory Ideas:

• Anecdotes
• Concepts
• Insights
• Metaphors
• Action steps
• Examples
• Statistics (again)
• What?
• How?
• Why?

After I start a section with 1-3 sentences, I tend to follow them with something like an example, insight, explanation of a concept, and action steps.

As you go about writing or creating your outline, keep that list somewhere safe. You can cycle through them or ask AI to help you brainstorm.

As an example, if I’m struggling to start a section about why “you can’t just learn any skill,” I could use this prompt:

I’m writing a newsletter on the easiest way to get ahead of life. I’m struggling to start a section about how you can’t learn any common skill that everyone tells you to learn. My target audience is [20-30 year olds who want to become valuable in the internet space]. Can you give me 3 big ideas, 3 statistics, 3 personal experiences (in the form of a question), and 3 pain points I can choose from to begin writing?

Note that most answers from AI won’t be perfect, or anywhere near it. This is simply one brainstorming tool out of many until you come to the right idea.

Action Steps So Far

Let’s start off simple:

• Choose a topic to start outlining
• Brainstorm a few ideas related to that topic
• If you have ideas for key points, list them
• If you have filler ideas for the key points, list them
• Choose a book, article, or YouTube video that may give you ideas for those (research)
• Have your notes ready to write them down and add to your outline when you are back at your desk

Nailing the outline is 80% of the work.

It’s okay if it takes a day or two to feel confident in it.

Keep it simple for now.

Have a section for the topic.

Have a section for unorganized ideas.

Have sections for the key points.

List the filler ideas under the key points.

Then, when it comes time to write, you will open this next to a blank page and start stringing things together.

Since everyone’s writing style is unique, rather than teaching how to write each sentence, we’re going to learn how to learn. That is, I want to show you how to do that in real time as you are writing.

II – Don’t Use AI To Write For You, Use It For This Instead

The best way to learn is to find a source of inspiration, dissect what makes it work into tangible parts, and attempt to bring a few of those parts into your own work.

Not just for content or newsletters, but for everything.

If you can master that process, you can learn any skill fast.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a tutorial on Photoshop or After Effects that teaches the ins and outs of the software.

Instead, I have a vague idea for a project I want to build. Then I search for a tutorial on a specific effect that looks like it would help. I follow the tutorial, and then change the “look” a bit to match my style. In the process, I learn techniques. When I learn enough techniques, I start to spot patterns, and soon enough, I can accomplish almost anything in that software.

If you’ve ever used PhotoShop, you know that once you understand a few different ways to mask images, you can do 80% of what you need to do in Photoshop.

This is how you begin to craft your own style.

You experiment with multiple methods over time until they blur so much you can’t even tell where they came from. It becomes your style. You just know what to do.

This is where AI really starts to show its utility, because when you have AI write for you, it misses the mark unless you understand how to edit the writing… and that often takes longer than just writing it yourself, because the entire piece could need editing.

Instead, we can use AI to break down what works so we can learn from it and implement it.

You could do this manually, and I recommend doing that to get your brain juices flowing, but AI can do this much better than most people would be able to.

People often ask me to “review their writing,” and even though I’ve been doing this for a while… that’s hard to do. My mind has weird biases and I miss things that could have helped. I end up telling them how I would write it, and that’s not too helpful.

If you wanted to do it yourself without AI:

• Find a piece of great writing. Something you admire and think “Damn, I wish I wrote that.”
• Write down the macro structure. Glance over the main parts of the writing – the intro, body sections, conclusion – and note what each part represents.
  • Example: the intro starts with a problem, the body tells a personal story, and the conclusion gives actionable steps.
• For each section, write down the micro structure. Go through each section and write down what each sentence or paragraph represents, like a big idea, problem, quote, anecdote, statistic, insight, etc.

This is how you create a “template” to write from. This is helpful as a beginner.

This process can be applied to anything.

For my YouTube videos, I watch other creators whom I enjoy and usually come away with one thing to try in my own videos that will make them better (like how the screen looks when they show a quote or how they use an overlay to add depth to a static image) and try to replicate it in my black and white style. Over the course of 5-6 years, and pulling one thing from many people, my style started to emerge quite fast.

Once you have the structure written down, you can attempt to pull pieces into your own writing or replicate it completely.

If you don’t know how to start a newsletter section or continue writing, you can use this process to see how other people do it.

If you are just starting out, you will be doing this quite often until you feel confident in doing it without “training wheels.”

The Newsletter Dissector Prompt

• Paste the prompt below into an AI tool
• Hit send
• Paste the piece you want to break down into it
• Use it to help write your first piece

Prompt starts here:

You are a Content Structure Analyst specializing in deconstructing high-performing content through established psychological principles. You analyze the macro and micro structures of content pieces, explain the psychological mechanisms behind their effectiveness using verified frameworks, and provide actionable replication guidance. Always disclaim when making inferences about psychological effects that aren’t clearly established.

The user wants to reverse-engineer effective long-form content (newsletters, articles, video transcripts, etc.) to understand both the overall structural framework and section-by-section breakdown. The goal is to extract replicable patterns and provide specific guidance for overcoming writer’s block when creating similar content.

Instructions

1. Initial Content Analysis

• Request the content to be analyzed (text, transcript, or article)
• Identify the content type and primary objective (inform, persuade, entertain, etc.)
• Note any missing context that might affect analysis accuracy

1. Macro Structure Analysis

• Map the overall framework/storytelling structure (e.g., problem-agitation-solution, hero’s journey, thesis-antithesis-synthesis)
• Identify established psychological principles at work (cognitive biases, persuasion techniques, attention mechanisms) - reference specific frameworks like Cialdini’s principles, dual-process theory, etc.
• Provide both template-style replication guidance (”Use this 5-part structure: [X], [Y], [Z]…”) and principle-based guidance (”Apply social proof by…”)
• Disclaim any psychological interpretations that aren’t clearly supported by established research

1. Micro Structure Analysis

• Break down each section paragraph by paragraph with structural labels (hook, problem statement, social proof, story, insight, call-to-action, etc.)
• Explain psychological mechanisms for each section using verified principles (availability heuristic, narrative transportation, loss aversion, etc.)
• Provide replication templates and principle-based applications for each section type

1. Writer’s Block Solutions

• Generate specific prompts and questions for each identified structural element
• Create fill-in-the-blank templates based on the analyzed patterns
• Provide alternative approaches when the original structure might not fit different topics

Constraints

• Reference established psychological principles rather than speculating about effects
• Disclaim uncertainty when psychological mechanisms aren’t clearly evident
• Avoid timestamps or video-specific references - treat all content as text
• Focus on replicable patterns rather than content-specific details
• Provide actionable guidance over theoretical explanation

Output Format

Structure your output in markdown format with headings, paragraphs, and bullet lists where relevant.

Macro Structure Analysis

Overall Framework:

[Structure name and description]

Psychological Principles:

[Established frameworks with brief explanations]

Replication Template:

[Step-by-step structure]

Principle Application:

[How to apply the psychological mechanisms]

Micro Structure Breakdown

For each section:

Section Label:

[Functional purpose]

Content Summary:

[What this section does]

Quoted Example:

[Direct quote(s) from the content that exemplify this section]

Psychological Mechanism:

[Established principle at work]

Replication Template:

[Fill-in-the-blank structure]

Principle Application:

[How to apply this technique]

Writer’s Block Toolkit

Structural Prompts:

[Questions for each section type]

Alternative Approaches:

[When original structure doesn’t fit]

Content Adaptation:

[How to modify for different topics/audiences]

VERIFICATION NOTES

[Any disclaimers about uncertain psychological interpretations or missing context]

Prompt ends here.

III – How To Write A Killer Introduction

When it comes to writing a long form piece, the problem most people face is not being able to write a compelling introduction.

If you don’t nail the introduction, people stop reading, and the rest of your writing struggles to stay coherent.

Note: While I give specific methods here, there are many others you can research and experiment with. This may be a great starting point for you (and teach you about various principles) but I don’t want you to feel as if you must follow this approach. You can do whatever you want if it works.

The purpose of an introduction, or hook, is to:

• Grab the readers attention
• Qualify the reader (answer the question, “Is this for me?”)
• Include essential context that readers need to know
• Open a curiosity gap so they have a reason to continue
• Bonus: sprinkle in some form of authority from statistics, your own experience, a public figure, etc

The most difficult part about writing is being able to think up the best ideas that hit all of these.

Since this is your first newsletter, I want to give you an “easy” way to do this.

As you progress, you can pursue more complex hooks, but what I’m about to share with you can be applied to almost any kind of topic you write about.

You ready?

Here it is:

Illustrate what most people do wrong.

It can be as simple as that. And that sets you up for a great piece, because then all you need to do is show people how to do it right (which you already have done with your outline).

That grabs attention, qualifies the reader if they do that wrong thing in their own life, and opens a curiosity gap because they’re curious about the “right” way.

When it comes to an introduction or a hook, I believe that illustrating the problem is the most important part. When done correctly, that can check the box for almost the entire list of hook principles above.

You can watch videos or download free ebooks about the “best 20 hooks to use,” but as you’ll find, all of those will fall flat in one way or another. None of this is ever guaranteed to work.

Now, there are 2 ways in which you can illustrate what people do wrong:

• Personal story – I think back to a time in my life where I did it wrong and how it impacted my progress.
• Direct statement – Just lay it out there. What do most people do wrong? Tell me.

Those are the foundations of my hooks. I choose either of them or a mixture of both. Whichever is the best fit or most compelling. My job is to illustrate that in the introduction, and I can use other things to strengthen that argument like:

• Big idea – A “micro summary” of the entire newsletter or topic, like if you were going to write a short social post about the topic as a whole.
• Examples – I sprinkle concrete examples after certain ideas that aren’t as clear as they could be.
• Interesting statistic – If I really have nothing to say, I’ll look for a statistic and start brainstorming around that.
• Hard hitting quote people want to save – A quote related to the topic that provides more context or insight.

Let’s run through an example:

The topic I want to write about is “How To Reach The Top 1% Of Discipline” because I saw that recently did well for Ali Abdaal. I wouldn’t plan to title it the same thing - I would plan to write my own perspective on that topic, without referencing anything Ali mentioned in his video, and then generate a new title for it once my piece is done.

For the introduction, I immediately start thinking of personal stories of when I wasn’t disciplined or what most people do to try to become more disciplined.

That’s another bonus about this style of introduction: people love novelty. That’s like psychology 101. And when you force yourself to think about ‘how most people do it,’ you either have to come up with a better way, or research different methods until you have a novel solution.

The thing about novelty is that it doesn’t mean original. It means that any given person hasn’t heard about it before. If you have something to share that was new to you when you first heard it, chances are, most of your readers don’t know about it, or could use a refresher.

Moving on… I could then tell a short story about the time where I would lay in bed all day, play video games, eat McDonalds, and do nothing with my life. I’d have the occasional burst of motivation and try to force myself to be disciplined, but that never worked.

We’re already off to a great start.

Many people can relate with that.

Then, I can think of a big idea.

I can think about what discipline is and how to achieve it.

With enough thought or curating ideas as we learned previously, I could write “Discipline is the byproduct of clarity, not force.”

That opens a curiosity gap, making people wonder how to generate clarity.

From there, I can make that concrete with an example. I can either talk about how “setting the right goals” made discipline easier, or I can reference how top athletes don’t need to force themselves to do hard things, they just do it because it’s a part of their identity.

Then, for a cherry on top, I could use AI to research a list of studies, anecdotes, and statistics that have to do with discipline, clarity, and forcing yourself to do things.

Or, if I have notes on discipline or clarity (you should be taking notes all the time on ideas that fit into your worldview because they start to form the building blocks of most of your writing - you write asynchronously when you take notes), I could include those.

Or, I can think about an author I’ve read or a public figure who talks about discipline, look up a list of quotes from them, and find one that fits my argument well. Or I could just reread parts of their book. Or if I’ve already read the book, I could simply feed it to AI and ask for a summary of the part I’m thinking about.

With that thought process, it shouldn’t be difficult to hammer out 200-500 words that set a compelling scene for the rest of your newsletter.

So that’s your action step for this section.

If you’ve already started writing, go back and refine the hook with what you’ve learned.

If you are still working on your outline, take the ideas inside of it and write a 200-500 word hook for the topic you chose.

(By the way, 200-500 words is just a random number. You can go over it if you want. I do quite often.)

Next, we will talk about beginner, intermediate, and advanced writing frameworks to help you complete the rest of the newsletter.

IV – How To Actually Structure The Newsletter

Over the past 3 days, we’ve learned about outlining the newsletter, pulling inspiration from others, and how to write a great intro without flavor-of-the-day hook tactics you’ll find online.

Technically, you should have everything you need to write a great newsletter.

However, I want to make this a bit more concrete.

I want to give you 3 newsletter frameworks, from beginner to advanced, so you have multiple ways to practice writing.

The introduction for each newsletter will largely be the same across them all. That’s what we learned yesterday.

Structuring the sections or key points of the newsletter is a different story.

Framework 1) Pain & Process

This is the beginner level framework.

It’s pretty simple.

First, you illustrate the pain point in the introduction. We know how to do this.

Second, you give an actionable process to solve the problem. This usually comes in the form of step-by-step advice.

Here’s an example:

• Pain point: You don’t know what you want in life and it leads to inaction and anxiety
• Step 1: Realize what you don’t want by creating an anti-vision
• Step 2: Set a series of goals that will move you away from that
• Step 3: Turn those goals into projects and learn how to learn
• Step 4: Timeblock 60 minutes for learning and 60 minutes for building

Then, you fill in the steps with big ideas, examples, personal stories, quotes, more pain points, and other things until you amply explain each step.

You can either write out the steps as one big section after the introduction, or separate them by headings to make it a bit more readable.

I’d recommend having a heading for each step for the sake of readability.

Note: The “steps” in the framework can be anything. It’s a list of things that help resolve the pain point. It can be “5 steps” or 5 reasons, tips, insights, lessons or anything else that can be turned into a list.

Framework 2) Pain, Concept, Process

This is the intermediate level framework.

In a nutshell, we add one extra section to add greater depth and novelty to the newsletter.

This makes the newsletter longer, which may not be your cup of tea, but this is how most of my newsletters are written.

In order to do this well, you need to have a reading or research habit. If you don’t have a deep concept to write about – which is usually found in books or other curated content – then this one is difficult to write.

Building on our last example:

• Pain point: You don’t know what you want in life which leads to inaction and anxiety
• Concept: Emotional transmutation and how to turn negative energy into positive action
• Step 1: Realize what you don’t want by creating an anti-vision
• Step 2: Set a series of goals that will move you away from that
• Step 3: Turn those goals into projects and learn how to learn
• Step 4: Timeblock 60 minutes for learning and 60 minutes for building

Your introduction would include the pain point.

Then, you’d write a section headline and explain the concept of emotional transmutation.

Then, you’d write another section headline and explain the step-by-step process, separated by smaller subheadings.

The reason I love this framework is that I tend to have an idea or concept I want to write about first.

Most of the time, I don’t start with the topic or pain point, I start with a big idea or concept that I think is worth sharing, then I build the pain point and process around the concept.

For this example, I could be reading some philosophy book or watching a video, come across the concept of emotional transmutation, want to write about it, and start fleshing out a newsletter outline like the one above to make it more practical.

This works well because emotional transmutation adds a layer of depth to the process section.

In step 1, I talk about creating an anti-vision to build up negative energy. That’s a great idea on its own, but when you preface it with some kind of philosophical or scientific concept, people thank you for how impactful your newsletter was.

Framework 3) Perspective, Advantage, Gamify

This is the advanced level framework.

It’s roughly the same as the others, except you exchange the “concept” with a “secret advantage.”

For this framework:

• Perspective = how most people view the problem or pain point. The common way of looking at it.
• Advantage = how you look at the problem or pain point and what a better way of doing it is.
• Gamify = a step by step process that follows flow psychology, you turn it into a game

By all measures, this framework is the most powerful because you change their mind and life in one piece of writing because you have a deep understanding of behavior psychology.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with details just yet, but I would recommend reading the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and attempting to apply it to your writing. Rather than using it to create flow in your own life, use it to create flow in others’.

In short, the “gamify” section is the same as the “process” section, just broken down into tiny challenging steps for the specific person who is reading, making the action steps more tangible and doable. You remove as much friction as you can between the problem and the action.

Using our last example:

• Perspective: How most people view getting what they want in life
• Advantage: How you view getting what you want in life
• Step 1: Pull out a notebook
• Step 2: Write down the most painful experience in your life
• Step 3: Write down everything you hate about your current life
• Step 4: The single habit that will change everything

This is very similar to the last framework, but it is slightly more effective because it gives them no option but to change and act.

That should be enough to get you started writing or creating long-form pieces.