Saying the Unsayable in Writing: Lessons from Tom Junod

When I think about the best writing I have ever read, one of the essays I go back to time and time again is "The Falling Man," which is a distillation of maybe all the feelings everyone has ever felt about 9/11.

It's one of the most haunting and beautiful works of all time.

It was written by Tom Junod, whose work is defined by a refusal to look away and a deep exploration of humanity in every light.

Now, in a deep-dive conversation with David Perell, Junod explores the mechanics of his craft, the personal ghosts that drive his search for truth, and why writing is ultimately an act of the soul.

I think there are a ton of lessons in here for screenwriters, so let's dive in.

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1. The Hair-on-Your-Arms Test

I love this kind of thinking when it comes to writing. Junod says the goal of a sentence is visceral. When he began writing "The Falling Man," he hit upon a line that became his North Star: "In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow."

This is a line that makes the hair stand up on your arm. And it became the "guiding principle" for all of his work.

This isn't about being systematic; it’s about a "tightrope walk" between having privileged knowledge of a subject and discovering the rhythm and word choice that brings that knowledge to life.

2. Finding the Tension

All screenwriting is about tension. No matter the genre, you are trying to get the audience to feel a certain way as things go wrong for the people on screen.

The "secret sauce" of a Junod story is almost always a contradiction. He wants two things in direct contrast with one another.

Junod argues that if a story has a dimension of ambivalence or something "off" that you can't quite name, that is exactly where the writer needs to go.

Not just going where you think is interesting, but going where you think there's tension and problems, and addressing them directly.

3. From Evil to the "Mystery of Goodness"

Before meeting Fred Rogers, Junod was primarily interested in "human evil" and cynicism. But Mr. Rogers changed that. Through Rogers, Junod learned that "goodness is just as much a mystery as evil is".

This led him to deconstruct both.

We can take something away for our characters there. Evil and good can be interesting if we're willing to pull apart why someone is that way.

Junod says he looks into a spiritual dimension now to pick apart these ideas and to address them in everything he writes.

4. The Emotional Odyssey of Writing

Junod is famously candid about the pain of the process. He breaks the stages of writing down into a five-step cycle that I think we can all find relatable:

"I’m shit, I’m a genius, I’m shit, I survived."

This process happens with everything he does, and it puts him almost at ease when he goes through it. It also lets him make decisions and continue to write without stopping. Because he is prolific and has this base, he can walk away from ideas that are not working and is less stubborn, too.

In order to continue this, he has an exercise that might be worth trying:

• The "This is a story about..." exercise: Write a paragraph where every sentence starts with those words to find your core. Once you have that, you know why you're writing the piece and can outline based on those emotions.

5. Writing as Bearing Witness

In the age of AI, Junod makes a powerful case for the "soul" of writing. And I think it matters a lot to screenwriters as well. He views human history as a series of "f*ckups," but notes that for every tragedy, there is a writer grappling with it.

That grappling is the essence of great writing.

We're bearing witness to our own pain, joy, and hope on the page, and then empathizing with those feelings from other great writers.

In movies, it's how we take things to the big screen and get an audience to buy in and to get good word of mouth.

Junod argues that AI operates on the notion that there is no soul, and therefore, everything it makes is cold and lifeless and cannot resonate.

Summing It All Up

Junod's final advice is basically to be brutally honest and challenge yourself with every sentence. Never be afraid to look directly at the things the rest of the world chooses to ignore and to tell us what you feel about them on the page.

Let me know what you think in the comments.