🌲 Why I like Twitter Threads more than Epic Novels

On clear communication, targeted narratives, taming project sprawl, & the typical mind fallacy.

I recently realized something about the way I process narratives: sprawling, multi-perspective stories like Game of Thrones or The Wandering Inn exhaust me. It’s not that I dislike complexity or depth—in fact, I appreciate richly detailed worlds—but I need coherence, structure, and focus to truly engage. I get that Brandon Sanderson is, like, the biggest deal ever in fantasy, but I keep bouncing off The Way of Kings.

Just when I start to find my feet in the story, it jumps ahead or over to a different character. I can’t find my feet.

It's not even that I mind there being such a sprawling world with a bunch of different characters and their stories. I just wish they were presented in more coherent chunks¹. Smoother transitions would be nice, too.

This is an article about corporate communication. About teaching history. About why I like the slightly disjointed format of 240-character-per-tweet twitter threads. (They’re very easily digested. Oh, they’re not always what I want. Somtimes I want a 17,000 word treatise on why Aztecs are awesome.

But I like how they’re punchy, concise. There’s an almost poetic structure to the good ones. Twitter threads almost always:

State the important parts at the beginning.

In marketing, there’s this thing called the hook. You see it in everything from product sites to fiction project planning. It’s the opposite of the punchline.

Back when I was still in education, I had a boss I got along with really well. He had hard conversations with grace, came out drinking with us despite the inherent awkwardness of the hierarchy, and really cared about student achievement and discipline. Most of my colleagues didn’t like him — he had high standards, and he held us to them — but he’s the first boss I ever had that I really respected.

He once pulled me aside and gave me some of the most impactful advice of my professional life:

“You write great emails,” he said to me. “They’re very detailed, they have all the documentation I need for meeting about this incident. You write clearly.”

For context, at the time I was working at in what’s called “alternative education” — the public school where expelled kids got sent after being expelled. So when I say “incident” I mean things like “that time kid A threw a chair at kid B and it hit a teacher².”

“But,” he continued, “Sometimes I need to know the important bits up front, because I know just from the subject line that I need to come running, and I don’t want to walk in blind — but I don’t have time to deal with the whole thing just then.”

You see, I’d always known I read fast compared to normal people — I was always the first one done during tests, and usually scored pretty well for anything that involved reading instead of math. Slowing down and “taking my time” and “double-checking my work” never really changed my scores. I really do read and comprehend that fast.

But I hadn’t really internalized the idea that I was also fast compared to people in authority over me. It never occurred to me that 3-5 paragraphs of detailed, point-by-point descriptions of every possible useful piece of information could be a) overwhelming b) time-consuming to engage with³.

“So,” he said to me. “Do you think you could start adding a section at the top with some bullet points pulling out the things you think I need to know right away?”

This was a very easy change for me to make. Three bullet points to expand on the subject heading at the top is much faster to write than the 3 paragraph email.

It’s not that the details aren’t important — they are, because they provide context, eliminate opportunities to get burned by a fuzzy memory, and create a written record to refer back to.

Restate the important parts at the beginning.

When I moved on from teaching (largely a verbal & email job) to quality assurance at Readwise (where we mostly use Slack and Linear for communication), I fell out of the habit of prepending my messages with a summary. I fell into the same trap of assuming that everybody else is reading as much, as quickly, as me.

If my time writing the Obsidian Roundup should have taught me anything, it’s that most people don’t find it as easy as I do to keep up with high-volume chatrooms involving technical topics. But the typical mind fallacy is well-known for a reason.

My colleagues are, for the most part, busy building software. My bosses are generally very busy with big-picture things, while I am down in the weeds. So if I launch into a lengthy explanation of all the things I did before I hit a bug, instead of leading with the important information — what happened, how many people I think it’s impacting, who I think should be paying attention — that makes life harder for everyone.

It’s hard to remember to do this. My instinct is to tell stories chronologically. The hero’s journey recommends starting with the status quo — but even when you begin a story in media res most of us are reluctant to really give away the climax. You’ve gotta set the scene, right?

Heck, one of the things I really liked about Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff (which I reviewed last week) was how the opening paragraph talked about her personal background rather than jumping right into the recommendations. In long form articles, Journalists traditionally start with the humanizing details — they bury the lede.

But my list of books I could be reading large, and my time is short. These days, if I get a chapter or so into a book and I don’t get what it’s about, or it feels like a bait-and-switch, I generally put it down and find something else to read. There was a time when I almost never DNF’d a book — these days, I gave up on three books this week.

I abandoned Wandering Inn, Book 3 after the arc with the blind emperor jump-cut to some adventures I couldn’t remember and were just sitting around complaining for way too long. Gave up on Interesting Times (Discworld Book 17) because it feels so superficial compared to things I normally read. Gave up on Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) because the humor is just not doing it for me, although I’ve been assured that it gets better, so I might give it another go… Book 1 of the Dresden Files isn’t great either, and the stuff in Book 2 basically never comes up again, but the series as a whole is wonderful once he hits his stride.

I’m willing to slog through something if it gets better.

But the worst book of The Dresden Files wasn’t the first, or the second. It was Peace Talks, originally planned to be one book but split into two volumes due to its length. Battle Ground had too much fluff, and weirdly felt like it could have been made much less complex by moving some of the chronology around. There was too much going on, it was obviously expanded after-the-plot, and was ultimately unsatisfying. I get that Butcher had a lot going on, but I’m really hoping that the next one is better, because end-of-series bloat is an enormous turn-off for me.

Instead of interleaved threads, I prefer stories that are structured more like the Recluse series by Lee Modesitt, where each book focuses coherently on just two or three characters. Anne McCaffrey did something similar with Pern — instead of trying to shove every story that ever took place on Pern into one book, she wrote several different novels. Each has a coherent beginning, middle, and end.

Of course, the flip side is that some authors try to recapture the original magic of a book by writing the same story from a slightly different character's perspective, which I find annoying. Expanding the cast of perspectives works better in a visual medium like film can make a story more powerful and interesting. For instance, The Hunger Games movies adopted a third-person perspective to reveal information that wasn’t accessible in the first-person book narration. The way the True Blood TV adaptation expanded the book's closed first-person narrative into a sprawling ensemble piece worked well.

Medium matters.

That said, I don’t always want a single point of view in a written work; Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver had multiple perspectives that I found engaging. As with the Lord of the Rings and the Codex Alera, the plot was strong enough to follow the thread. It’s a spectrum, of course, and there are multiple variables involved in deciding whether I’ll enjoy something. Not all Twitter threads are created equal, either!

Make your point clear at the end.

Speaking of Naomi Novik, I’ve been making my way through her anthology Buried Deep. It’s predominantly short stories set in her various worlds, mostly fairy tale riffs. If you follow along with the thread where I’m liveblogging my reactions to the book, you’ll see that I keep getting frustrated with Novik failing to stick the landing.

There’ll be this beautiful story with incredibly human relationships, a clear theme and moral question being played out on the page, and the end just… ends. A thing happens, and there’s no sense of what point the story is making. It’s maddeningly unfinished.

I do the same thing, tho. I always feel like I’m being redundant or beating a dead horse when I do the whole “put the thesis statement at the beginning” “ok now put part of your thesis statement at the beginning of every paragraph” “now re-write the thesis statement in the conclusion” thing we learn (or, in my case, teach) in school.

This is not an essay about how awesome I am and how you should do what I’m doing because The Method Works.

How many times should we repeat ourselves?

Lots, actually.

When Gwern was pointing out why writers like Matt Levine (author of Bloomberg’s excellent Money Stuff newsletter) are so rare, he pointed out that Levine has lots of opportunities for organic, engaging repetition.

as an author, you know every time you wrote about something, across all the years, but a reader may well have read none of them. So if you repeat yourself only as often as you can bear to, you have usually fallen short of the mark.

Most of the world’s most popular writers — which is to say the best communicators — are prone to repetition. Even guys who write about whatever catches their fancy, like Scott Alexander in

Astral Codex Ten

, have drums they beat year after year. Phrases they coin or get known for⁴. Concepts they become the central thought leader for —

Peter Gray

advocating for play-based childhoods, Bret Devereaux on how the Spartans weren’t particularly great warriors at all, Nick Milo and the value of Linking Your Thinking.

This is a good thing, actually.

I spent entirely too much of my teens and twenties thinking that originality is super important. There’s an insidious ivory tower kind of pride that with coming up with something really clever and new⁵. One of the most brilliant physicists to ever live, John von Neumann, was famously a little jealous of Einstein for having flashes of “irrational” intuition — the kind that “result in startling new ideas.”

But von Neumann accomplished an incredible amount just by grinding (logically, brilliantly) on known problems!

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes

It’s not just stories, or business communication, where repetition is useful and focused communication matters. “Human history” is a sprawling pile of information. If you think it feels ridiculous that someone might find The Wandering Inn or Game of Thrones or The Way of Kings overwhelming, consider that those stories are incredibly bounded compared to other types of information. A person could literally devote their entire lives to learning history and never manage to hold the whole thing in their head.

There’s an idealized conception of historians that imagines objectivity. But almost every history book I’ve ever read has had a perspective. No matter how neutral the author tries to be, the mere act of curation makes a statement. And curation is necessary.

The Silk Roads by

Peter Frankopan

imagines that the trade corridor from Rome to China is a coherent entity — the way it frames history is extremely different from Mary Beard’s SQPR, which focuses on Rome. Despite being roughly the same length, these two books involve different geographical areas, and different time periods. Beyond the Blue Horizons by Brian Fagan spans a much greater stretch of time (the history of seafaring!)

If fantasy novels written from the dual perpsectives of a male and female are the small scale version of what I’m talking about with regards to complex, interleaved narratives, then human history is surely the extreme other end. I wonder what the overlap between fans of sprawling, multifacted narratives like The Wandering Inn or Game of Thrones is with people whose interest in history is equally sprawling.

Me? I tend to gravitate toward very well-bounded data-sets when it comes to history. I know it seems like my interests bounce around, but I love learning about Phoenician, Carthaginians, Aztecs, Maya, etc specifically because we know so very little. I feel like I can actually grasp all the pieces. It is entirely possible for one person to grasp the entire human knowledge base for something like “how were horses domesticated?”

Oh, I’m nowhere near David Anthony’s level in terms of actually figuring things out, or going and doing the work of cataloguing bones and experimenting with putting old-fashioned bits on modern horses’ teeth to evaluate wear patterns, but I can read the books and understnd the debate.

The History of Rome? Man, people devote entire careers to things like Roman coins. I can no more hold all the nuances of “Roman religion” in my head than keep track of the family tree of Daenerys Targaryen, though Mary Beard does a hell of a job organizing the information. But Roman history is memetically the thing most hobbyists dive into learning more about.

And I find Rome a heckuva lot more accessible than something like figuring out who did what to whom in the Cold War!

Don’t deal with more than you can keep in your head.

Some people find modern history easier to deal with because they have more context for it. I find ancient history easier to deal with because I can spin off very discrete chunks of it to spin around in my mind, and connect with other very atomic things like human sacrifice in different cultures or early pastoral economies.

Though I fall prey to it, I try to avoid the typical mind fallacy. My oft-repeated claim is: figure out what works for you, then do that.

Just… take into account what works for the people you’re talking to, too.

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This has been an essay about wrangling large code bases⁶, complex ticketing systems, overgrown notes vaults, the brain, and society. If I spin it out onto Twitter, it will end up as several different threads⁷. If that sounds appealing to you, follow me there. Medium matters! I say different things on Twitter than I do here.

1. I realize this essay is a bit sprawling. I didn’t say I had mastered these skills. I still screw up my work communication, too — I get too eager, prioritize being quick over being clear when I shouldn’t, etc. To err is human. To opine on unachieved ideals? Also human :P

2. True story.

3. Yes, yes, I do realize the irony of saying this an essay that is nearly 3,000 words long. I haven’t changed that much. What can I say? I like to be thorough!

4. Colleagues have started teasing me because of how often I say “my kingdom for—” 🙈

5. After I wrote this, but before I finalized the draft, I stumbled across the following quote from Tenobrus on Twitter: “i remember being so mad when factorio came out, like ‘wow they just copied minecraft modpacks and made money off it’ but then i realized packaging ideas into a cohesive accessible format is actually a great public service, meant millions more got to enjoy the experience” — this is exactly what I’m talking about. It applies not just to games and stories, but also white collar work like reports and memos.

6. Although in the case of code, one should probably avoid repetition as such. Variables & functions exist for a reason! But when managing complexity, there’s also a reason that compilers exist. Split those files up! Make those tickets atomic, whatever. I’m just saying that it’s really hard to keep something like the Linux kernal in your head without leaning on abstractions and good organizational techniques… git exists for a reason, as well.

7. This is an annoying double entendre, and I wish social media words were clearer. The fact that Threads now exists but doesn’t really do threads is a minor frustration to me. Oh, they have the functionality, but a 500 word character limit leads to a very different style.