The Blog as Comics Panel Method
Write blog posts that sketch two points and let the reader leap between them
Seth Godin draws on Scott McCloud Understanding Comics to explain why blog posts work differently from long-form writing. In comics, the magic happens between the panels — in panel one Superman sees a problem, in panel two he is with the villain, and the reader mind fills in the gap. Bad comics add too many pictures and do not let the brain do the leaping. Similarly, a great blog post sketches two points and lets the reader figure out how you got from one to the other. The reader grows by doing the leaping. This is fundamentally different from long-form writing where the goal is comprehensiveness. Godin coaches Ferriss that his tendency to add parentheticals and qualifications is not thoroughness — it is resistance. He is adding complexity to protect himself from being misunderstood, which prevents the blog post from functioning as a blog post. The solution is to accept that you will be misunderstood (hence no comments on the blog) and trust the reader to make the leap. The method produces sustainable creative practice because each post is a sketch, not a treatise — done is better than perfect.
- Great blog posts sketch two points and let the reader mind fill in the gap between them
- Parentheticals and qualifications are usually resistance disguised as thoroughness
- Removing comments forces you to write for impact rather than protection from misunderstanding
- Announce the genre to your reader so they know what to expect
- A short post that provokes thinking serves the reader better than a long post that answers everything
- Identify Your One PointEach blog post should make exactly one point — not three, not seven, not a comprehensive treatment. If you have seven points, that is seven blog posts, possibly a series. The discipline of one point per post prevents the compression trap where you try to stuff a long-form argument into a short-form container. Godin told Ferriss that his draft was actually seven blog posts forced into one, and each one should stand alone.Pro tipIf you cannot state the one point of your post in a single sentence, you have not found it yetWarningThe temptation to add just one more point is the most common form of resistance in short-form writing
- Write the Sketch, Not the MapWrite your post as a sketch with two anchor points — an opening observation and a concluding insight — and trust the reader to leap between them. Do not fill in every logical step. Do not add qualifications. Do not protect yourself from misunderstanding. Godin example: if I just say biceps are temporary, baseball helmet sizes are forever the reader visualizes immediately and then wants to think about what you meant. That provocation is what blogs are good at.Pro tipAfter writing your draft, delete every sentence that explains what you just said — those are the anti-leaps that prevent reader engagementWarningThis method requires accepting that some readers will misunderstand — that is the price of the form
- Apply the Shorter-Gets-Points RuleDuring revision, the rule is simple: you get points for making it shorter, not longer. If you cannot boil it down further and it is not deliberately deceptive, it is done. This rule prevents the infinite expansion that kills blog posts. Godin writes posts in advance and rewrites them the night before publication, always with the goal of compression. The purpose of the post is to tell people something they already sort of know in a way that they would be grateful for the chance to forward to other people.Pro tipRead your post aloud — if any sentence makes you pause to explain it, delete or simplify that sentence
- Ship and Move OnPublish the post without seeking perfection and without anxiety about response. Godin describes his ritual: he does not know when a post is done because that is the point. You would not agonize about whether your turn in a conversation was properly concluded — you just speak and let the dialogue continue. The post is one turn in an ongoing conversation with your audience. Ship it, and tomorrow you will take another turn.Pro tipCreate a publishing ritual that takes less than 60 seconds — the less ceremony, the less resistance
Ferriss sent Godin a draft blog post about performance-enhancing substances that contained seven distinct points compressed into under 1,000 words, with dense parentheticals and qualifications. Godin diagnosed the problem: it was seven blog posts forced into one, and the parentheticals were resistance, not thoroughness. He recommended splitting it into a series and writing each post as a sketch with a provocative opening — like biceps are temporary, baseball helmet sizes are forever — that invites the reader to think rather than consume.
Godin developed this understanding through publishing over 8,500 consecutive daily blog posts. Early in his blogging career, he had comments enabled and found himself overwriting to prevent misunderstanding — which destroyed the form. After removing comments, he could write in the sketch style that makes blogs powerful. His coaching of Ferriss crystalized these insights: Ferriss default was to compress a 5,000-word essay into 1,000 words, which creates dense, exhausting prose. The correct approach is to write a 200-word sketch that makes one point and trusts the reader to supply the context. The Hemingway example — For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn — shows the extreme power of this approach, even though it is not sustainably repeatable at that compression level.