What Makes Writing Worth a Screenshot? A Conversation with Eli Sundelson

There is something funny about writing right now. We have more tools to help us write than ever, and somehow more of what we read sounds exactly the same. Every founder has a LinkedIn strategy, every company has a voice, and everyone has GPT open in another tab. Yet the stuff you actually remember still sounds like a real person had something to say. Eli Sundelson is a copywriter and ghostwriter whose headline is "I write things people screenshot," and whose career makes no sense until it does: more than two decades as a musician, sixteen of those teaching, before he built Big Brow Creative. We dug into what makes writing memorable, why business content turned so bland, whether AI is flattening all of us into the same voice, and where the line sits between helping someone find a voice and inventing one for them.

Why some writing gets screenshotted

His answer to what makes someone screenshot a post instead of forgetting it in thirty seconds is contrast. He writes things that go against the grain of what you usually see on LinkedIn, often intentionally in opposition or just out of left field, because people respond to and remember what sticks out against the surrounding sameness. It feels natural to him now, but it didn't start that way. When he first showed up he tried to fit the conventional norms of how you present yourself, and that was harder, because it wasn't true to his personality. He's careful about the distinction: he isn't quirky all the time in everyday life, but in his writing he likes to heighten things, to play with a part of his personality and see how far he can take it. The play is the point, and it reads as real precisely because he's enjoying it.

Businesses are scared of personality

His bio opens with, like all the best copywriters, "I started as a jazz organist," and that one line says more than most LinkedIn profiles manage in a paragraph. So why are companies so scared of a personality? He thinks it's the pressure to be taken seriously, and a fear that showing what you're really like will cost you credibility. His view is the opposite. Show a little more of who you are and people trust that you're a real person showing up as a real person, and they take you more seriously, not less. He frames it almost as a compliment to the reader: I trust that you can see me for who I am, so I'll let you be part of it.

The selling tightrope

Does he even have to sell, or can he just be himself and let the chips fall? He's honest that selling is a tricky balancing act he's still working out. He's only been on LinkedIn about a year, and at first the quirky voice was an experiment, a way to have fun and be creative, not a pitch for new clients. Lately he's been trying to put his services more front and center without losing the tone, and he admits the hard part is walking the line between being funny and going against the grain, and doing what everyone else does, which is sell. The reason it's worth the trouble: people trust people, not brands, so the personality is what makes the eventual sell land at all.

The bar is so low it's an opportunity

Plenty of LinkedIn writing has correct grammar, clean structure, and a tidy hook, and still manages to be boring, because it all sounds the same. Eli refuses to read that as only a bad thing. You can see it negatively, everybody sounding like an overly serious robot, or you can see it the way he does, which is that it's so weird it's almost hilarious, and a genuine opportunity. If everyone is boring you to death, it isn't hard to sound interesting. Compared with other platforms that have more variety of voice and perspective, LinkedIn is a sea of mediocrity, and that low bar is exactly what makes it a chance to be a big fish in a small pond.

Can you tell when it's AI?

He'd like to say he can always spot fully AI-written work with no original thought in it, but the honest answer is that we now live in a bizarre world of constantly second-guessing everything we read, which is a strange way to exist. He flagged the small dystopias we've already normalized: people thanking the model in the comments, or captioning a post with a defensive "I wrote this myself, I used em dashes before they were cool." Beyond the obvious tells, his reliable red flag is subtler. When you boil a post down to its actual point and the point is minimal or nonexistent, yet it arrives as an eloquently structured essay about essentially nothing, that's usually a robot in the room.

The manufactured prophet problem

A lot of people on LinkedIn operate with a heightened sense of importance, and when you couple that with AI it spirals. Nobody wakes up every single day with a great thought, and that's fine, except the algorithm rewards showing up daily, so the feed fills with people performing daily profundity. Eli doesn't wake up with a great idea either, and finds it genuinely hard to come up with things to write. His tell is that his best-performing posts are often the ones he dashed off out of frustration on his notes app, not the ones he labored over. People respond to someone just being a human being on the internet, about something mundane or comical, far more than to someone claiming a higher being visits them with wisdom every morning.

As I put it to him, if news breaks once a week, that's news; a twenty-four-hour cycle of news isn't news anymore, it's entertainment. The same goes for the influencer living their "best day" on repeat. Fine to market that, but it should never become anyone else's pedestal to match.

Social media is a performance

His flat read: social media is all a performance, and anyone who thinks it's a version of real life is kidding themselves. Embrace that it's a performance, or be a bit delusional about it. He pointed to the novel "Yesteryear," about a tradwife influencer whose idyllic farm life is propped up by a production team and freezers hidden off camera, until she wakes up stranded in the 1850s and has to actually live without the comforts she claimed not to need. His point lands the same way the crying-to-camera posts do: these clips carry the air of authenticity, the surface illusion that you're watching something real, but they're no different from reality television. They are just its next evolution.

What ghostwriting actually is

Ghostwriting is a strange business, being paid to sound like another person, so when does it become imitation rather than uncovering something a person couldn't say themselves? For Eli it depends entirely on the ghostwriter. The word carries a negative connotation, as if something is hidden and the reader is being tricked, but he treats it as a creative collaboration, no different from a politician's speechwriter, a musician's producer, or an actor's director. He doesn't take the keys to someone's account and invent thoughts they never had. He has real conversations, absorbs their ideas, product, and audience, and organizes them, but he starts somewhere more basic: figuring out who the person actually is. What's your day like, what do you love, what do you hate, what do you struggle with. From there he knows what to write. He isn't pulling one over on anyone; he's helping a real person put their best foot forward.

Why hiring a ghostwriter beats the slop

People have ghostwritten books for a very long time, because not everyone is a writer, and there's no dishonesty in a subject-matter expert shaping someone's real story. The same logic applies to a CEO. If you're running a company and your strength isn't writing, hiring help to put yourself out there is no stranger than hiring a chef because you don't have time to cook, or a trainer because you can't get to the gym on your own. The alternative most people reach for is worse: lacking the time, energy, or budget, they go the ChatGPT route and add to the ocean of meaningless slop. Eli would rather read something well written and real, and he half-seriously argues that a good ghostwriter does a service not just for the client but for everyone else spending their hours reading posts on LinkedIn.

Reinventing versus starting young

Is it harder to get good at something at twenty when nobody expects anything of you, or to reinvent yourself after two decades of being good at something else? He'll only speak to his own experience, and there are pros and cons both ways. Part of him wishes he'd started sooner, for the head start. But the musician's years taught him to think about an audience and make people feel something, and sixteen years of one-on-one teaching taught him to convey an idea so it's easy to grasp, and how to work a craft and improve it. Those detours, far from marketing, are exactly what give him a fresh perspective now. As I put it, writing and music aren't so different: both move people, and words have marched people into wars and changed nations.

Creativity can be taught

Can creativity be taught, or can you only teach the mechanics and hope taste shows up? Taste, he laughs, is a loaded word, and he'll happily mock taste that differs from his own while admitting everyone's entitled to it. But on creativity he's unequivocal: he 100% believes you can teach someone to be creative, and if he didn't, his years teaching improvisation and songwriting would make him a fraud. Everybody is creative, often in unusual or hidden ways, and the work is helping each person find where their creativity actually lives. What he's wary of is the AI reflex. He's experimented with the tools and doesn't think they're inherently opposed to creativity, but the constant push to optimize and make everything faster is at odds with it, because creativity sometimes needs time, boredom, frustration, insecurity. Those uncomfortable states are paths to it, and it's sad to watch people bypass them.

It brought us to the Good Will Hunting bar scene, where Will skewers a student for parroting what he read in a book for a buck fifty instead of having an original thought. That's the question for anyone in marketing or sales: what's the point of all those years of experience if you're going to spit out the same thing an LLM would? If you actually have thoughts, dig deeper and deliver them, even though, as Eli admits, that takes courage when your thinking isn't fully polished. He's figuring things out mid-sentence in the interview, and that, he argues, is part of being a human being: watching someone think out loud, thesis not yet perfectly formed.

Key takeaways

Contrast gets screenshotted. In a feed where everyone sounds the same, sticking out is not that hard. The low bar is the opportunity.

Personality earns trust, it doesn't cost it. Showing who you really are makes people take you more seriously, because they believe a real person is there.

The AI tell is a tidy essay about nothing. When the actual point is minimal but the structure is flawless, suspect a robot.

Ghostwriting is collaboration, not deception. A good ghostwriter starts with who you are, then helps you put your best foot forward, the opposite of the ChatGPT slop most people settle for.

Creativity needs time and discomfort. Boredom, frustration, and insecurity are paths to it. The pressure to optimize everything faster is what kills it.

Frameworks worth stealing

Write the one you dashed off

Notice which posts actually land. For Eli, the pieces he jots down out of frustration, without overthinking, routinely beat the ones he edits and labors over. The lesson is to lower the production around a genuine human observation rather than polishing it into something that sounds like everyone else. People respond to a real person noticing a mundane or comical thing, not to manufactured daily profundity.

Start with the person, not the post

Before writing a word for a client, figure out who they are. What is their day like, what are they passionate about, what do they hate, what do they struggle with. Those answers, not a content calendar or a hook formula, are what tell you what to write and make the result sound like them. It's the difference between collaboration and imitation.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

I write things people screenshot.

There's such a sea of mediocrity on LinkedIn that the bar is very low. That's a real opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond.

This constant need to optimize and make everything faster feels very much at odds with being creative, because creativity sometimes takes a lot of time.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Put yourself in a room with people who are better than you, and don't be afraid to do it. As a self-described neurotic who isn't always confident, getting on the bandstand with musicians he admired terrified him, and that discomfort is exactly where he learned the most.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Stop comparing yourself to everyone else, a danger social media makes acute. The antidote he keeps returning to is coming back to your own reality and, if you must compare, comparing yourself to who you were in the past.

What would you tell your younger self? It's funny to imagine telling his younger self he'd one day write on LinkedIn, so the message would be: don't worry, you'll still have fun and still be creative. Any creative path you take, for yourself or for work, doesn't have to define who you are.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Constantly switching modes, work to music to creative to relax, and struggling to create space in between the things he does each day.

Favorite spot? Gordo Taqueria in Berkeley, where he grew up. A super chicken burrito with black beans, sour cream, and hot sauce, nothing more comforting. He now lives in what he calls an East Coast burrito desert, and is firm that Chipotle is not a burrito.

Tool you can't live without? Not a tech-stack person at all. A plain timer. Twenty or thirty minutes of "for this chunk of time I'm working on X," which quiets the voices asking whether he's doing it right. Has the timer gone off yet? No. Back to work.

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Eli Sundelson is a copywriter and ghostwriter and the founder of Big Brow Creative, after more than two decades as a musician and music teacher. Find him on LinkedIn and at bigbrowcreative.com.