How to Write 10,000 Words a Week
The most productive writers know that writing is only one step in a larger process
I love writing. Every little goddamn bit of it. Writing is all I think about and all I wanna do. I write for roughly six hours a day, every day. A weekly Funbag column: 4,000 words. A GEN essay: 1,200 words. Another few thousand words for books in process, or one-off takes about who sucks in the NFL, or the occasional long-form story, provided I’m fortunate enough to be assigned one.
It’s a lot of writing to do in any given week, but I don’t care. I want to write it all. I write all day to work, and then I think about writing all night to relax. In the late afternoon and evening, I am constantly, to paraphrase the great Walter Mosley, “percolating.”
To a lot of people—to a lot of writers — this sounds awful. In college, I was reminded time and time again that a blank page was terrifying… that I SHOULD be terrified of it. (This was in a writing class, mind you.) This wasn’t my line coach telling me this. I remember the former Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine columnist Rick Reilly saying “I hate to write” outright in an interview. Other writers tweet things like “tfw when you get a lot of edits” accompanied by an obligatory gif of Elmo on fire just below. After he retired, the late novelist…
