Lessons I've Learned About Writing

how I finally kept putting my ass in the chair

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The other night I posted a picture encapsulating how writing can feel.

It was a mostly blank white page with one word on it.

“The.”

I had been sitting at my computer for about an hour, and the only word I had been able to muster was the most common word in the English language.

What’s funny is that what I was struggling to write wasn’t a creative piece or anything that required much thought. It was only a 300-word blurb about my own book (The Longhorn Alphabet), which I was supposed to send to a publication willing to feature a story on my book for free. I captioned the picture with “Writing is Fun.” It was a helpful reminder, because thankfully, days and moments like that come far less frequently than they once did.

Since writing my book, starting at Inside Texas, and doubling down on my Substack, I’ve gotten a few questions like “what’s your process?” Not to bury the lede, but I have no idea how to answer that question. It’s putting one foot in front of the other.

For too long, writing was way too existential. I wanted to be writing, and I hated myself for not doing it. When I did write, it came in these unhealthy bursts where I sacrificed other things in my life. I’d write 30,000 words in three days, but then I wouldn’t type or pen another word for months. In On Writing, Stephen King talks about when he finally got the massive oak writer’s desk he dreamed of. He put it smack dab in the middle of his office. It was a symbol he’d arrived as a writer. Then a period of hardly any productivity or quality followed. King ended up discarding the oak desk and found a much smaller one, which he tucked into the corner of the room. The lesson? Writing can’t be the center of your life such as to dominate it. It has to fit into who you are. It’s a part of you, just like everything else is.

I struggled to call myself a writer. Most of my writing was about writing. My stories contained characters who were writers. Bore.

My counselor, who I saw at the time, suggested that when I went on a work trip to sell wood, I should reply “I’m a writer!” if someone on a plane or at a hotel asked what I did for a living. Try it on, see how it feels! I couldn’t do it.

Most creative people who struggle with doing the thing they want to do believe there will be a magic moment of inspiration. A lightning bolt of “eureka” that forces you in front of the blank page and causes said paper to be filled with words so beautiful they’d bring Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss to their fucking knees. I did that. I’d also liken what I used to do to someone who dives off a boat into the middle of the ocean and hopes a lifeboat appears.

I treaded water there and applied to MFAs like Michener, writing uninspired short stories cold turkey for the application process alone. I sent emails to writers I liked and asked for jobs. In retrospect, “save me from my $200,000-a-year sales job” probably wasn’t the best pitch. But make no mistake. I was a good fucking salesman.

So what changed? If I’ve learned anything about writing, being creative, or doing the shit you want to do, here it is. It’s the most valuable lesson I’ve learned on the subject:

Create accountability with community.

I grew up wanting to be a sportswriter.

Somehow in my 20s, I got in my head that sports writing was beneath me and I wanted to write fiction. That’s where a lot of this became unspooled. Writing fiction is lonely, isolating, and hard. I still haven’t done it successfully, and I don’t know if I ever will. My friends who have done it, like James Wade and Meredith Davis, are absolute heroes to me. I’m in awe of their abilities.

Before 2021, my wife and some friends told me I should write about the Longhorns. Maybe they were tired of me complaining about not writing—I was tired of listening to myself, to be sure. “You love the Longhorns, you want to write, 2 + 2 = 4.”

So I created this Substack and began writing about Texas Football. The first season I bailed after a dozen or so articles. I got in my own head and the Longhorns went 5–7. But when the 2022 season started, I had a few people reach out: “Are you writing this year?” WTF? I asked myself. But I’d created accountability—the expectation I was going to write about Texas. That season, I wrote most weeks. Then in 2023, I missed one week—the bye week—and I remember my father-in-law asked me if I was okay. I just didn’t think there was anything to say. But I’d set the bar high without even knowing it. People were now expecting me to write even on an off week.

Then, I made one of the best/worst decisions of my life. I told too many people I had an idea for a children’s book about UT Football.

“How’s the book coming?”

“What book? My fiction book?”

“No, you idiot. Your children’s book. I need one for my kids.”

I wrote the first draft of the book in one two-hour sitting at Radio Coffee.

Steven Pressfield, the author of The War of Art, says to “put your ass where your heart wants to be.”

I put my ass in the chair and wrote it. I also had created community and accountability around writing. While fiction was like being on an island trying to live off coconuts and fish, sports writing and writing The Longhorn Alphabet was communal. Infinitely so. And that’s the whole reason I love sports in the first place. It’s family. It’s the multigenerational love of a thing. It’s identity and placing mile markers in your life. I’d somehow missed it.

Then I became pot-committed to writing the children’s book, financially and emotionally. I had to do it. But I also had to sell the thing once it was real. And I knew I was going to have a way better chance to sell a shitload of copies if I was RT Young, sportswriter, than if I was RT Young, disillusioned architectural product salesman. So I doubled, nay, tripled down on writing about the Longhorns last summer and for the 2024 season.

I was finally able to take my counselor’s advice and answer “writer” when people asked me what I did. You know how? I had a freaking book I was publishing and paying an illustrator for. It helps you answer the question when you have something to show for it. So create that thing. I’m not of the belief my book is Lord Of The Flies or The Grapes of Wrath. It’s an alphabet book about a football team. But I also believe it does the thing I wanted it to do: create community around sports and reading. Above all, it’s what I needed to kick whatever wall stood in between me and writing.

But I was still desperately trying to write a fiction manuscript. By myself. Alone. I submitted it to a contest and got a very damning rejection letter.

That same day, Eric at Inside Texas messaged me after an article I wrote about Texas/OU and said, “You should be writing for a bigger audience.” Creating professionalism around a process which oftentimes felt very garage-bandy helped infinitely. Not everything needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winning piece. Sometimes the people just want to be entertained with a 300-word article about how you think Arch Manning will get 50 touchdowns in 2025.

You might think some of this flies in the face of King’s advice to “write with the door closed.” I still believe that. Your writing, your creativity—it has to be you. At the end of the day, it’s a one-on-one game: you versus the blank page. Steven Pressfield calls the blank page “the resistance.” The force that’s keeping you out of “the chair” or holding you back from filling the empty paper.

The best way I’ve learned to fight the resistance is through accountability and community. So name your intentions. “I’m going to do this”—for example, write the draft of a children’s book. Start smaller than I once did.

Don’t set out to write the next great American novel. Shit, pick something for a niche audience, like I did. But then shout those intentions from the rooftop to people who care. If they’re like the community I had in my life, they’ll ask you about it. Even hold you to it. It’s okay to be guilted into something you really want to do. Putting your ass where your heart wants to be is the greatest lesson I’ve learned from another writer. But what I’d layer onto that is to make sure your ass is tied to your heart/passions in the first place.

I adore fiction and reading, it’s one of my great pleasures, but why was I trying to write it? Did it just feel like the easiest escape hatch from a career I was unsatisfied in? I fell in love with writing through sports writing first. Sports is also one of the greatest connecting threads of my entire life: to my family, to friends from childhood and college, even to how I view the world. Don’t waste your valuable and precious time in the chair trying to force something that isn’t even the thing that had you sit there in the first place.

There will be moments when you sit for an hour and you come up with only: “The.” Congratulations. You’re a writer. A creative. Someone who got in the motherfucking chair. When days of only “the” happen, add accountability back into your life. Tell someone, “I’m struggling to get something out right now. But I’m going to have a page done by Friday. Ask me on Friday where it is.” Oh, and be a good friend—ask that person what they need help with too.

It’s only you in the chair, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.