How to Write Like an Athelete

This is a summary of the salient parts of “How to Write Like an Athelete”, a really, very good podcast about the strategies and processes a person with a full-time job spent 6 years researching and writing a book (that I haven’t read yet). The whole thing is worth a listen, even in the background as you walk places, but I’ll summarize my main takeaways that I might try to implement in 2024:

• Read prose that inspires you or prose that you want to sound like before you start writing. Jimmy read “The Everything Store” for 10 minutes every day before he started writing.
• Write in public to get feedback and criticism. write with a village - ask people for help. Pay for help if you need to (Jimmy paid a fact-checker, and many others). DM friends with excerpts of your writing. Be shameless about it. This might be the catalyst for me to deanonyomize this blog.
• Set deadlines (even artificial ones) to keep making progress. Jimmy told a friend that he’d donate $200 to a cause he hated if he didn’t send them writing every Saturday.
• Volume builds quality. If you want to write more, ask for opportunities. If someone at work is going to give a speech, volunteer to help write the first draft.
• Writing simple yet compelling prose is much harder than writing complex prose. This is true in more than writing.
• If you’re doing interviews with people, record everything, and then write down salient thoughts and vibes about how you felt. This isn’t directly relevant to my writing, but I do often skip doing monthly reviews during the month that I’m supposed to review, and this is a reminder that I’m often forsaking various details that I cannot possibly remember 3 months later, but are crucial in understanding how well my month went.