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 Philip Roth put up a Post-it note in his apartment that read, “The struggle with writing is over,” like he had just been freed from prison. You get this romanticized internal melodrama all the time from writers who are hopelessly stuck along the Hemingway/Faulkner axis.

Too many writers have been taught to be afraid of writing and have had their voices suppressed as a result. You don’t have to be one of those writers. I can’t teach you to write like Toni Morrison, but I can give you pointers on how to LOVE writing.

It took me a long time to understand that writing could be a practical step rather than simply an artistic or journalistic one. Take it from George Saunders: You are a plumber when you write. A handyman. Writing is a matter of sketching and building and arranging and fixing what is in your brain.

Once I understood that, and as I wrote more and more, I began to feel the pull of writing: Those wondrous moments when you have a clean and vivid idea and your first instinct is I GOTTA GET THIS DOWN, not because it’s ready to be read, but because getting it out is the only way to give it shape. Once you get something down, it’s now out of you. Even in rough form, you’ve given yourself clay to mold into something interesting and beautiful. That’s writing. Writing is how you complete your thoughts.

You’re writing right now. When you’re reading and the words on the page inspire your brain into thinking of its own narrative threads, you’re writing. When you’re thinking of a good comeback to a rude asshole an hour after you had the chance to use it, you’re writing. Writing is seeing, writing is listening, writing is thinking, writing is living. When you’re texting, you’re writing. You probably don’t think of it that way. You’re just talking with your fingers. You’re not forcing yourself to write.

I keep a notebook next to me at all times, like Linus van Pelt clinging to his blanket. When I get an idea, I put it down. I’ve had to stop on the side of the road to do this. I’ve put off eating to get notes down and write things, and I never put off eating for ANYTHING. Sometimes I get annoyed when I can’t get the thought down quick enough, when I’m not writing at the speed of my brain. When I’m somewhere without access to a pen and paper, like in the shower, that impatience grows even more pronounced. I gotta make sure to catalog the notes I wanna make in my brain so that I can get them down the second that shower is over. I mentally repeat the thoughts to myself, like I’m reciting some kind of really dull mantra. Then, once the thoughts are down, they’re safe. I don’t need a lot of words to note what I need. Just a couple of scribbles act as a keyword search and brings me directly to the original thought.

This is not a journal. If you read my notebook cold, you’d think I escaped from Arkham Asylum. But that notebook is a physical manifestation of a messy room that only I know the order to. Give your thoughts tangible form and then you can exert control over them.

They don’t need to be fully formed thoughts. The things I write down usually aren’t. I’m talking about just a nice turn of phrase that came to me, or a headline for a post (I used to work alongside staffers at The Onion, who always started with a headline and wrote from there), or a small idea that could perhaps be the seedling of something greater.

That’s how a blank page stops being intimidating. Because when you do this right, you’re not starting with a blank page. I rely on all the prewriting I’ve done in that notebook and in my head before my hands have touched the keyboard. Would you build a tree house without lumber, screws, or tools on hand? You need MATERIAL. Fortunately, life is constantly throwing material at you.

Then you get to catalog it, tinker with it, and puzzle it over. The puzzling isn’t a chore. You can get stuck in places, or have a hard time figuring out the right way to transition from one thought to the next. But there’s a great deal of joy to be had in solving those little puzzles. And in 2020 you have more outlets for writing — privately and publicly — than mankind has ever had at any point in its history.

You’ll flourish as a writer if you don’t fear writing and don’t force it, and if you know, like Saunders did, that there’s no one way it should end up. If you treat your work like some impassable wall you have to scale (or if some dipshit boss of yours demands you treat it that way), you’re gonna hate it. No tip I give you will prevent you from going on a snack hunt to procrastinate if your attitude is that every molehill is a mountain.

Nor should you fear editing yourself, altering your sacred texts and even your voice. You have to accept that editing is part of the deal, whether you do it or someone else does it for you. Edits act as a vital sentry, interrogating your writing and divesting it of needless contraband. Soon, you can learn to anticipate those edits, making them yourself before they even meet the gaze of fresh eyes. You’ll see your thoughts as others might see them, and that’s the gift.

Once you start writing with a reader’s mindset, a lot of the ego and insecurity disappears. That’s when writing becomes an act of giving. There’s no need to psych yourself out when you can simply give yourself to the work at hand and see where it takes you. And then, the struggle of writing vanishes.