Welcome back to another installment of Running Up That Hill, the only column in the known universe named after a Tori Amos Kate Bush¹ song that the columnist doesn't even like!

The topic of this week's column is, as the title implies, Are You SERIOUS? As in, are you serious about writing?

Notice that I didn't say, “are you serious about being a writer?” Because there's a certain romanticized charm and appeal to the notion of being a writer: the challenge of living up to the hard-drinking, hard-living ideals of your Ernest Hemingways and Charles Bukowskis; the mysterious, brooding persona that only a true artiste can attain; and the money, fame and glamour we see bestowed upon a select group of popular writers like Stephen King and John Grisham.

So, yeah, being a writer sounds like a pretty cool thing to do. But (and here comes the drumroll of the painfully obvious)... before you can be a writer, you've got to write.

And that's where a lot of us come up short.

***

Two years ago, I decided I wanted to be a writer – specifically, a comic book writer. I did a lot of research on the subject, the bulk of which was trying to get a handle on just how a comic book script is put together. After finding a couple of examples (and here's a good time to mention the excellent comic book script archive available right here on Scryptic Studios), I dove right in and started writing my first-ever comic book script.

And I worked on it late at night, after my wife went to bed, and sometimes on Sunday afternoons, if I didn't get caught up in a football game on TV. And even though I wasn't really spending all that much time writing, I thought of myself as wanting to be a writer.

Some time passed. I chipped away at that script, we had a baby (actually, my wife did all the work as far as the actual having of the baby), and for many months afterwards, I barely even thought about writing.

I thought about our beautiful little baby boy, and about how nice it would be to someday get a good night's sleep again. And I thought about how cool it would be to someday be a writer. But rare was the time in which I actually thought about writing, in the sense of, “You know what I'd really like to be doing right now? Writing!”

And yet...

The desire to be a writer never left me. And I grew frustrated at the dissonance between my oft-stated intention of being a writer and the amount of time I actually spent writing.

But the twin fears of rejection and failure were never far from my mind, and the inertia of several months of basically not writing at all made them all the stronger. I'd think about writing in the evenings after the baby was tucked in for the night. But I'd be tired, and I'd be scared of the blank piece of paper staring out at me from the computer screen, and it seemed so much safer to just put it off till tomorrow.

Because as long as I didn't actually try to write, and fail, I could safely still say I was going to be a writer one day. Just not today.

And that's when Elizabeth Genco kicked me in the ass.

***

Elizabeth is a self-described “writer, fiddle player, avid reader, and Tarotist living in Brooklyn, New York.” Time back way back², she wrote a column right here on Scryptic Studios called The Craft. One of her columns in particular was exactly the right message at the right time in my life to get me off my ass and onto... my butt?

Yes, you see, the concept Elizabeth espoused in this temporarily apocryphal column (once all the columns from the old site are migrated over to this new one, I'll add a link to it here so you can read it for yourself) was, quite simply,

BUTT IN CHAIR.

Here's a short excerpt:

"Butt in chair" is pretty self-explanatory. Indeed, you've probably heard the cacophony of voices out there in comics land, harping on "shut up and Do It", which is just "butt in chair" with perhaps a little snorting and chest thumping thrown in. In the end (pardon the pun), applying the seat of one's pants to the seat of one's chair is the only thing that will give you a finished piece of writing.

And another:

For me, "butt in chair" doesn't always mean working on a project. Sometimes my writing is just practice, noodling in the notebook, taking down stuff that I know that nobody will ever see. Trying on images, making shit up about folks on the subway, whatever. Before you dismiss this as a total waste of time, let me remind you that in every other field on the planet, there is practice. Artists have sketchbooks, basketball players dribble the ball around the court, and opera singers spend hours making those "mi mi mi" noises, all in the name of busting their chops.

There's a lot more to the column, including a corollary of “Butt In Chair” called “Butt On The Couch,” which is all about the need for time and space in which to gestate new ideas. But the thing that stood out to me, that seemed as if it was written especially as a motivational tool just for my benefit, was those three simple words:

BUTT IN CHAIR.

It's a concept that's simple to grasp, but not always simple to implement.

And yet...

It actually IS simple to implement. As simple as putting your butt in the chair, and telling yourself you're not going anywhere until you've gotten somewhere with whatever it is you're writing.

It just seems like it's not simple sometimes. Because the demands and desires of Life As We Know It – all the real, true, important people and things that make up our world – often come into conflict with Butt In Chair.

And there's where it all comes back to the topic of this week's column:

Are you SERIOUS?

I learned two things when I started applying the new gospel of Butt In Chair to my life. One, I wasn't really serious about writing before, because I let too many things get in the way of writing: playing computer games with friends online, watching TV, checking email, surfing the Internet. And two, I actually was serious now.

***

Time and time again, I come back to Butt In Chair as a personal mantra, when I'm struggling to carve out the time I feel I need in which to write, or when I have the time but not the inspiration.

Just last week, I got up early Sunday morning (5:30am) with my son so my wife could have a rare opportunity to sleep in a little. So I was hanging with him the first part of the day while she took care of some errands and some work for her job.

Around lunchtime, she took over son duty, freeing me up to write. I'd been looking forward to this chunk of several hours of uninterrupted writing time for most of the preceding week. And now that it was upon me, I was tired from getting up so early and uninspired from being so tired.

So I put Butt In Chair, and sat there. And thought about what I needed to be writing (a new transitional scene for an upcoming miniseries submission). And thought about how tired I was. And how the Cowboys game was probably on TV. And how maybe what I should really be doing is going to Vino's Brewpub and Pizzeria to take some photo reference for the very scene I needed to write.

And a dozen times, I started to get up and... go downstairs to say hi to my son and see what they were doing, or go to Vino's to take those photos, or go just check on the game for a little bit.

But I kept Butt In Chair, and kept forcing my focus back to the scene I'd been struggling to nail down the preceding several days. And the longer I sat, the more focused I got, and after a couple of hours of pretty much just sitting there thinking, perhaps jotting down the occasional note, it finally started coming together in my mind. And I started writing. And kept on, and kept on, and kept on until I was done.

And the scene's good. It works. It accomplishes exactly what it needs to to transition between what comes before and what comes after.

And that's how I know I'm serious about writing. And why, two years after deciding I wanted to be a writer, I now feel comfortable in saying that I am one.

So now that we've established the fact that I'm serious about writing comic books, the question remains:

Are YOU serious?

Footnotes & Bibliography

¹Last week, for several hours, this column's opening line did, indeed, lay the blame for the Kate Bush song, “Running Up That Hill,” squarely on the entirely innocent shoulders of Tori Amos. Sorry 'bout that, Tori!

²If you don't recognize “time back way back” as an expression from Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic masterpiece, Riddley Walker, please go buy it from Amazon.com right this minute. It's quite possibly the most brilliant piece of post-apocalyptic fiction you've never read.

Elton Pruitt writes comic books (none of which have been published as of yet, but that'll be changing in a few short months). He thinks (quite possibly incorrectly) that “the Ecto” is a cool nickname/nom de plume. He hasn't smoked a cigarette in 712 days. And if you visit him in EltonSpace, he'll be delighted – particularly if you subscribe to his blog!

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