Welcome back to another installment of Running Up That Hill, the only column in the known universe whose acronym spells the name of the columnist's former mother-in-law!

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Do you ever stop and ask yourself why? Specifically, why in the world you want to write?

I do. Particularly at times such as this last week, when I've been struggling through the cumulative effects of several days worth of mild sleep deprivation. And the only thing I really feel like doing at the end of the day, after getting my son tucked in for the night, is going to bed myself.

There are a lot of things, a lot of people, I could be more involved with if I wasn't dedicated to becoming a successful comic book writer (whatever that is!). Off the top of my head:

1. More time with my son, which would make me happy

2. More time with my wife, which would (presumably!) make her happy

3. More time with my friends JD and Shawn playing Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin (a computer game I love, love, love – if you ever played Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, you should really check this game out – except, not if you want to be a writer, so never mind)

4. More time with Head on Pillow, as opposed to Butt in Chair (which was the subject of last week's column)

If you're an aspiring or practicing writer – and since this is a website targeted completely and specifically toward aspiring and practicing writers, let's just take a blind leap of faith and say you are -- you've got to know that if you're going to write, you're going to have to make some sacrifices. You simply cannot do it all, unless you're one of the fabled Haruchai who have mastered the ability to live without sleep.

I believe it was the little-known writer Brian K. Vaughan who opined that the two steps to becoming a successful writer are (in no particular order):

1. Write more.

2. Do other things less.

Truer words were never spoken!

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A not uncommon question (which some might refer to as a “common” question, but where's the fun in that?) on message boards and, presumably, when aspiring writers get to actually meet and talk to practicing writers, is

Where do you get your ideas?

I think it's easy to make fun of that question, and we've all seen it done: “if you don't have any ideas of your own, why do you want to be (slash) what makes you think you're cut out to be a writer?”

But I'm not here to do that. I'm here to encourage you to get your Butt in the Chair and Follow That Dream. So, here goes a little segment I like to call

Where the Ecto gets his ideas!

Because I never like to pass up an opportunity to mention Alan Moore, small-g god of comic book writing, in the same sentence as Elton Pruitt, talented comic book writer, allow me to throw a couple of quotes your way from Mr. Moore's indispensable book about writing for comics, titled (and I just don't care for cryptic titles like this) Alan Moore's Writing for Comics¹.

Moore says:

Studying the work of other people will provide useful pointers as to how to formulate an idea, but the initial raw impetus comes from inside the writer or creator themselves, influenced by their opinions, their prejudices, by all the things that have happened to them and by all the elements in their lives that go toward making them the sort of person that they are.

And:

[Y]ou just have to get your head pointing a certain way in regard to how you view life, and you'll find that the ideas then occur spontaneously with hardly any prompting at all. A unique and new viewpoint is never short of unique and new things to say or to talk about. Seen in the right way, everything becomes a source of ideas.

And what do you know? He's right! Everything actually is a source of ideas. Even his own book on writing for comics!

Later in that same chapter, he relates a tale of his childhood, and how he sometimes wondered if everyone besides him had the ability to read others' thoughts, and if he was “the only person excluded from this massive telepathic conspiracy.”

Now, this is probably the fourth time I've read his book, and I've always just breezed right by that particular anecdote without stopping to tarry. But this time... this time, I lingered a moment. And a moment later, B-I-N-G-O! The cartoon lightbulb over my head flashed on, the clouds parted, and An Idea Was Born.

Mine is titled Open Mind, so please choose another title for yours! I'll fill you in more on this as things develop. All I want to say about Open Mind at the moment is, (a) it's probably the opposite of what you think it is, (b) it's positively Melbournesque, and (c) a year ago, it would never have even occurred to me.

 
It wasn't always that easy. Ideas did not come unbidden to me, hat in hand, vying for my time and attention and creative energy.

When I started running up that hill toward the fabled land of Successful Comic Book Writerdom, I was really just putting one foot in front of the other, struggling to walk and keep some sense of forward progress. I had this one idea, which I'll share with you here because what the heck, I'm not doing anything with it, and it's the holiday season and all, plus I'm an all-around nice guy. So click this link and read the page that comes up, and I'll run downstairs for a refreshing Avery IPA and we'll meet back here in, say, five minutes.

Link to the Ecto's First-Ever Idea Source

Pretty weird, huh? Gang stalking. Covert surveillance. Targets and perps. The most insane paranoid delusions you could hope to come across. But what if it's all freakin' real? What then? Because it sounds so obviously crazy, what better setup to actually be a perp, a gang stalker, and unleash this deranged harassment on innocent victims, knowing they can't go to the authorities without being classified as loonies?

So anyway, I had an idea for a story that was inspired by this website. And I worked on it, and worked on it, and wound up writing myself into a corner from whence there was no escape. It was my first-ever attempt at writing an actual comic book script. And I just got stuck.

And sometimes I'd sit and try to come up with other ideas, and wonder if I actually had any other ideas in me, or if I was destined to be that saddest kind of writer, a one-hit wonder without a hit.

Somehow, I got my head in that place that Alan Moore described, where ideas come at you from anywhere and everywhere. And guess what? You can too!

You want to know how?

I think it's pretty simple, actually. I think it's in the deciding that this – writing – is what you want to do, above all else. And by “above all else,” I don't mean retiring to some mountainside shack and becoming the Unabomber of comic book writing. I simply mean that you make a conscious decision to focus your energy on a concrete goal (“I wanna be a writer, darn it!”) and then you stick with that, and you put more time and more energy into it, and you spend less time and less energy with your PS2 or Monday Night Football or bowling or Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin or whatever black hole your time and energy used to get sucked into.

And if you stick with it long enough, and focus enough energy on it, you can tap into something magical about this crazy universe we live in.

Oh, it's not like flipping a switch or rubbing a magic genie bottle. But there's a mindspace you can live in, in which stories and ideas for stories are just right there, ever so slightly out of reach, out of focus – like those weird little air bubbles you see sometimes, but only peripherally, and if you try to look at them, they track out of your vision – but the thing is, these idea bubbles you actually can look at, can bring into focus and sharpen and refine.

Writing is never far from my mind, and if you want to write, it should never be far from your mind, either.

Where do I get my ideas?

Here, there, and everywhere.

Driving.

Being behind the wheel, as long as it's not on my way to or from work, always promotes a fertile mindspace for me. Once a week, I'll take a ten-minute drive to Pop-a-Top Liquor for beer, and that twenty-minute roundtrip, sans radio, alone with my thoughts, almost always yields up something worth jotting down when I get home.

Showering.

While my wife likes me to shower daily because it makes me “clean” and “fresh”, I insist upon it simply for the creative mindspace and idea-bubble-conduciveness of the whole experience.

Music.

I listen to music approximately 40 hours a week, whilst my brain is occupied with all manner of bizarre SQL, ADO, and ASP.NET insanity (aka, “web programming”). And while my brain is occupied with work, my creative mindspace is humming right along – lately, to the sweet sounds of Aimee Mann's Christmas album, One More Drifter in the Snow. Before that, it was her 2005 release, The Forgotten Arm. (And I must confess, on many occasions, it's Lynyrd Skynyrd, but that's research for a story, I swear!)

The thing with Aimee Mann is, she's just a ridiculously good songwriter. Listening to one of her albums is like reading a short story collection by Raymond Carver or James Joyce, only you can hum along to it and it's over in 45 minutes. On her Christmas album, she's backed by a small acoustic ensemble, and her versions of classic carols like “Winter Wonderland” and “I'll Be Home For Christmas” just evoke in me this image of a washed up lounge singer in a tiny bar in the Las Vegas airport, on Christmas Eve, and the weary traveler slumped at the bar, who won't be home for Christmas because he missed his flight, or it was cancelled, or whatever – but the thing is, it's visceral, and I can't listen to that album without thinking of characters and settings and panel progressions inspired by it.

And even if it's not story ideas per se, just the craft of writing for comic books is always in my mind. Particularly so on the rare occasions when I put down the notebook and decide to just watch some TV or a movie.

Lost is just absurdly good. If you don't watch it, you're depriving yourself of an absolute tutorial on writing: plot, characterization, setting, story structure – it's all there, and it's inspiring as hell! I've already got my _________ meets Lost idea cooking up, that will give me the kind of playground the Lost writers have in terms of a cast of characters to explore, in both the story present and flashbacks, and a uniquely developed environment that helps propel the story forward.

Because it's the holidays and I'm feeling all warm and Christmasy, I'll scoop you on the title to said comic book right here and now: Disco Apocalypse. (Yes, the __________ is actually Saturday Night Fever!)

Where was I? Oh, yes, TV and movies as sources of inspiration. Have you seen Jennifer Aniston in Derailed? The first maybe 20 minutes of that movie are nearly perfect: we meet the characters, get a sense of their personalities and what makes them tick, and just wham bam the story moves forward in a lean, economical fashion – just like a good comic book – telling us exactly what we need to know, no more, no less.

This one scene just killed me in its spot-on execution and its applicability to comic book writing. It would translate perfectly to our medium of choice. In it, Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, who've only recently met on a commuter train, make contact over the phone. He calls her. She answers.

He: “Lucinda?”

She: “Charles?”

Then BAM! Cut to them having lunch together, the first step down that oh-so-slippery slope (they're both married, and not to each other, you see).

So returning back to the original question posed in the opening of this week's column: why do you want to write?

It's a question worth asking of yourself from time to time. For me, the answer is like the snake that eats its tail, or a Mobius strip, or some other equally perplexing image.

I want to write today because two years ago, I decided I wanted to write, and the very act of wanting to write so badly gave me the necessary MindSpace and Idea Balloons to have ideas, and those ideas make me want to write so I can explore and give birth to them. It's like a mental snowball that I set to rolling down a hill two winters ago; it's gotten a lot bigger and stronger and now there's really no stopping it.

It all began with Desire. That's the thing. Decide that you want it, and then decide how badly you want it. And if you want it bad enough, get ready to wake up in a different life somewhere down the road. A life where writing is part and parcel of your life, where every day, your MindSpace is filled with Idea Balloons – and in December, if no other time of year, with Aimee Mann's Christmas album.

Footnotes & Bibliography

¹It is true that I've worked in web programming for nigh on 10 years now, and I am a firm believer in stacking the deck of search engine optimization entirely in my favor whenever possible!

Elton Pruitt writes comic books. His first published story will appear in Sequential Suicide, due in early 2007. He likes to imagine that “the Ecto” is a cool nickname/nom de plume. He hasn't smoked a cigarette in an astounding 719 days! And if you visit him in EltonSpace, he'll be delighted – particularly if you subscribe to his blog!