Indy Comics Writer

There are so many silly things that distract me from my writing: the Internet, the Bears game, the White Sox game, a good book to read, a good comic to read.

Then there are the importantthings that do the same: my family, promoting my writing business, studying comics written by true masters of the field. Some days it’s a wonder any writing gets done at all.

The trick, I think, is to accept that there are important things that will take you away from writing, even when you desperately want to put some words down on the page. But if you can resist, as much as possible, the silly things — like that Bears game I sat through this weekend — that take you away from your writing, you’ll be OK.

Take this weekend. Torrential rains hit the Chicago area. We set a record, actually, for rainfall on Saturday. The basement on our 80-year-old home didn’t handle this well. This meant that I got to spend the entire weekend pumping rainwater out of it.

Understandably, that took a lot of time away from my writing. The mistake I made, though, was in wasting time on the Bears game, surfing the Internet and basically just puttering away my writing time.

People who don’t write for a living don’t understand how challenging it can be to actually sit down and write. There are days when it’s the last thing I want to do. Problem is, if you want to become a great writer — in any genre — you have to write, and you have to do it every day. We all know people who talk, talk, talk about their next project. When it’s time to write that short story, comic script or novel? It never happens.

So don’t waste all that precious time. There’s never as much of it as you think.

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