Hey! I’m Scot Butwell.

Do you want to be a writer?

 

Have you thought about starting a blog or writing a book?  Do you feel you have something to say that others need to hear?   Do you have a story you want to tell? Or have you started to write but feel stuck in some way?  

That’s why I started The Writing Booth.  

 

I want to encourage you to discover your creative self
and find your voice and, most of all, not be afraid to pursue your writing dream.

 

My Writing Journey

THE BEGINNING 

My love for writing began  in high school when I joined the newspaper staff in my junior year. 

 

My teacher also recommended me for a journalism camp taught by professional journalists. 

 

I grew up playing sports and went to basketball camp every summer at the university where my dad worked.  To me, learning how to write different types of articles—news reporting, feature stories, sportswriting, movie reviews, magazine writing—was just as much fun as playing basketball all day at basketball camp.

 

I felt my dream shifting from basketball to writing.

 

The camp reinforced my love of writing, and my passion for it must have been evident because Mrs. Little, the school newspaper advisor, asked me to teach the class what I learned at the journalism camp.  

 

I met the assistant sports editor of the Los Angeles Times at the camp, and because of this I was able to write sports articles for the suburban section of the Los Angeles Times as a teen.

I DECIDE TO WRITE A BOOK

My desire to write grew in college. I was an intern at a newspaper as a freshman and junior in college. 

  

I also wrote poetry and had poems published in the university’s literary and arts journal. 

 

What I really wanted to do was combine my love for journalism and literature and write a memoir in the style of Tom Wolfe (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and Jack Kerouac (On the Road), both known for their unique styles of writing in their era.

 

I had a great idea for a book.  While in college, I took a job as a cab driver with a plan to write about all the interesting people I picked up.  While waiting for my next passenger, I studied the craft of writing, reading books by two of my favorite authors, Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski.

 

It was going well.  I was meeting a bunch of people with strange lives.  I was keeping all my notes in a notebook I kept with me in the taxi.

 

Then on a rainy, foggy morning, racing through an intersection, I crashed the taxi.   

 

And crashing a taxi when it’s your fault means your taxi driving days are over.  

 

And so was my plan to write the book.

 

But I still wanted to write.  

LOSING MY IDENTITY AS A WRITER

I graduated and got a job working for a newspaper. My main responsibility was compiling a horse racing page with gambling odds for local horse racing tracks. I also wrote feature and sports stories. 

Life was good. 

And then, one day I showed up for work and the sports editor asked me to come into his office. 

“There have been typos in the gambling odds. You know people bet money using these odds. You can write a letter of resignation or be fired. It will look a lot better if you resign… “ 

I was 24 and crushed … but I suppressed my feelings of loss for years.

Between crashing the taxi and giving up on my book, and then losing my job at the newspaper, I lost my identity as a writer. 

On top of that, my girlfriend broke up with me.

I didn’t know what to do next. 

I felt depressed and hopeless. 

I had a college degree.  I wanted to write but that wasn’t working out.

What would I do with my life? 

Turning to God helped lift the gloom …. and I left my dream of writing behind.

I GOT A JOB AS A TEACHER

I became a teacher and finished my Master’s in Literature.    Aside from writing a few magazine articles here and there, I didn’t pursue writing for fifteen years.      

 

But just because I wasn’t pursuing it or talking about it didn’t mean my desire went away.

 

Working as a teacher allowed me to keep the loss of my passion for writing buried within me.

 

I helped students learn to write, but I wasn’t writing myself.  

WRITING AGAIN

 

I always felt I would write a book when the right subject came along.  The truth is I didn’t allow myself to think about my writing dream because it hurt too much.  



When our son was diagnosed with autism, my wife suggested I start a blog and write about what I was learning about autism and being a dad.

 

 

I am  now turning that blog into a book.

PANDEMIC

Because of the pandemic and having an autoimmune condition, I was out of the classroom on medical leave for a year. 

 

There was a void in my life because I wasn’t teaching, and I began to write more.  

 

I discovered the writing platform Medium.com and published 340 articles in ten months.

 

Writing allowed me to heal the wound of letting go of my writing dream I buried so long ago.

 

I now share my writing insights on my YouTube channel.  I lead a group on Medium.com called Story Nerds, where we read each other’s writing and comment on the craft of writing.  

 

The truth is, I’m a guy who loves to write and study the craft of writing.