How I Write: In Which I Describe a Man Trying To Think Up Words All By Himself

It was Interstate 40 that made me want to write again.

Specifically, it was the hour I spent driving it each day, commuting from Asheville to my job as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired in Haywood County, North Carolina, hard by the Tennessee state line.  Once I arrived, I got out, stretched, and got back in my car to drive still more, from school to school, visiting students scattered throughout the county. 

I logged a hundred miles a day, most days.  I spent a long time looking out my windshield, wondering what would come up next on my radio.  These were beautiful drives – if you’re going to be looking out a windshield for large chunks of your day, Haywood County is a right nice place to do it – but after a few years I got tired of listening to music. I turned off the radio and started talking out loud, mostly to amuse myself, and after a while I brought a tape recorder along.  The next thing I knew I had the first two chapters of Just Maria.

I write best on the move. It started with the album reviews I wrote for The Austin Chronicle back in the 90s. I would grab a pile of new releases, throw on my Discman, and take myself a walk, stopping every song or two to scribble notes on a pad I kept in my pocket.  Soon enough, I ditched the notepad for a mini-cassette player, and before long I was composing the first drafts of all of my writing by talking to myself.  Out loud.  

Those novels I mentioned earlier, the essays, the children’s poetry?  All yammered out first into a recorder, and transcribed into print only later.  This blog post?  I’m talking into my phone right now, hiking the Pump Gap Trail in Madison County, North Carolina, a six-mile loop that runs along Silver Mine Creek and up to Lover’s Leap.  I’ll transcribe these words at home, sooner or later, and run ‘em through several edits before plunking them on this site.

I’ve found that writing this way is easier for me.  My thoughts flow more freely.  There is no blank page to mock me; no expectant cursor, so patient and unforgiving; no first draft of my clunky prose staring dolefully out at me from the screen.  I edit as I walk, going back and re-recording bits, trying out new phrases and giving notes to myself.

“Rework that first sentence, but make it funnier.” 

“That’s a little maudlin.  Try again.”

Just Maria was written this way, during the free time I had on my drives to, from, and around Haywood County.  At first I used my trusty micro-cassette recorder; later, I graduated to the Voice Memos app on my phone.  Occasionally I might stop for a stroll, to tackle a particularly troublesome patch of prose.  If you saw me in those days, circling the Lake Junaluska walking path while talking to myself, chances are I was working out a minor plot point in Just Maria.

I did this for years, spilling words into the blank spots in my day.  I would steal spare moments at night to transcribe those words.  I still wasn’t sure I would finish the book, but I convinced myself there was no harm in prattling on.  It made the miles pass by more quickly, that’s for sure.  As long as I liked what I heard when I listened back, I kept going.

Three years later, I had a book.

I planned to end this post by recalling where I was when I spoke the last words of Just Maria into my phone, more than three years after I spoke the first words of the novel on some lonely stretch of I-40.  What mountain pass, what lumber truck, what roadside cow bore witness to that moment, never knowing its significance?

It feels almost cinematic, this moment:  a writer, yours truly, speaking the final words of his novel into his phone, his face registering satisfaction, serenity, and already a sense of loss.  The world whirls past his windows as he ponders what it is he has just done.

It must have been so sweet.

But I don’t remember it at all.  Not one bit.

I must have cast my eyes ahead, and just kept driving.

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