I love long car trips.
I’ve always had this theory that all my fiction ideas are out there floating in the air, just waiting for me to grab them. And that the harder I smack into them, the better they stick. This was why, as a very young child, I was somehow perfectly content to ride my bike no further than one driveway to either side, so that my mom could look out our front window and make sure I was zipping by with some regularity. I would pedal that same 200 yards for hours, making up stories and talking through dialogue. Then, I would come in, boot up our MS-DOS machine, and write it all down.
When I was allowed to go further, I would do the same thing, but throughout the neighborhood, sometimes pedaling the same hill over and over again because with the rush of the downhill side came characters and dialogue and plot.
From ages 13-18, I had a season pass every summer to the amusement park near my home. I would get my mom to drop me off (and later, drive myself), and arrive with a water bottle, a notebook, and a pen. I would spend the day riding the coasters and inevitably leave the park with material for story after story. If riding downhill on a bike caused story ideas, hurtling through the open air at seventy miles an hour was an even better idea.
Nowadays, my “smacking into ideas” happens mostly during long drives (though it’s been a few years since I’ve gone to an amusement park, and I think a visit is in order). Fortunately, I drive a lot by myself. So even though I’m hard at work using Camp NaNoWriMo to get as close as possible to finishing STREGONI, when my drive this week yielded a chapter of ONE DAY, I dropped everything to get it down.
This story, I’ve mentioned before, is one of the oddest and most organic writing experiences I’ve ever had. Ask me when a plot point is going to occur in STREGONI, and I can tell you almost to the paragraph, even if it’s unwritten. Not so for this story. I know exactly where it’s going, and even almost every single step they’ll take along the way (at some points down to the actual dialogue—the exchange about Ann Arbor home prices was written probably a year ago), but I don’t know always when a particular piece will fit, or when these two are going to make a particular stride. For instance, on my drive, along with the scenes in this chapter, I also talked my way through the conversation Bella and Carlisle will have about his divorce…but when I came to put it in the chapter, I found they’re not ready to talk about that yet.
Much to my chagrin.
So, I’m just going to buckle my seat belt, and go for the ride. Thank you for coming along.
Have you ever considered to work as a truck driver? So you could drive and drive and drive and even get money for it? And I could get chapter after chapter and story aftrer story from you? 🙂
(I guess I had too much sun and too much coffeine today and combined with a glass of wine and the happiness about a new chapter of One Day it makes for a strange mixture with seemingly even stranger ideas…) 😉
I actually did want to be a truck driver when I was little. I thought it would be fun to be so high up.
My mother was unimpressed.