Writing in Cars (for mothers and others)

In class recently, one of my students at home with two young children talked about having left the house the evening before to write. She hadn’t been able to write all week, but in the twenty-minute reprieve she wrote three pages!

There is something magical for me, too, about getting out of the house—even when the kids are at school. The house demands—cleaning, laundry folding, perhaps a deeper purge . . . When I leave it for the library or a café, writing rises up again. It matters most.

Make it a habit to the house when you have the chance, I told my student, even if you only sit in the car and write.

Another student frequently parks her car at the beach or out at the ballpark to write. Another said when her kids were younger, she wrote in her car, and then another said that she wrote in her truck outside her son’s hockey games.

We can fool ourselves into thinking we need a room with a view or to clean first or to live a fantasy writing life we read about in an interview with Ann Patchett. Or we can use twenty minutes of precious free time as a vehicle for moving the story forward, shelter ourselves in the containment of what is possible now. Leapfrog the fantasies for the writing itself.

Where do you write?

After we started talking about this in class, I did a Facebook survey of the quirkiest places people write and got some fascinating answers:

Best writing I ever did was in a solitary confinement cell. Irony is I never for one moment out here felt as emancipated as I did in that cell with my pen on the page.

While running. I’ve composed entire plot lines and poems that way.

I did compose my wedding vows on my morning run the day of the event.

On an overturned cardboard box during a big flood. I wrote almost a whole chapter of my novel while wondering if the levee would break. At that moment I was a refugee of sorts, although it turned out that the levees held and I did not have to move to even higher ground.

Nowhere special. In class on my laptop before the students show up.

I write while in carpool line (not driving!) and sometimes I go to a museum, and sit in front of a great painting and write.

Yesterday I wrote in my walk in closet. A few days ago in the car outside my gym.

In a bathroom stall at a spa in San Francisco . . . The massage I got released more than tension!

While jogging, often. In meetings when someone’s droning on boringly, I’m taking notes on someone else sitting there. In meetings when someone’s being interesting, I’m scribbling down their quirky voice.

My husband wrote a novel in a car at Doran beach when our son was in preschool in Bodega.

Nabokov wrote much of Lolita in his car using 3×5 cards.

Love Candlestick or Holly Park in the backseat with my latte.

In bed–I have Lupus and my novel comes out in June–I wrote half the novel in bed!

In my one hour weekly writers’ group. Over 20 years!