Writing and driving
I often work on my writing in the car. I don't write while I'm driving, but I turn ideas over in my mind. I "met" Alpha Breville, a major character in my new novel Thief, one day when I was driving from Park Rapids to Bemidji. After the corridor between Lake George and Kabekona, after Highway 71 turns north again, the name for the character came to me, and I understood him clearly. Sometime later, on a different section of Highway 71 close to Itasca State Park, the whole shape of Thief came to me. I'd known for some time what the content of the novel was, but that day, driving, I got a sense of the whole: how to put it together, what its flow was, what its energy was. The book became animate for me, and I felt like I could hold it. I drove past spruce and jack pine and lowland and got used to the feeling and presence of the book. I had to wait months before I had the time and emotional focus to write what I saw so clearly that day, but the vision of the book and the feeling of the book that came to me that day never left me. It guided me, and I stayed true to it.
There's something about the act of driving that helps me think, but it's also the landscape I'm passing through. The regular border of road ditch followed by lines of trees, or in spots where the water table is high, sedges and reeds and water. My eyes and part of my mind are busy scanning for deer, but the other part of my mind is seeing space, thoughts, what isn't there. Even the car seems to disappear. I'm just moving through space.
And I always seem to be headed north when things come to me. Not south.
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