Interstate Writing Time

Making my hour-long commute home today in taught me a couple of things. The first and possibly most important is that it would be nice to have a working air conditioner in my car. Sure the weather has been great here lately (by “great” I mean dark, rainy, and dreary) but we all know what comes next.

And I’m mostly saying this to remind myself, but once we do hit those 100+ degree days, I’ll need to drink lots of water before I leave work because I’m fairly certain that I’ll lose five pounds of what my high school wrestling coach would have called “water weight.”

So while that has nothing to do with anything, I just wanted to talk a little about how I use the drive to write. Yes, write. It’s not always about rolling down the windows and cranking the AC/DC, after all.

Besides, if the kid in the next lane can text on the intestate–oh stop it. I’m not writing while driving for real; I’m writing in my head.

Maybe writing isn’t the best term for, as it’s often more of a brainstorming thing, but my point is really that when you’ve got a busy life and are maxed out on time most of the time, you have to try to find every opportunity you can to follow your dreams.

So I do the best I can with the two hours I spend on the road Mon-Thursday and come up with ideas.

The only drawback about the daydreaming/writing when driving is that the ideas pop out just as quickly as they pop in, so you have to figure out a way to trap them before they run off. Or at least be able to quickly jot down some notes first thing when you get home.

So writers out there, if you’ve got a long solitary drive ahead of you this summer, take advantage of the quiet time by turning up some hard rock and fantasized about fun stuff. And then turn that fun stuff into some great fiction.

What places do you do your best daydreaming? How can you better utilize the time you do have to yourself? Feel free to share in the comment section.