This blog post is not about writing per se. It’s more about not-writing, due to vehicular problems on the road trip I just returned from.
My Itasca Navion has been a lemon from the very beginning, which could be kind of charming in a Milennium Falcon sort of way. Except that it’s been me it’s happening to, instead of some fictional character. So it’s actually been more inconvenient and dangerous than, you know, comically romantic.
I won’t get into details about what went wrong with it in the past, but in the first months after I got it, it had multiple separate incidents of serious engine computer problems and various other issues on both the chassis part (the Mercedes Sprinter van that’s the engine and drive train and most of the cab) and the house part (the Winnebago RV box that’s the shell of the turtle). At least it’s still under (extended) warranty, so I don’t have to pay for much of what happens to it. Except apparently headlights are only covered for the first six months.
On this trip, both headlights burned out at different times, which about doubles the number of headlights I’ve had burn out in my entire driving career. I also had a propane leak, which is as dangerous and disturbing as it sounds, and it sounds like a loud hissing with a sulphurous stench. Simultaneously there was a sewage leak, which would be as gross as it sounds except I don’t really use the built-in facilities. Also a hubcap went flying off somewhere in Atlanta, which is probably more a testament to some of the awful potholey roads on the outskirts of that city than to the vehicle’s assembly, though I suspect it wasn’t solidly attached (since the other three are still there).
The air conditioning started to malfunction in Florida, which isn’t really the place you want that to happen. It would be blasting lots of cold air goodness with loud wind tunnel sound effects and then suddenly not be blowing at all, though still sounding like it was blowing just as hard. I’m not sure that one got fixed right, since it didn’t happen for the two Mercedes dealers I took it to. We’ll see on the next trip, I guess, which is soon. Also, the rearward of the two ceiling fans failed, and needs to be replaced and ideally upgraded. And the TV antenna stopped working at some point; I don’t watch TV, so I’m not sure how long that’s been out, but I was trying to demo it.
The vehicle consumed a great deal of various fluids, more than it should have in my opinion for a three-week trip, including, oddly, antifreeze, and less surprisingly, the ever-delightful Diesel Exhaust Fluid, which is basically synthetic urine in a bottle (I am not making this up) that somehow cleanses diesel fumes. I’d had the truck serviced the day before I left, so it should have been good for at least 7000 miles…although, regarding that service, the first problem I had on this trip was that they’d put too much motor oil in, which I discovered on a Sunday, and which I had to have fixed at a truck workshop that I was just lucky was open. So who knows what state it was in really.
So, in addition to all the other majestic sights on this trip, I got to see the inside of several Mercedes Sprinter dealerships and Winnebago service centers. And there’s more to do at the local warranty service place before my next trip, which is soon. I did meet some interesting characters at these places, though, and generally received good service.
I just don’t understand how a new vehicle can have this amount of trouble without the maker going out of business. Or makers, in this case, since there’s the chassis and the house and they’re completely separate. These constant problems are really distracting when all you want to do is drive, look at cities to possibly move to, take photos, and finish the first draft of your novel. Instead you’re constantly worrying about whether you’re going to die in a fiery gas explosion or faint from heat exhaustion, or run out of some fluid you didn’t know you needed when you’re hundreds of miles from anywhere. It’s all the delights of boat ownership coupled with road hazards and traffic.
Though I still do like having my house, and my stuff, with me wherever I go. In principle.
In the last few months I’ve been talking a lot to a friend who was stalled in the novel he’d been working on off and on for a year or two. We’ve been discussing what we’ve learned from experience and books and trying to motivate each other, and in fact, the first of my road trips this year was with him, and we both wrote on most days, as I posted about before.
Among lots of other excellent advice (most of which I learned from other people and not my own brain) I told him that all he had to do to get started was to write for 10 minutes each day, even 5 minutes, just long enough to get a taste for it but not long enough to feel like it’s a pressure. He blew it off at first, then started doing it, and has been very consistent about it, as I was before these road trips began. He’s started doing hours at a time, which is rare for me. Now he’s very nearly done with his first draft, which puts him weeks ahead of me, and which also makes me proud of him.
I lamented to him several times over the last couple of weeks that I’d been breaking Rule #1 to the point where I might as well have never formed the habit in the first place. The first few times, he said it’s OK, you need to let things stew sometimes, to let ideas gel and problems to be solved by your subconscious, or whatever.
I told him that might work for him, but it’s not what I need, and it’s an unfairly generous interpretation of my slowed progress. Those sorts of inspirations and epiphanies do come to me in the shower or dreams or whenever, but productivity comes from following Rule #1 above all.
Finally he said, OK, you’re right. You do suck, plus you’re whiny. So go back to 10 minutes a day. (Some of that might be paraphrased.)
This, of course, was a really good point. I’d gotten to where I was expecting myself to do 1-2 hours per session, and it had become hard to find that kind of time on road trip days, so I was blowing it off entirely…when all I really had to do was 10 minutes to keep the habit going. Of course, it’s the rough gear shifting between mindspaces that’s hard, and probably takes more than 10 minutes to achieve after driving hundreds of miles, but the principle is sound.
I’ve said in the past that it’s much easier to keep a habit than form it. Now I’m going to have to find out. After I post this, I’ll be doing my 10 minutes for the day. Maybe even much more. I have to get back in the saddle.
Setting goals is another key to completing your novel. Maybe Set and Achieve Goals should even be Rule #2, though if I’m going to be declaring a whole set of rules I’ll need to put some time in to get them just right. Anyway, I haven’t done this as much as I should. So, my goal, now, shall be:
to finish my first draft before I leave for my next road trip in about 3 weeks.
Can I do it?
I guess we’ll see.
Meanwhile, my message to all working writers is, as always, follow Rule #1. Write every day! Don’t blow it like I did and have to form the habit again from scratch. 10 minutes is enough to keep yourself on the wagon.
Well, I’m home from my three-week trip across the southern half of the US. I saw a lot of places and took a lot of photos, which is my other sort-of-creative pursuit. I learned a great deal about photography on this trip, since for the first time I’ve been working with semi-professional camera gear. Maybe I’ll write a separate blog entry about photography. Also about the many problems my lemon of an RV had along the way.
I got about one week of writing done in the course of a three-week trip. This was due to the following excuses:
Obviously none of these excuses are worth a damn, with the possible exception of photography, which is at least a semi-creative pursuit. I’m not one of those people who views it as an art form, though, since it’s so much easier than, say, sculpture or painting or even writing. But it’s still worthy, in my opinion, and you have to get the shots when you spot them. Or maybe that’s pure rationalization, which is probably the case since it’s the less comfortable interpretation.
Rationale and rationalization aside, writing one week out of three is a clear violation of Rule #1: Write every day.
What am I doing about it? I’ll tell you tomorrow.
So I took those two road trips back to back and something just didn’t go right along the way, in terms of writing at least. Went to the Grand Canyon, took a bunch of pictures, that was fine. But—and I don’t know if it was tiredness or jadedness or just using travel as an excuse—I got very little writing done on that trip.
And worse yet, I broke my habit of writing every day. And it turns out I was right: that’s really bad. I still haven’t gotten back into it.
Now, I have spent time on some other things. Early preparations for moving, for one thing. Also I decided to take photography up a notch and research better camera equipment. There were a couple of other personal projects in there. And, I’m starting yet another road trip tomorrow: another research trip to figure out where I might want to move.
So the time hasn’t been a total loss, but obviously I feel very crappy about having done maybe five days’ worth of writing in the last three weeks.
This next trip I’ll be solo, and that should help. I shouldn’t be in a huge rush, and should be able to find time to stop to write. Bernadette is safely at the ex’s, where she seems happy enough, so that’s not a worry.
Maybe I’ll do some blog updates from the road, though that was never really my intention. I’d rather spend the time writing. But I do want to keep this going at a reasonable pace. One of these days I need to release the half-written, long-awaited entries on the third and fourth walls (blockades to writing that I’ve experienced). Hell, arguably what I’ve been dealing with lately is a wall in itself, although it’s not related to the writing work, the subject matter, lack of ideas or any of the usual issues.
I think foremost I have to re-form the writing-every-day habit. Maybe the distractions are over with for the time being. But the whole point is that nothing must ever be allowed to distract you from writing every day. If it happens even two days in a row (maybe three), you’re screwed…because re-forming a habit is a lot harder than forming it in the first place. Take it from me….
Not after I’m dead, because then I won’t bother updating this blog because I’ll be enjoying the unabated thrill ride that comes after…but I’m not supposed to say any more. No, post-mortem means I’m back from an 8-day trip and the question needs to be answered: Did you write on the road, Robert? And the answer is…I did, kind of, yeah. I’m as surprised as you are.
To frame the hardships involved, think about the mechanics of road trips. This trip was in a small RV (an Itasca Navion 24M) with one other person who is also writing a novel though that’s entirely coincidental. We drove between 300 and 500 miles a day, which is an easy pace, and didn’t really go through any barren regions like if we’d gone through Nevada and Arizona on the back roads featured in the movie Cars. (The town that cartoon was set in really does exist, sort of, and it is way TF in the middle of nowhere. Can’t remember its name, but I happened through there late at night on a random wandering trip late last year.)
Anyway, on this trip, we thought maybe we would trade off on driving and the other guy would go in back and write. There are seatbelts, incidentally, though I personally wouldn’t use them. You should though. As it turned out, we didn’t implement this procedure. It’s just too stimulating to be up front watching the miles roll by and enjoying the fact that we don’t live in some of the places we accelerate through. Although some of them are nice, including the hometown of everyone reading this.
What we did do was go to coffee shops, sometimes Starbucks, where the mocha tastes like hot chocolate in the same way the champagne tasted like coca-cola in that song Lola. Sometimes not, in places where mentioning the name caused safeties to be snapped off. In those places the coffee tasted like coffee, which is bad for me since in spite of everything, I rather dislike the taste or smell of it.
We would go in these places and buy something and sit down and write for about an hour fifteen to an hour and a half. It was ironic that traveling companion Jones happened to be quitting coffee that very week, so it was like dragging an AA rookie through bars, but sacrifices must be made in the name of rule #1 (Write Every Day). Various friends we were staying with along the way were very tolerant of this, even joining us in a couple of cases.
Incidentally, I posted on facebook a couple pictures of the unexpected flying and boating we did on the trip. I also performed the primary mission aspect of the trip, which was to spend time in Portland and Seattle deciding whether I might consider moving to one of them soon. (The odds are against it, though they’re both cool places.) But we’ll see after a number of longer road trips this year. I was also very pleased with the result of Bernadette bunking at the ex’s house, where both of them were reportedly very happy with the arrangement. (Bernie, with her little-kidlike/doglike behavior, is very entertaining to have around, and much less of an upholstery-destroying hellion with her claws trimmed, which I did before I left.)
Out of 8 days on the road, we wrote for at least 1:15 on 5 of them. That’s not perfect and it’s not every day, but it’s not bad considering that on previous trips there was nada. So, now I just have to do that on every single subsequent trip for the rest of my career. I’ll be taking another one in a couple days, to the Grand Canyon via Vegas, and there won’t be many Starbuckses, so I’ll have to find some other way.
As I mentioned last time, I’m going to be putting my daily writing habits to the test in a difficult new way this year. I have to travel more than I did last year. In fact, I will probably travel more this year than I ever have in a single year ever before.
To answer the obvious first question, yes, I’ll be very unhappy about leaving The Bern behind. But I’ve tried taking her out in the RV and she just makes cat-in-a-microwave kind of noises until I bring her home. It’s too bad, since I had her in mind when I got the thing in the first place. But sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to. Anyway, I think I have good arrangements made for her to stay with people who she likes. It’ll be even better if their dogs don’t eat her.
To answer the obvious next question, the reason why I have to travel so much this year, especially by RV, is that I want to move in the next year or so, but I don’t know where I want to move to. So I need to explore a lot of different places and see if any place appeals to me in a special way. As some short guy once said, I’ve put this off for far too long…I’ve lived where I am for three times as long as I’ve ever lived in one place before, and being fundamentally nomadic in mindset, I have to move. I’ve also been in a rural environment for a really long time, and while I like that kind of isolation and will probably go back to a rural setting one day, I think I’d like to be in a city for a year or so. We’ll see.
So that’s a key goal for me: to find the place where I want to move. Could be Seattle, or Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. Could be Austin, Texas, or Kansas City, Missouri. Could be Atlanta, or Florida, or who knows where. That’s sort of the point.
But another key goal is to keep writing daily. It is unacceptable not to do that. I want to finish the first book and get going on the next. I have to do it. Furthermore, isn’t the point of a writing career that you can do it from wherever you are?
However logical all of this sounds, it didn’t work out so well last year. As I mentioned before, it was a total failure; I did not write on road tripsat all. So what’s different now?
I’m counting on one thing: routine.
Before, I didn’t have the infrastructure of writing software, backup routine, familiarity with the tools, etc., but now I have. I hadn’t developed the writing every day habit, but now I have. The question is whether the write-every-day habit will carry over from a daily Starbucks routine to the much more involved task of finding a place to park the vehicle for a couple of hours (ideally with a view), parking myself on the RV’s little sofa, and really doing the work.
If someone else is with me and taking a shift driving, in theory I’ll even be able to write while on the go. Carsickness is not a concern. Loss of road trip cameraderie time is, though. The kind of conversations my friends and I tend to have on these kinds of trips often offer a gold mine of humorous dialogue that I really need to start writing down. It’s possible that would qualify as writing time.
That’s not even rationaliziation: I can’t imagine a better real-life source of hero’s journey banter than road trip banter. But I have to be careful not to let myself slide; documenting conversations to later mine them for dialogue is not something I’ve practiced, just like I haven’t practiced writing down descriptions of the places I’ve visited around the country and the world for later use as setting or backdrop.
A friend suggested that I could also look for Starbuckses on the road and do my writing there, and that’s not a bad idea if I happen to run across them. City people might say, but they’re everywhere, how could you not run across them? Of course, out there in the massive open spaces of most of the US, they are a little harder to come by. But it’s not at all out of the question that I would come across one every day or two, and when I do I could at least go and do the work in there.
So I guess we’ll see what happens. Bottom line is, one way or another, I will write every day on the road.
Conversely, I doubt I’ll update this blog as often on the road. On the other hand, there’ll be some nice photos and certainly some humorous anecdotes.
Well, this should be interesting. I’m going to put my hard-earned habit of writing every day to the test, in a crucial and hardcore fashion.
Last year I got a little RV after many years of wanting one. So far I’ve used it for road trips ranging from a couple of days to a 2-3 weeks in duration. I’ve driven it around about half the country so far, and up pretty far north in Canada. I’ll probably blog about the RV and some of those travels in more detail later, and you can see my photo record of previous trips (RV and otherwise) at http://gryphontravel.shutterfly.com. (Please let me know what you think of the photos and the trips, BTW.)
Last year, at the point when I was first seriously contemplating getting started on the writing project that this blog is about, I had planned to derive out of these trips the motivation, inspiration, subject matter, and excuses to write. I set up a dock for the laptop, the same one I’m using to write on now, where it’s rigged to the LCD TV in the vehicle and has a wireless keyboard and trackball. The TV is across from the little sofa, and there’s a table I can mount in one of two collars in the floor, in case I want to put the keyboard or the laptop itself right in front of me. I put a lot of thought into getting set up to be able to write.
As you probably guessed, the plan was an utter failure. I had all the starting problems that new writers always have, plus my own unique ones, but there was more. Being out on the road was a hindrance, not a motivator. There was always another 50 miles to cover, or exhaustion to give in to, or something distracting to see, or movies to watch, or books to read (my all-time #1 dominant excuse).
On these trips, sometimes I had internet access. But it didn’t motivate me to figure out the angles of getting started that require connectivity, such as researching and downloading and evaluating writers’ software, or trying to learn about social media. Sometimes I didn’t have internet access. But the isolation didn’t motivate me to buckle down and write.
Many of these trips were solo. Being alone didn’t motivate me to write when I stopped for a break or for the night. The rest of the trips were with a friend. Having another driver didn’t motivate me to write during the times I didn’t have to drive.
So basically, the idea of writing on the road was a total failure, despite the fact that there was nothing in the way but myself.
But that’s not gonna happen this year. It can’t. Because I have to keep up writing every day, and I have to take a lot of road trips this year.
So what’ll be different this time?
In the interest of shorter blog entries, to be continued tomorrow…
