By the time I reached Utah – a writer discovers the creative benefits of driving on her own.

From Writers with Love
Extracts from books, guides and articles I believe will make me a better writer. They may help you too…This week KAREN PALMER

Writing in Motion

“A car is a contained world with ever-shifting vistas.”

Ideas flow when the body is occupied but the mind is unbound. At the desk, the phone is too often near; the screen issues its siren’s call. A car on the other hand is a contained world with ever-shifting vistas….

…I slipped under Barstow’s bridges at 85 mph, and I shifted into a slightly altered state, one in which a fix for an essay I’d been working on for weeks presented itself. I thought about pulling over and making notes — memory being a trickster these days — but decided not to. I said the words aloud. Repetition melded with the hum of the car’s engine, while mile after mile monochromatic scenery rolled past. By the time I reached Richfield, Utah, the journey’s halfway point, and checked into a motel, I’d “written” the better part of a novel chapter. I spent the evening hours getting everything down. Sentences begat more sentences. It felt like taking dictation. Which, in a way, it was…

Read the article in full on Lit Hub and stay to see what else they have to offer. It is a daily American website that specialises is literary fiction and nonfiction.

Karen Palmer is an award-winning American writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her memoir about escaping a violent marriage She’s Under There has just been published.

Picture Credits: Orange open road – Lit Hub
Driving – by Alex Chernenko on Unsplash