I was driving in my ash grey Subaru, blasting music, to escape the monotony of my college room when it all came to me in a flash, the whole story laid out in my mind. I felt my knuckles go white as I gripped the steering wheel and my face uncontrollably transform into a grin. Something about creating a story in my mind, one that I simply cannot wait to start writing, shifts my body into automatic until I can sit down on my bed, notebook in hand, and get those words down on paper.
When I was in high school, driving was the main genesis of all my best writing. I lived in a small town on a somewhat abandoned street that neglected to provide streetlights. However seemingly straight out of a horror film it looked at night, my lifeless street provided the perfect lights-out racetrack for myself. Initiating at the dead end (it was, of course, the kind of street that simply stopped), I would turn up my music as high as it could physically go and press my foot on the gas until it reached 60 mph, which is when I turned off all of my lights and rolled down my windows, resulting in pure darkness and a cold slap in the face. After adjusting to the circulating blackness, the stars would begin to shine through the sunroof.
When talking about his experience while skydiving, Will Smith once said, “God placed the best things in life on the other side of terror […] at the point of maximum danger is minimum fear.” When I was flying into darkness, stars above me, crisp air on my face, I always felt the least bit afraid. And this is when ideas would simply rush into my brain fully formulated about what I want— no, need, to write about. After time had passed and I had shifted from high school to college, I had to leave that street behind— the inspiration to every story I had ever written, the antidote for all forms of writer’s block, and the only place I felt truly and utterly without a worry in the world.
I spent my first year and a half of college forgetting how to write, or so it felt like. I relied so heavily on my lights-out racetrack method that I didn’t fully believe that I could write without it. In the spring semester of my sophomore year of college, I took a fiction writing class in which our main assignment of the semester was to write a short story. Halfway through the semester, I had nothing. I attempted writing exercises to see if any grand enough ideas appeared on the page, I read constantly to see if any novels inspired me, and I even went back into my old writing to see if any of my shorter stories could be expanded upon. After exhausting what seemed like every writer’s block remedy I was taught growing up, my brain felt like a huge pile of bubbling molten lava and my hands had indentations from where my pen lied that looked like little skin potholes.
When I felt my knees buckle under the pressure and my motivation creep to a halt, I decided to go for a drive headed nowhere in particular. I was driving in my ash grey Subaru, blasting music, to escape the monotony of my college room when it all came to me in a flash, the whole story laid out in my mind. I felt my knuckles go white as I gripped the steering wheel and my face uncontrollably transform into a grin. “Ring of Fire,” by Johnny Cash suddenly started blaring through my speakers, which, at the time, I remember being odd since I rarely ever heard him cycle through my Spotify playlist ‘Recommended’ section. My heartbeat fluttered as ideas popped through like a slideshow in front of my mind’s eye.
I sped back to my college home and banged out the first 5 pages. Day after day, I played Johnny Cash, what I soon viewed as the inspiration for my cult-inspired short story, and simply wrote. I set aside 3 hours a day to attend to this ritual of music and writing. It became therapeutic. This then turned into rewriting, which led to editing, which ended in perfecting, and then it was done. At this point, I felt such a connection to what I had written that it could not even compare to any euphoric feeling I had felt prior.
Since then, I have written so much more, finding new ways to inspire me every day. I have found inspiration in the people who inhabit my life, those who build me up and those who tear me down. I have found inspiration in the memories I hold in my heart, old and new. I have found inspiration in every new place I venture to, the places that give me hope and the places that cause tears to roll from my eyes out of terror and anxiety. I have found inspiration in myself, who I was and who I plan to become. And now it’s two years later, and here I am, finally planning on how I wish to transform the short story that started it all into a novel; a dream in which I never fully felt that I could accomplish (so why start?). I’ve come to realize that everything I ever needed to write was passion and that was simply and sweetly within me from the start.
When I was in high school, driving was the main genesis of all my best writing. I lived in a small town on a somewhat abandoned street that neglected to provide streetlights. However seemingly straight out of a horror film it looked at night, my lifeless street provided the perfect lights-out racetrack for myself. Initiating at the dead end (it was, of course, the kind of street that simply stopped), I would turn up my music as high as it could physically go and press my foot on the gas until it reached 60 mph, which is when I turned off all of my lights and rolled down my windows, resulting in pure darkness and a cold slap in the face. After adjusting to the circulating blackness, the stars would begin to shine through the sunroof.
When talking about his experience while skydiving, Will Smith once said, “God placed the best things in life on the other side of terror […] at the point of maximum danger is minimum fear.” When I was flying into darkness, stars above me, crisp air on my face, I always felt the least bit afraid. And this is when ideas would simply rush into my brain fully formulated about what I want— no, need, to write about. After time had passed and I had shifted from high school to college, I had to leave that street behind— the inspiration to every story I had ever written, the antidote for all forms of writer’s block, and the only place I felt truly and utterly without a worry in the world.
I spent my first year and a half of college forgetting how to write, or so it felt like. I relied so heavily on my lights-out racetrack method that I didn’t fully believe that I could write without it. In the spring semester of my sophomore year of college, I took a fiction writing class in which our main assignment of the semester was to write a short story. Halfway through the semester, I had nothing. I attempted writing exercises to see if any grand enough ideas appeared on the page, I read constantly to see if any novels inspired me, and I even went back into my old writing to see if any of my shorter stories could be expanded upon. After exhausting what seemed like every writer’s block remedy I was taught growing up, my brain felt like a huge pile of bubbling molten lava and my hands had indentations from where my pen lied that looked like little skin potholes.
When I felt my knees buckle under the pressure and my motivation creep to a halt, I decided to go for a drive headed nowhere in particular. I was driving in my ash grey Subaru, blasting music, to escape the monotony of my college room when it all came to me in a flash, the whole story laid out in my mind. I felt my knuckles go white as I gripped the steering wheel and my face uncontrollably transform into a grin. “Ring of Fire,” by Johnny Cash suddenly started blaring through my speakers, which, at the time, I remember being odd since I rarely ever heard him cycle through my Spotify playlist ‘Recommended’ section. My heartbeat fluttered as ideas popped through like a slideshow in front of my mind’s eye.
I sped back to my college home and banged out the first 5 pages. Day after day, I played Johnny Cash, what I soon viewed as the inspiration for my cult-inspired short story, and simply wrote. I set aside 3 hours a day to attend to this ritual of music and writing. It became therapeutic. This then turned into rewriting, which led to editing, which ended in perfecting, and then it was done. At this point, I felt such a connection to what I had written that it could not even compare to any euphoric feeling I had felt prior.
Since then, I have written so much more, finding new ways to inspire me every day. I have found inspiration in the people who inhabit my life, those who build me up and those who tear me down. I have found inspiration in the memories I hold in my heart, old and new. I have found inspiration in every new place I venture to, the places that give me hope and the places that cause tears to roll from my eyes out of terror and anxiety. I have found inspiration in myself, who I was and who I plan to become. And now it’s two years later, and here I am, finally planning on how I wish to transform the short story that started it all into a novel; a dream in which I never fully felt that I could accomplish (so why start?). I’ve come to realize that everything I ever needed to write was passion and that was simply and sweetly within me from the start.