This column was published in the Santa Barbara News-Press on 2 January 2022.
My first road novel, Motional Blur, the result of rolling around seven western states in my Clubhouse on Wheels (COW), was published in 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing in New York City.
A second, Book Drive, was published by Bartleby Press last July.
This column is the tale of how the COW was born and led to road novels.
I almost joined a private “social” club in 2013 but, at the last minute, came to my senses. The price tag was steep and I had a sense that I would be imprisoning myself in a secure cocoon of snobbery and exclusivity.
Instead, I opted to use the entry fee to create a traveling fellowship of like-minded adventurers beneath a rolling roof that ventured deeply outside my comfort zone; the road to everywhere instead of nowhere.
A Clubhouse on Wheels (COW).
Out of it evolved road trips and road novels, based on a methodology I soon created.
HOW TO TURN A ROAD TRIP INTO A NOVEL
It starts with an idea that kicks around in my mind, giving birth to characters, cultivating a plot.
The late Thom Steinbeck of Montecito once imparted this bit of wisdom on me that he’d been told by his famous father, John, who wrote Travels with Charley, arguably the best road book of all time: “You should carry a story in your head, live with it a while before trying to write it down. You should be able to take a lie detector about your story and characters before setting pen to paper.”
Only then, after months of scribbling notes about plot development and characterization, am I ready for the road.
Or so I thought.
I had planned a cross-country jaunt as the setting for my story. However, the day before departure (in late June 2014), I had second thoughts and changed the itinerary.
My reasoning: Driving cross-country means too much time in a vehicle and not enough in the places that provide the aromas, flavors and sounds I’d want for peppering my prose.
More important, a cross-country drive is something of a cliché, and I felt that my highly original novel deserved better treatment.
Instead, I carved a new route that took me from home base in Santa Barbara through Las Vegas, Nevada and into Park City, Utah—a 12-hour drive—for the first overnight.
This establishes motion. The essence of a road trip—and my novel—is motion.
Such motion needs to be conveyed to the reader as if he/she is present, sitting in a car motioning along with the story’s characters, overhearing dialog, enjoying the scenery and witnessing every nuance.
Kerouac’s On the Road achieves this with “spontaneous prose”—part of the reason for its enduring success.
For that road trip, I took with me a friend who would partly form the character of my first-person protagonist. I wanted to see how this individual reacted to outside-the-box situations and unexpected events, reactions that would later become part of the story I wrote.
Now all I needed to do is enjoy the ride; observe; take lots of notes as our journey wove from Utah to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and up to big sky country in Montana before veering southwest and rolling through Idaho, across Oregon and finally alongside the Coastal Redwoods of northern California.
By the time I got home, I had a journal packed with detail and a mind stimulated by new experiences.
That’s when the fun begins; what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called taking all that chaos and birthing it into a dancing star.
I know, from experience, that the time to write arrives when I can’t not write i.e., when a first line, or three, reverberate around my skull until, like a volcano, they erupt from my fingers onto a computer screen. Thereafter the words continue to flow like hot lava.
I write the way I road trip: End a writing session (or overnight somewhere) knowing where I’m heading next, so I will awaken in the morning with direction, excited to continue.
This—the writing—is the fun part; it is where I get to weave genuine setting with fabricated story, a marriage of journalism and fiction.
Restaurants, and the aroma of indigenous dishes, are woven into my story along with real people encountered along the way.
Even random incidents become anecdotal to the plot, a verisimilitude that can never be accomplished by staying home and studying Google maps.
During the road trip, my friend/protagonist got pulled over in Wyoming for speeding after he overtook an unmarked police vehicle. It went into my novel.
A piece of jewelry I purchased in Boise became one of the story’s most poignant moments.
While traveling, in real time, I published captioned photos and commentary on my blog, Clubhouse on Wheels, named after the vehicle (now retired, succeeded by Substack).
I cultivated a readership that followed my road trip blogging, but the real reason I ran this blog is so that once my writing erupted I could reference a chronological photo essay to assist my memory of all that happened.
Although my methodology is based on having a plot and characters in my mind before rolling off anywhere, it can, of course, be done the other way around: Take a road trip and be inspired by all the new stimuli and knowledge you encounter.
At the very least, you bring your senses alive and clear your mind.
At best, you might stumble into the story of your life.
A road trip is a metaphor for living and, better than any other exercise, teaches you that life is about the journey, not the destination.