Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Ride to Write, Write to Ride

This is the first in what I intend to be a series about writing and riding. I do both. I make my living both as a writer and as a manager of writers--my day job is as a technical communications manager at HSBC, the 2nd or 3rd largest bank in the world (every place but the states), depending on who is measuring and what they're measuring. And one of my passions is writing book length works of fiction and non-fiction. So you could say I write to work and work to write. But I also ride to work (less so now that my commute is along Chicagoland's asleep at the wheel commuter filled expressways) and work to ride, so carrying the equation to it's logical end, I ride to write and write to ride.
So the upcoming thesis is simple: as writers, there is much we can learn from bikers. In fact, these two activities are so much alike that I wonder if many writers aren't bikers, and vice versa. Time to do some research--did the American greats ride? Contemporary big names--do they have motorcycles?
One contemporary small name does--me. For me, the open road is a blank sheet of paper, and a blank sheet of paper is the open road. This may seem contradictory coming from someone who preaches and practices the creative discipline espoused in NOVELIST'S BOOT CAMP, but
A) I have earned the right to contradict myself
B) F. Scott Fitzgerald, who I will now misquote, once wrote that "the true test of a superior intellect is the ability to hold two contracting ideas in one's mind at the same time."
C) There's more discipline in motorcycling than the uninitiated know.
And with those as teasers, I'll pick this up next time.

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