Last weekend I watched Anna Tivel perform at a local bar. She had some new songs to play – and yes, it is a little too soon for me to be wanting a new album right after the last one came out, but I enjoyed them quite a bit – and the banter/explanation before one caught my ear. She wrote it on a drive from Los Angeles to Portland. After she said that, I reflected on how much of my own writing happens in cars. Usually when I’m stuck for a column idea, I go for a quick drive and ideas start to form.

While I used to joke about how it because there might be idea particles floating in the air and driving fast lets your head collide with more of them, there actually are practical reasons why driving might be the perfect activity to start getting inspiration. We have so many distractions and opportunities to be entertained that the biggest challenge of creating something is putting that down and working. The device that I use to write is the same one that can get me lost on TV Tropes [1] or cat videos. It’s both incredibly easy to get your thoughts out there and difficult to have time to carefully formulate them. Driving forces you to put down the device. It’s the perfect activity for it. You have to stay awake but your distractions are reduced. What you can do while driving (especially if it’s a solo trip) is listen to the radio or music, either of which can give you fodder for ideas. It’s a more intense form of listening with fewer distractions.

If that isn’t enough, the road is filled with oddities. There are tourist traps and hitchhikers and – if the trip is long enough – you can go over mountains and through deserts and vast spaces and packed cities. There’s a sense of adventure that the open road gives. When trying to write, that’s always an advantage.

The trend among the newer generation is to move away from owning cars. The reasons are multiple: it’s cheaper to live without a car, there’s a heightened concern over the environment, and the movement is towards cities with better mass transit and bike support. Ultimately I support that goal. However, a bus or a trail is just a mobile living room. Tablets with cellular connectivity give you the same ease of distraction that usually can happen just at home. Unlike some, I’m not opposed to the new cell phone culture. I love having all knowledge available at every moment and it is fun to have myriad sources of entertainment. The only problem is that if you’re being entertained by others, you don’t have time to create something of your own.

It takes some boredom to inspire creativity. It’s so difficult to force that upon ourselves, but that’s the joy of the drive. The road stretches on and on and you can be alone with you and your thoughts. Planes are faster, trains are more romantic, but if the goal is to have time to reflect and think, to try to create something, driving is the best way to travel. This downtime is part of what made touring so intriguing when there were many changes of cities; after having an adventure, there would be a period of reflection. If you’ve never seen a band this way before, I can’t recommend it enough. Get in your car and cruise the land of the brave and free! It’s worth it!

[1] No link embedded because I don’t want everyone getting this far into the column and then reading that site for 10 hours.

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David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capital Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at http://www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html and he’s on the board of directors for The Mockingbird Foundation. He now tweets and has a daily update on the Phish Stats Facebook page

His book This Has All Been Wonderful is available on Amazon, the Kindle Store, and his Create Space store.