Tell Me About Cars, Yours, And I Will Tell You Mine
On the devastation & elation of cars + traveling hundreds of miles without leaving + a step-by-step evergreen & infinitely effective writing exercise for mining any genre of story from remembered cars
This week’s structured, step-by-step writing exercise will take you on a clearly outlined journey intended to unlock the stories that live within or adjacent to the cars you’ve loved and hated. It’s an exercise you can use over and over again to bring you to places you wouldn’t otherwise arrive at in your writing process and on the page. And it’s an exercise you can use to generate new material or contribute to works in progress, or simply to till the fertile soil of creative memory for future work.
When I was little my stepfather drove a purple Chevrolet Impala, probably a 1967 model, which I hated with every fiber of my being. I hated it so much that even though I recognize now how that car was pretty cool, I still hate it.
Later, my mom drove a yellow Karmann Ghia. What a cool car! But it was really really small, had no perceptible heater (umm, Minnesota winters, anyone?), and, one time I got stuck sitting in the backseat of that car for the several-hour drive back from an extended family cabin trip (one I had not wanted to be on and did not enjoy) crammed between two siblings and a dog who’d been sprayed by a skunk.
My first serious boyfriend drove a tan Oldsmobile Cutlass. I loved him so much—and, in fact, so much more than he loved me (if he loved me at all) that during the period of my infatuation with him, something strange happened. Tan Cutlasses began proliferating in the Twin Cities metro area, to the point where they were blaringly visible on every street corner, highway, and parking lot. Tan Cutlasses here, tan Cutlasses there, tan Cutlasses everywhere. I’m telling you the god’s honest truth: this happened.
Later, I dated a boy who drove a vintage Cadillac hearse. That car had the best heater of any car I’ve ever known before or since. He also drove a maroon and cream conversion van and a school bus. None of those vehicles proliferated the way the tan Cutlasses did.
As for my own car history, I learned to drive in my mom’s Ford Pinto, which she’d occasionally have me take to the grocery store or gas station for staples or cigarettes long before I had a license. During that era, I also, once in a while, drove Mom’s Pinto to my job at Fannie Farmer, where I generally worked alone. This meant I had freedom to eat mint meltaways and bear paws until I was a little bit sick and needed salt, at which point I’d switch to the fancy nuts, which would make me feel at first better then worse, causing me to crave some sort of licorice or hard candy, and just like that the whole process would start over. That’s exactly the candy carousel I was riding one afternoon when my mom phoned me at the shop to tell me (thanks for the heads up, Mom!) that she’d contacted the police to report her car stolen, and that she’d instructed them to look for it at Fannie Farmer. Yes, there’s a story in this. No, I haven’t written this one yet.
The truth is, behind (or inside) every single one of these cars lives not just one story, but several stories, real stories, stories with despair and longing and hope and devastation. Cars are an incredible vehicle (sorry) for our most intimate memories, dreams, relational struggles, and human attachments.
Consider this astonishing excerpt from the flash fiction story “Grand Am” by Tyler Barton:
Bad cries were things she hid. They happened in the Pontiac. Driver’s seat. 9:45 pm. Just home from work. Headlights off. Seatbelt still buckled. He’d watch her from the window beside his pillow. Down there. Where the only light was the winking red eye of the Marlboro. How it shook in her hand. Grand-Am filling with smoke. When she finally crept inside, he was as bad at feigning sleep as she was at pretending to believe him.
Or this breathless and stunning final sentence from Brenda Miller’s iconic flash nonfiction, “Swerve,” throughout the entirety of which she braids a fateful drive:
I’m sorry, I said, and I said it again, and we continued on our way through the desert, in the dark of night, with the contraband you had put in our trunk, with the brake light you hadn’t fixed blinking on and off, me driving because you were too drunk, or too tired, or too depressed, and we traveled for miles into our future, where eventually I would apologize for the eggs being overcooked, and for the price of light bulbs, and for the way the sun blared through our trailer windows and made everything too bright, and I would apologize when I had the music on and when I had it off, I’d say sorry for being in the bathroom, and sorry for crying, and sorry for laughing, I would apologize, finally, for simply being alive, and even now I’m sorry I didn’t swerve, I didn’t get out of the way.
So those are just two examples of the incredible places cars can bring us if we follow them onto the page. This week’s writing exercise will take you there step by step. But before we get to the exercise, I want to tell you a car story of my own—it’s an original car essay that I later adapted for a short chapter in The Part That Burns, where it now appears in a slightly modified version called “Big Blue”:
The thing I miss most about living in the country is the very thing I eventually came to hate about it.
The long snake of black tar between one place and another, the empty distances, the endless driving. Oh, my God, how I miss the driving.
I miss going for days and days without leaving the house in winter, little babies, creaky floors, nowhere to go, no one to see. Four walls, big window, bare branches, frozen lake.
I miss stuffing those babies into snowsuits and then stuffing those snowsuits into car seats, clicking them in, and going, going nowhere, for hours. Sleeping children, warm car, barren county roads. I can’t remember anymore the times it didn’t work. The times the baby boy screamed instead of slept, the times the spirited girl, that untamed horse, pulled his hair or bit him. The one time we skidded on black ice right into the ditch as a storm kicked up on the last afternoon of December. I don’t care about those times anymore now that we’ve survived and nobody kept screaming forever or biting forever or whining forever or anything forever. They stopped those things, and it all turned out okay, and now I miss all that driving the way I remember it, which might be realer than the way it probably was.
The car I hated the most is the one I now recall so fondly.
Big Blue, we named it, because it was a boat, and it was blue. It was handed down from the in-laws for the eighteen hundred dollars it took to replace the transmission. We paid over time for this beast, large and unstylish with that dirty patch of duct tape on the taillight (smashed as it sat innocently in the small-town church parking lot—smashed, it would seem, by a fellow parishioner who drove away from the damage without so much as an apology note).
But I can’t remember the duct tape anymore, or the way driving that car made me feel like a cross between a grandpa and an unwed teenage mother. That’s not the way I remember Big Blue. It’s the heft of it that I recall, the solid slam of the door, the quiet way it hummed at high speeds—no shaking or whining the way these small tin boxes do. Big Blue had a way of rocking gently as it coasted that made me understand and appreciate the likening of large cars to watercraft. It’s a compliment, really, to call a car a boat.
I loved Big Blue, even though I was very, very happy when it died.
What I miss most about those country afternoons in Big Blue is the way it came to feel so normal to drive a long, long way to nowhere. Sometimes I took the children to the thrift store at the intersection that still poses as a town called Almelund. I’d carry my son on my hip while chasing my daughter around the store.
But the chase was made easier by the woman who owned the shop—her strange appearance entranced my curious little girl. The shopkeeper always wore floor-length skirts with aprons, and frilly blouses with high collars, small buttons, and puffed sleeves. She looked like Ma Ingalls on Sunday. I don’t know why she dressed this way. I never asked her. But she fit in pretty well with her surroundings.
The air in the shop was dense with must, and the place was crammed floor to ceiling with broken antiques and unusual junk. Out of politeness, I always bought some tiny thing—usually a ten-cent plastic toy to keep my active mare occupied for the long drive home.
But just as often as we stopped, we kept going. Farther east into Wisconsin, or north toward Pine City, children sleeping, motor whirring, road unrolling behind us like the world’s longest runner—steel gray and utterly inhospitable, except for its openness. The only choices to be made were trivial ones: turn left or right? Exit now or later? Turn around or keep on driving?
I miss the driving because I’ll never have it again. The country is behind me, the country with its right-wing politics and greasy-spoon food and frigid lake full of milfoil and disappointment. The country with its endless county roads crisscrossing each other and looping back on themselves, as senseless and difficult to decipher as the lines of an open palm. So many roads, so few destinations.
My children don’t wear snowsuits anymore, or ride in car seats, or remember much about Big Blue. They have places to go with specific routes to appointed stops that leave little room for rumination. The city is full of destinations, but short on empty stretches of tar, of time, of space, where a person can travel hundreds of miles without ever leaving. I don’t ever want to drive that way again, so desperately and without purpose, but still I miss it more than I can say.
So, cars provide us with such rich material for our writing. There are the cars we drive or have driven, the cars our parents drove when we were young, the cars our crushes drove, cars in which we’ve had sex, fought, perhaps even hidden (I once hid inside a car in my mother’s garage while she toured a prospective buyer through the house; it’s long story, I should probably try to write it someday). Cars are rich in part because cars represent journeys, and journeys are also rich in and of themselves. But there’s more. Cars can also intersect with personality, and even identity. And that is where things explode with fascinating possibility. It’s part of the reason this exercise can unearth so much crackling material, material that unearths meaning far deeper and more compelling than the cars that enshrined it. Material that can serve your work in surprising ways, and that you can tap into over and over again with this single, elastic, repeatable exercise.
Writing Prompt: Tell Me About Cars, Yours, And I Will Tell You Mine
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