Driving Lessons: The Write Speed
Writing your way to driving faster
“I have no interest in ever writing a book, memoir or anything else.” Said no one ever. Well, very few, anyway. It seems that most everyone wants to write a book, “someday.” And for everyone who does, I suspect at least ten more started, stopped, restarted, and have some form of unfinished collection of words.
Words. There’s some form of a most basic human need to put into words what we think, and often those words are put onto cave walls, stone tablets, paper, and computer files.
There are at least three reasons I write:
It helps me learn. A person doesn’t truly understand anything until they explain it to someone else, and putting that explanation into the written word takes this to another level. Perhaps the ultimate level. When I have a thought about driving, I have to write about it — in language that is simple, perhaps even to the point where a child can understand it. It’s only then that I have comprehended it fully.
I love sharing what I’ve learned and experienced with others. Why I feel that way, I don’t know. Is it ego, so I can show off how smart I am? I don’t think so, although there probably is a tiny bit of that deep down inside, because… well, who doesn’t have some of that in them? But I think it’s mostly that I love driving so much and what we learn from it that I would feel that I’m letting other people down by not sharing it with them. After all, everyone in the world should get the same joy out of driving that I do!
It’s my creative outlet. There was a time when I would draw — cars, old barns, scenery, and even a bit of some slightly abstract stuff. I went through a stage of woodworking, mostly building furniture so whatever money I did have could go towards racing and not on something I’d sit on or put books on at home. I like taking photos, although I never got into the art to the point of having fancy cameras. In fact, I like the challenge of capturing an image with a cheap camera or a smartphone. But writing is something I can do pretty much anywhere, any time. I even write in my head while hiking or sitting on a plane. It’s fun to play with the “timing and rate of release” (to borrow my favorite phrase about the use of brakes in performance driving) of words in a sentence.