When writer Nick Petrie got stuck for ideas for his new novel, he loaded up his camping gear and took a road trip.
“Now, I have a rule for solo road trips. I’m only allowed to listen to the radio until my local stations fade into static,” Petrie writes. “So once I’m out of FM range, I’m stuck with my own thoughts.”
While to-do lists and other mundane worries take over at first, after a few hours of driving, Petrie chills out and lets his thoughts wander over the passing countryside. In a day or two, he reaches Nebraska, where he believes his novel will take place. “It likes the look of these flat plains and rolling hills, the contrast of this rich farmland, once the source of American prosperity, now dotted with abandoned farmhouses collapsing on themselves,” he writes. “By the time I stop for the night along the Missouri River, I know it’s about Helene. I know how she gets from that lonely Montana gas station to a gravel road in Nebraska. I know how she meets Peter, and I know the beginnings of the challenges they will face, apart and together. I don’t know anything else, but I don’t need to. It’s enough. I’m on my way.”
Now that the book is written, it feels to Petrie as if the outcome were inevitable. Even some of his false starts ended up in the finished novel. “This is part of the magic of writing, for me,” he says. “There is a primitive part of each of us, developed during humanity’s earliest days, when we had nothing but fire to brighten our nights. We sat around the flickering flames and wondered where lightning came from, or why the sun rose and fell in the sky. We told stories to ourselves, and each other, to ease our fears and make sense of the world’s mysteries.”
