Not my commute
One person’s magic writing studio may be another person’s awful bus ride
A colleague of mine wrote her book riding the M4 bus down 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Not in one sitting, but over the course of many 45-minute rides to work. A city bus is no dreamy writer’s studio, but when Laura told me this, it lodged in my aspiring mind as a romantic scene of resourcefulness, fortitude, and consistency of craft. “I had a laptop and would balance it on my purse,” she said, describing her makeshift desk. With this detail, the image burrowed further in.
It resurfaced a few weeks later as I was making a difficult decision about which of two jobs to take. I drew up lists for each job, itemizing the pros and cons and even applying a point system to each item, hoping it would might make a gnarly decision more clearcut. One stark difference between the two jobs was the commute. Traveling to the more interesting job could take 1.5 hours each way, and entailed crossing a lake and multiple bus changes at peak travel times. The commute to the less interesting, but more secure, better-paying job was about half the time and simpler.
Being a sucker for the seemingly less boring prospect (and intrigued by the mention of “artificial intelligence”), I chose the more interesting job with the terrible commute. I believed I was being clear-eyed about all the accompanying cons. But, if I’m honest, each time I thought about the lengthy commute, the image of Laura on her commute bubbled up. If I could see her distinctly, tirelessly tapping away at a laptop perched on a purse, then maybe I could see myself writing on the bus too, crushing that Eastside commute.
Laura’s approach spoke to me. What I heard was that a writer didn’t need a sabbatical, visitations from a muse, a quiet room of her own, or Cal Newport-level “deep work” to finish a project she cared about. Look what she did with a set amount of dedicated time that recurred daily. For Laura, that limited window (the 45–60 minute bus ride) became a writing timeframe that she preferred. And the magic of being on the bus, she told me, was that she couldn’t wander off to the internet from her laptop, so there were no lost hours to Facebook or email.
But as with many romanticized visions (and finishing strategies), what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another person. I did attempt to use my long Microsoft commute to write, I really did. But here’s what actually happened during my journey from Greenwood to the Green Lake park-n-ride transit hub, through the University District, across Lake Washington and Mercer Island on the 520 bridge, and overland to the behemoth tech campus stamped into the Redmond woods: I stared out the window. I texted. I wrote emails on my phone. I copyedited two art catalogs for Basquiat exhibitions in Japan. I did some work-work. Listened to podcasts. Read a little. But if I read too much, I got carsick — or bussick? Anyway, nauseous. I usually got a seat on the longer bus ride in the morning. I rarely got a seat coming home at night, jostling elbow to jowl with other commuters. (The shared air and germ-space now seems shocking.) I noted the youthfulness of other commuters and wondered if I really was too old for this. I gazed out the window some more, and sometimes, while glazing over, I admired the varieties of grey in the lake and sky. Infrequently, the grey would part and I’d catch a view of Mount Rainier, Tahoma, to the south. I saw the “Connector” shuttles reserved for full-time Microsoft employees zipping ahead. When I did, I ruminated on all the ways that we who were “vendors” at the tech company led a shadow, second-class existence, bereft of perks such as better commutes in private shuttles. Gradually, I replaced the crowded bus rides home with carpools, throwing my fate to the rideshare gods and wondering what that evening’s driver would offer: predictable small talk, pleasant chitchat, blessed silence, the crunch of potato chips, a short burst of road rage, or surprisingly out-there burps and other bio-emissions. The routine dread of never knowing how those rideshares would go offset whatever time I saved in the carpool lane. By the time a work-from-home mandate came down from the bosses due to Covid, I was long past ready to never make that commute again.
Of all the things I managed to do during those hours I spent commuting, writing a book was not one of them. For a time, I was disappointed in myself. Why hadn’t I been able to wrest those bus rides into a writing retreat? My romantic, self-pitying side wondered if this meant I wasn’t actually much of a writer. At which point my fried, middle-aged self interrupted and asked, again, wasn’t I really too old for this?
Eventually, with the job (and commute) in my past, and time to decompress, I forgave myself for not figuring out how to make it work. I realized that I’d been too doggedly literal about what was inspirational in Laura’s example. Her lesson in finishing was less about writing on a bus and more about these principles: The daily, recurring aspect of the commute. A limited timeframe for writing that she embraced as a generative constraint instead of viewing as “not enough time.” The absence of internet distraction. These were all finishing strategies I could — and do — take from her story.
I still like the heroic image of Laura creating her book on laptop upon purse within bus across town. And I’m still inspired by the notion that, in essence, a determined person can write a book anywhere. (And perhaps not incidentally, the book that Laura wrote is titled How to Write Anything: A complete guide.)
