The other day I wrote a little abstractly about creativity, and how pieces of writing come together out of seemingly unrelated threads. That’s how a lot of my writing works, not just the occasional “creative” essays but also a lot of my seemingly everyday, observational work. So today I’m going to think out loud about how some of my core urbanism writing comes together.
One of my favorite things to do is drive—yeah, I’m sorry—down my region’s older highways and just observe them. Semi-aimlessly meandering and seeing what I see, alone in my car, is a flow state for me.
The immigrant communities, the old buildings, the subtly earlier iterations of familiar roadside fare, like shopping centers with smaller anchor stores, situated closer to the road, or gas station buildings with exterior-entry restrooms.
It’s impossible to predict how much one of these drives will yield. Maybe I’ll see a Latino man with a machete slinging coconuts out of a pickup truck parked in a strip plaza, and that will fill out an example in an article about small business. Maybe it will become the central image for an article I can eventually sell to a magazine. Maybe I’ll try a new food item at a local restaurant and use it as a fun little “local color” detail, and receive an interesting or useful comment from someone who works in a restaurant or does business in that community. Maybe I’ll see a funny sign and make a joke to myself and say “That would make a great headline!”
It’s almost like I have a collection in my mind of little vignettes and details and one-liners I pick up from everywhere and store away to use here and there, who knows where.
Or maybe, as sometimes happens, I don’t really find much, and the handful of stops I pre-planned will be a bust, and yield nothing useful for an article unless I want to just pretend.
It’s almost like fishing—you’ll only “catch” so many worthwhile experiences or details out of all the “casts” you make, but the boredom and repetition and frustration are inherently part of the overall process.
However, I go back and forth on this. Part of it is that I’m good at arguing, and so I can almost convince myself of anything. I can argue, you know:
“These little road trips are a drive through America’s history, but also its future. It’s exactly the suburban places that have been used and left behind where the most interesting things are happening. Immigration is enlivening them. You can see a scrappy entrepreneurial spirit in these places that comfortable, affluent Americans seem in some way to have outgrown. Come drive with me.”
Then I can also say, “How many times do you need to write some little blurb about hardworking immigrants in rundown commercial strips? And anyway, it’s a waste of time and gas. Why do you need to spend half a day on the road and go spend money at some random restaurant so you can write the same thing again with a few different pictures that all look the same anyway?”
Obviously, I know which one I really believe, or I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. But I do sometimes doubt the value-add of actually doing the half-day on the road as opposed to exploring on Google Maps from my own home. How different is the final series of observations? I do think the “doing” is part of the point of the work, which is why I don’t like to outsource it to Google Maps, at least not completely (or AI).
I’d say that Google Street View doesn’t capture