Friday I’ve got a five-hour drive to Texas to pick up some supplies. I’m looking forward to it more than I’m looking forward to most things this week.
I read a story a long time ago about a man in the Florida panhandle who had an idea for a training course. No time to write it, no discipline for sitting still. So he got in his car with a tape recorder, drove to Miami and back, and talked the entire way. Then he mailed the tapes to a transcription service, and what came back in the envelope was his course.
I’ve thought about that guy for years. What he understood was that the drive was the room. Nobody could reach him, he couldn’t do anything else, and the only thing left to do was think out loud until the tape ran out.
I do the same thing now, with the difference that everything he had to wait on and pay for happens in the passenger seat while I’m still driving.
The voice memo app captures it. Then AI takes the transcript and shapes it — sorts the wandering from the useful, pulls out the questions I circled without answering, hands back something I can actually work from. The first half of that was a real change. The second half doubled it.
One drive last year I came home with five hours of audio and over twenty-five thousand words.
Another drive, I built the bones of a novel. Outline, plot points, the world, the characters and what they’d do to each other — all of it riffing at seventy miles an hour, none of it written down until later. I got more done on that road than I’d gotten in a month at the desk.
Here’s what it actually looks like.
I start talking. Whatever’s on my mind — a problem at work, a project, a thing somebody said. When I hit something that wants unpacking, I ask for twenty or forty questions on it and then answer them one at a time, out loud, for as long as it takes. The questions pull me around to angles I’d never have found on my own, and because I’m just talking, real examples come up that I’d have edited out if I were typing.
It’s not a trick. It’s how I’m wired. I process by hearing myself, and I’ve known that about myself since I was a kid singing in the car. What I didn’t have until recently was anywhere to put five hours of it.
My wife is used to this. She’s known for twenty-eight years that I talk to myself to work things out.
What she’s said more than once — and I think this is the actual point — is that she’s glad I found a method that makes sense to me. Not a method that would work for everyone. This wouldn’t. Plenty of people need silence, or a page, or a whiteboard. She just means she’s glad I stopped trying to think like somebody else.
The panhandle guy got a course out of a tape recorder and a long road.
I’ve got a phone and five hours to Texas. We’ll see what’s in the envelope.
