The Risk Taken

I ride my bike to the bus stop almost every work day — even in the winter. That sounds crazy, but it’s hardly that; biking in the winter is actually much more pleasant and not any more dangerous than in warmer seasons. With a few key pieces of clothing you will not get cold. In fact you’d be warmer than if you walked or stood around waiting for the bus. Trust me. Weather aside, winter biking is good exercise, saves gas money, wakes one up in the morning, and coasting down the bridge above my bus stop can proffer some nice vistas of the Allegheny River — views I wouldn’t get or experience the same way if I were going over the bridge in a car.

I’m sure that a few of the affable, middle-aged ladies that get dropped off right at the bus shelter must think I’m crazy to bike in the winter. But if I didn’t take that (admittedly mild) risk of removing the layers of metal and glass that an enclosed vehicle provides against the elements, I would be a few pounds heavier, a little poorer, and have one less nice thing to look at. Taking risks can pay off. The same goes for writing, because our characters take risks, and they take more grand risks than most of us will ever do…otherwise it wouldn’t be a story worth telling. Wouldn’t it make sense to put ourselves at risk, even if it’s just a smidge, like the characters we write about do?

There was a great scene in Stranger Than Fiction, where a renowned writer played by Emma Thompson sits in a torrential downpour with only Queen Latifah and an umbrella to protect her. They are watching cars travel along a bridge so that Thompson’s character can imagine a car crash for her current book project. She didn’t need to sit out there in the rain with her cigarette and an exasperated assistant to get the scene right, but it most likely helped (remember, if you’re a writer you have to smoke and, if it can be pulled off believably, be neurotically British).

Like I’ve said before, writers like to think of their vocation as something transcendent, something that they were made to do. When one invests so much time forming imaginary lives inside their head this manner of thinking can be a natural inclination. Physically, though, it’s really an unglamorous situation to an embarrassing degree. Someone enraptured in the actual process of writing a story can appear no different than someone eroding their life away playing Farmville or watching a Youtube video of an attractive women repeating the same sentence in different accents. Because of this we have to gussy up our pursuits with lofty phrasing and “no one understand my genius” self-vindications for overlooked manuscripts and concerned families. The job is naturally attracts introverts, who are (I think) averse to risk a little more than others. So writers who know themselves to be this way would do their work a service to do something out of the ordinary once in a while.