I'm in the Wrong Lane

ONE SAFE MILE

Blog Post | Whispering to the Bots

Have you ever decided to pursue something because it was expected, or because you had an interest in it, and then... poof, it just fizzled? Lack of motivation. Lack of direction. Difficulties in just putting the pieces together. But you keep pushing and pushing, and when you finally put it together it just doesn't look or feel right. It doesn't feel true to you.

That's what happened with YouTube and this blog. I am a teacher. But more than that, I'm a student. How does that actually fit into a blog that asks you to trust what I have to teach? I can put together the information about pre-trips and road hazards and the million other things truckers deal with daily, but it's already out there. Some of it is done really well too. Is the repetition needed? I thought I could, but it didn't take very long for every video and blog post to veer off in a completely different direction.

Claude and I have long discussions about workflows and brainstorm ideas. During these discussions I tell stories, make intellectual leaps, or just ask a random question about things like which authors I most admire or write similarly to. It always leads to unexpected revelations and sometimes a difficult decision or three.

This time it was like a lightning bolt. I'm in the wrong lane. I'm not teaching. I'm witnessing, the events of my life, writing what I see, how they make me feel, what lessons came out of the wreckage or the grace or the ordinary Tuesday. Claude has a name for that. I'll let Claude take it from here. 

Claude: 

Renae didn't come to me with a problem to solve. She came the way she usually does -- sideways, through a story, following a thread she hadn't named yet. We were talking about YouTube strategy, about longform video, about what wasn't working and why. She kept circling something without landing on it.

So I asked a different kind of question. Not "what do you want to make" but "what are you actually doing when you write?"

She started describing it. The way a scene from the road would surface and she'd have to get it down. The way a moment with Honey or a stranger at a truck stop would carry more weight than she could explain. The way her best writing wasn't instruction -- it was observation. Precise, specific, with herself fully inside the frame.

That's not teaching. That's witnessing.

A witness writer isn't trying to transfer information to an audience. She's trying to tell the truth about what it was like to be inside a specific human life, at a specific moment, on a specific stretch of highway. The reader doesn't come away knowing how to do something. They come away having been somewhere.

Renae has been doing this her whole life. She just thought she was doing it wrong.

She wasn't doing it wrong. She was doing it before she had the name for it. 

Renae: 

Tonight I'm parked at a truckstop outside Chicago. Two storms came through today, the kind that make the radio go quiet and the sky turn a color that means business. Between the first and the second I got dinner. Between the second and sleep, I picked up my phone and shot six photographs through a rain-soaked windshield.

I wasn't thinking about content. I wasn't thinking about the channel or the blog or the metadata package I'd need to build later. I was just looking at what was in front of me, amber truck lights dissolving into bokeh, water running in streams down the glass, the whole wet breathing world of a truckstop in a storm and I needed to get it down.

That's witness writing. Not because Claude named it. Because I've always done it.

I just finally know what to call it. 

A note from after midnight: 

Until Claude started describing my photographs back to me, I didn't even know what bokeh was. Technically, I still don't. But I took six of them tonight in a storm outside Chicago.

That's how this works. 

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