In the mid-1970s, I was a University of Florida law student hoping to avoid a legal career by becoming a successful fiction writer. To pursue this delusion, I spent my limited free time—usually a three hour chunk on Friday afternoons—writing a novel.
Early in January of that year, I saw an advertisement in the university newspaper for the annual Florida Writers Conference. The three-day mid-February event featured a guest novelist, a guest short story writer, and a guest poet. There would be lectures, workshops, and mix & mingle gatherings. For an additional fee, conference attendees could submit writing samples (chapters of a novel, a short story, or a few poems) and then meet with the appropriate guest writer for a private critique.
This caught my attention.
The guest novelist that year was John Knowles. And if you were among the many thousands of students of a certain age who read A Separate Peace as part of the standard high school literary canon, I need to add: Yes, that John Knowles. Even though attending the conference required me to cut three days of classes, the opportunity to meet with an author of his stature was too tempting to pass up. I registered for the conference and submitted three chapters of my work-in-progress.
After considerable mental build-up over the intervening weeks—in the most fanciful scenario, John Knowles would pick up the phone to call his publisher about the young writer he’d discovered—my “audience” barely lasted fifteen minutes. Mr. Knowles had read my submission, allowed rather tepidly that I “could write,” and strongly suggested for future reference that when I submit a portion of a novel I should submit consecutive chapters. (I had submitted chapters 1, 5, and 15, thinking that these were the best examples of my writing.)
At that point, most likely because there was nothing else to say, he asked what I did when I wasn’t writing. I told him I was a law student. He groaned, then paused thoughtfully, then predicted that if I became a lawyer and persisted in my quest to become a writer, finding the time to write would be my biggest challenge.
He went on to describe his strategy for writing A Separate Peace. At the time, he was working as an editor for a travel magazine. The job was stressful, and he found that the only time he could totally engage with his fiction writing was during his daily train commute on the New Haven Line between Connecticut and Manhattan. And so, he wrote A Separate Peace on that commuter train, hammering out a steady 500 words per day.
Admittedly, this personal anecdote meant nothing to me at the time. Daily train commutes? Full-time job? I was living a student’s life in North Central Florida. How was any of this relevant to me?
Fast forward approximately three years to a specific date: January 3, 1979. I had moved back to New York and was commuting on that same New Haven Line to my first day as a tax editor for a legal publishing company. Suddenly, two islands of time on a commuter train bookended my days at the office. How should I use this time? Read the tabloids? Sleep? Stare out the window? I decided I would use the time to write because . . . hey . . . that’s how John Knowles wrote A Separate Peace.
I began by carrying a briefcase loaded with legal pads and pencils. I would find a seat, preferably on the aisle and away from the window, take out a legal pad and pencil, and use the briefcase as a lap desk. And there I would sit. At first, I had nothing to write about. That law school novel was long abandoned, and I had no stories to tell because I knew little and had done nothing interesting in my life. But I carried a collection of quirky characters in my head, along with childhood memories and some crazy summer job experiences. I began to cobble this olio into stories.
Looking back, I now realize that by transforming a commuter train into a rolling office, I had done more than just use idle time to practical advantage. I had created a psychic space in which to write. Every aspect of the routine became a personal writing prompt: the rhythmic rumble of the wheels on the rails, the weight of the briefcase on my lap, the feel of my fingers curled around the pencil, the friction of the lead scratching across the yellow paper. And surprisingly, or maybe not, rush hour trains were amazingly quiet, filled with commuters who were sleeping, reading the tabloids, and either girding themselves for the day ahead or unwinding on the way home. There were many train rides when I wrote furiously for 45 minutes, many others when I simply stared, unseeing, through the empty page of a legal pad while I worked out plot dilemmas or character sketches in my head.
I sold my first short story in 1979—a bit of beginner’s luck—but it would be a long time and many commuting days before I sold anything else. I rode the rails for 30 years, pounding out eight novels (including a draft ghost-written for another author) and three dozen short stories.
My last train ride as a commuter was on December 1, 2020. I retired three months later. As a retirement gift, my daughter gave me a white noise machine as an aid for my writing. The machine generates 18 different soothing sounds—one of them the sound of a train. I wrote my first “sedentary” story to the sound of that machine. “Negative Pregnant,” which appeared in the Jan.-Feb. 2024 issue of AHMM, proved to me that I could write outside the confines of a commuter train. “Foxx Goes to College” followed and appeared in the May-June 2024 issue. Other stories are on the way, some waiting in the queue to be published, others in the queue to be considered.
My train excursions into Manhattan are rare now; my latest was to attend Dell’s annual Pre-Edgar Cocktail Party. I always carry a pen and a pocket notebook for these trips. Can’t seem to sit on a train without writing implements in hand.
Trace Evidence 