When I decided to write Stays Crunchy in Milk one of the big things that drew me to the story was the idea of getting to write a road novel. I’ve always had a love of road stories, really. Something about putting some folk out on an adventure, a traveling journey, that just makes me smile.

I can write about, say, Boston and tell you everything I want to about the city. I can talk about what it looks like what it feels like and so on down the endless paths of possibilities there. But if I use a few characters and instead of telling you what I think, reflect what they feel and think through the city – show their experience colliding with that the city is and has and get that reflection together … you can get an incredibly complex view. A view not only of the city itself but also of each one of those involved characters. I love that.

The whole thing serves so many different masters and creates such an interesting and big picture it can be addictive to me, both as a reader and writer. So when I sat down to write a novel I realized I wanted to take these characters on a journey, make them move away from comfort zones and explore into places they’d never even heard of. It let me find my own feelings on a lot of things and it taught me more and more about each character as I went.

I mean look I can sit here and say “Well Character X will jump if a spider walks into a room” but there’s no way to run every permutation beforehand. Nor, I think, should you. Because the next time they jump they could learn something from it. People do that, after all. So every experience adds to the last and every time you have something utterly new you have to work out about that character. They should be the sum of their lives, after all, and challenging that, taking them somewhere new for a constant stretch, will help keep them growing.

And with three characters to reflect through, every big event was a chance for exploring the effects of those changes. Both in them and in me. I know how I felt about some ideas and concepts before I wrote the book and I know that having to process those same concepts through three different headspaces and untangle those knots often opened things up for me in ways I might not have seen beforehand.

So yeah. Road novels. Travel stories. Got a favorite?