KICK START YOUR CREATIVITY:
What Bikers Can Teach You About Authenticity of Expression

By Melinda Rucker Haynes
Copyright 2005, All Rights Reserved

Writers can be lonely. They can spend far too many hours by themselves creating romance and adventure for other people. Of necessity, they must keep dipping into that figurative creative well, withdrawing inspiration and ideas for their stories. But while the creative well is bottomless, it can be slow to flow, get plugged up, even. Then the "dry" writer may face the terror of the blank page, or worse, find he's simply writing the same story over and over.

As a writer who's spent so much keyboard time that I've suffered from carpal tunnel butt (some call it sciatica), I know I've got to get up from the computer at least every ninety minutes. And I don't head for the refrigerator any more, but to the stair stepper or ski machine. Just getting the blood and breathing going gives me a new perspective and energy for my writing. Likewise, I've also found that I need a constant flow of new experiences and people in my life. If I live in a one woman writer world, no matter how physically fit or how strong my connection to my creative centre, rather than priming and opening the creative flow, I'm restricting it to the usual, expected and predictable same old stories.

I love to write about people of all ages who allow or make themselves to "just do it", whatever that maybe in terms of pushing the personal performance envelope in a positive, sometimes difficult, growth promoting way. In order to write authentically about such characters and their personal stories, I need to meet, observe and interact with all sorts of people as well as have adventures myself. So, when my brother handed me two tickets to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, I eagerly dusted off my earplugs and hit the road with 35,000 Harley Davidson motorcycle riders bound for the Laughlin, Nevada annual Harley River Run.

The Harley River Run. To get to the concert in the Flamingo Hotel outdoor arena on the Colorado River, we navigated the bikers-clogged sidewalks along the Laughlin Strip. Every street corner was packed 100 deep with men in black waving beer bottles, hooting approval or howling at the unending parade of every model and type of Harley motorcycle throatily prowling from one stoplight to the next. Beer gardens under striped tents enticed swaggersby with heavy metal biker rock, though not once did I hear "Born to be Wild." River Run tee shirt vendors must have gotten rich putting their merchandise on the backs most of the 35,000 Harley riders and wannabees. Rumor has it that one of the local Harley Davidson dealers made $300,000 selling parts and accessories during River Run week.

A sea of flashing chrome and metal fleck paint of a thousand parked motorcycles spilled from the Flamingo entrance to streetside as we merged with the leather heading for the concert. By this time I was desensitized to all the testosterone and horsepower and started to notice differences in biker types. There is a Harley rider's "uniform"--black leather everything and boots. Biker babes wear as little on top as possible, a leather halter or a bikini top. It doesn't really seem to matter if rolls are showing, just as long as whatever available cleavage does.

Harley lovers come from every socioeconomic group, from those who ride their bikes for days to get to the Nevada desert and then camp under a cactus to Fortune 500 executives who arrive in a $500,000 motor home towing a matching trailer filled with highly customized bikes, then stay in the Presidential Suite. Regardless of how they get there or where they're staying, Harley riders are bent on having a good time and many of them have plenty of money to spend in pursuit of it. A casino executive friend of my brother's says that Harley Weekend is the biggest revenue period of the year.

The concert. We found our seats five minutes before Lynyrd Skynyrd opened, and of course there were big bikers in our seats. I negotiated with the two of them to move and they kindly complied. They moved into my brother's seats. He was waiting outside for the rest of our group. I figured he could handle the bikers as they were pretty genial, one downright chatty and the other kind of "low-function" who spent the concert hunched over, staring at his hands, and perhaps wondering if his navel was still there under all that leather. He didn't say, but I know he was deeply contemplating something. When my brother arrived he sat in front of us and two of the others he'd invited tried to move the bikers. It didn't happen, but Chatty and Low Function kindly helped our friends to someone else's seats behind them. My brother always gets stuck behind some girl who won't shut up or sit down. This concert's female obstruction was quite large and wide, very loaded and stood for two solid hours dancing to a different drum in her own head and air-conducting with a beer bottle. While my brother tried to mellow out to Sweet Home Alabama, I discovered which Harley riders, as they danced in their seats behind and beside me, had enjoyed hotel amenities of showers and a change of leathers and which had lived in their clothes. This latest adventure has kick started my creativity and I'm joyfully at work on my new romantic adventure: Love on a Harley.

Writing Exercise:

Get up and get out. Explore your immediate world and something entirely new, if you can. Watch people. Interact with them. How do they react? Observe their expressions, mannerisms and what they say. What do they wear? How do they act? Are these in opposition? Record your observations, your emotions and reactions. Create a couple of character studies based on your observations and experiences. With a little luck you may just discover a sexy biker to write about.