Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Aspiring Writer

Episode 46 in a series of true rideshare stories

There are four of them, all loud, leaving a bar at closing time. She gets in the front seat and asks me if I have any stories of crazy pickups from tonight. When I say no, she asks what the craziest I’ve had was.

I go to my standby—the UFO abductee. It’s short and sweet and I can tell it well, usually getting laughs out of people and starting a conversation. On this night, it’s impossible to tell the story. For one thing, the people in the back are all shouting overtop of each other and interrupting the story to talk to the woman up front. Worse, she herself keeps interrupting the story, stepping on the pacing with unrelated questions. It’s a two-minute story that ends up taking five minutes and I never really get through it. I’m already looking forward to this ride being over.

“Okay, so I’m writing a screenplay and I’m working on the pilot script for the first episode,” she says.

(Writing tip: Try to strip away redundant language. For example, instead of saying “I’m writing a screenplay and I’m working on the pilot script for the first episode,” say, “I’m writing a pilot.”)

“It’s about crazy first dates,” she says. “So I’m collecting stories of crazy first dates. Do you have any crazy first date stories?”

I have at least one really good one, but I already tried telling one story on this ride and she and her friends made it impossible. I also write both fiction and standup, and I could make good use of this story in either of those mediums, so I’m hesitant to pass it off to another writer—especially one whose work I don’t know.

“Not really,” I lie.

“Oh come on, you must have something.”

“Eh, I’m a writer too, so my really good stories I like to save for my own writing,” I say.

“Yeah, but this is my idea,” she says, as though she owns a copyright on ‘crazy date stories’ as a premise.

“Well, I’m not thinking of anything anyway.”

She gets out some notes and reads me two or three crazy date stories that other people have told her. A couple of them are admittedly pretty funny. If she is a good writer, there are a few episodes there. She has more than enough for a pilot. If I were her, I’d be hard at work on that script and resisting the urge to say too much about it until I had it just the way I wanted it. But to each their own.

“So those are a few of them. And you’ve got nothing?” she asks in a sneering tone as we pull up outside her house.

Here’s the thing. I collect stories. I’m collecting a story right now. I don’t have to beg and plead for them, nor do I have to scorn people who don’t want to give me theirs. Every experience I have might be story. Every person I meet might be a character.

Remember those Magic Eye images where you had to look at them just the right way? Like the schooner in the movie Mallrats? That’s what story hunting is like. You can scour and scrutinize for hours and get nowhere, but if you’ve trained your eyes, you can relax, and stories will jump right out at you.

“I’ve got nothing,” I tell her again.

“I can tell you’re someone who never has anything interesting happen to you,” she says as she leaves.

I close out the ride, put the car in gear, and enjoy the quiet. I head for my next passenger, continuing to have nothing interesting happen to me.

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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.