Why We Write: How Bob the Builder Inspired a Motorcycle Adventurer
Our Arvon* tutor, Lois Pryce, is an acclaimed author, broadcaster, and—like me—a dedicated motorcycle rider. I asked her about her accidental journey to becoming a writer.
The third in a series of ‘Why We Write’ conversations with extraordinary writers on my Arvon writing course.
For this post in my Arvon series, I had the pleasure of interviewing our course tutor, Lois Pryce. Lois is a celebrated author whose three travel books sell worldwide in different languages. She is also a broadcaster and journalist. And, of course, she is a fellow long-distance motorcycle adventurer.
Here’s this successful author who is happy sharing her wisdom, yet, as she openly admits, she has no formal writing training whatsoever. Her story, it turns out, is an inspiring “Why We Write” case study. It’s a tale of ‘following your instinct’ and ‘having a go’.
“It’s Always Worth Having a Go”
Before we dug into her specific journey, Lois offered what seems to be her core philosophy, and one of the themes for our week in the Shropshire countryside. “It’s a funny kind of story, I suppose,” she began, “of taking a punt on something and then something else coming out of it... and I suppose, just sort of believing that you can have a go at something”.
This message—’it’s always worth having a go’—is the thread that runs through her entire career. It’s not about grand plans or formal qualifications, but about trusting an impulse.
Her own impulse, to my surprise, was triggered by a children’s TV character.
The Bob the Builder Tipping Point
Lois’s journey didn’t start in a university lecture hall. She left school at 16 and, being “crazy music mad”, worked in various jobs in the music industry. She eventually landed at the BBC record label, producing CDs based on BBC programmes.
“It could be fun,” she told me, “but sometimes they involved Bob the Builder and the Tweenies”.
It was, in fact, a Bob the Builder single that became the unlikely catalyst for a life-changing decision. She laughed, “It was a Bob the Builder single that pushed me over the edge and made me think, I’ve got to get out here and do something exciting”.
That “something exciting” was a 20,000-mile motorcycle trip from Alaska to Argentina, chronicled later in Lois on the Loose. This was 2003, and she’d only just passed her motorcycle test.
From Viral Emails to a Vocation
In the pre-social media, pre-blog era, Lois did what we all did: she sent emails home to friends and family. Her brother, who was keen to learn HTML, offered to build a website and post her dispatches.
Then, something unexpected happened. The emails, intended only for her inner circle, started to find an audience. “That, I suppose, would be called going viral in this day and age,” she said. “I would suddenly be receiving weird emails... my brother checked the stats and said, ‘You’re getting 2000 hits a day’”.
But the audience figures weren’t the real discovery. The profound, life-changing moment was a personal one. “What’s more significant, maybe, is that I loved it,” she explained emphatically. “I really loved the writing”.
This is the absolute core of her “why.” The adventure was incredible, of course—”meet people and see fantastic things and ride all those great roads”—but the act of writing became an equal passion. “I actually looked forward to the writing as much every day as I did the riding,” she recalled. The physical journey and the creative journey had become one and the same.
The “Sheer Fluke” of Publication
The journey from viral emailer to published author came about, in her words, “purely by sheer fluke”. A friend of a friend in California, who was an author, read her posts. She passed them to her agent in New York, who loved them.
The agent’s instructions were simple: “Go do the rest of the trip, go home, write a book proposal”.
“Long story short, that all worked out,” Lois said. “I mean, it was, of course, quite a few rejections along the way... but she did get me a book deal in America”.
As we are all learning this week, writing the book is only the first part of a very long process. Lois described the “slow process” that follows: “the enormous amount of time actually writing it, then the huge edit, then you have kind of proofs that are sent to you... it’s almost like it’s a sort of drip feed, kind of tease, until you get the actual book in your hand”.
And the magic moment? “I think the real thrill is seeing them in a bookshop,” she said. “My dream has always been to catch a stranger reading one on the train... but that’s never happened to me yet”.
The Next Chapter
Lois’s first three books chronicled her solo motorcycle travels, but she feels she may have “got that out of my system... from point of view of doing the trips”. So what does an adventurer do next?
She’s now been working for many years on a novel. It’s a challenge that has given her new perspective. “I plunged into it with optimism,” she admitted, “thinking ‘I’ve written three books, I can do that,’ but it’s a very different beast”.
And, naturally, new adventures are always “bubbling away”. She has a “yearning to do something watery,” like a long-distance kayak trip, and wants to walk the Lebanon trail, a country she loves. The boots, she assured me, are not hung up. She still rides, focusing more on off-road. (For the riders reading, she currently has a Honda CRF 250 and a Montesa light trail bike).
On Teaching and Loving the Process
This is Lois’s tenth year teaching at Arvon, having taught every year since 2015. I asked her what she gets out of it, coming back to guide new writers like us.
“Oh, I absolutely love it,” she said, without hesitation. “Writing is a solitary act... I’m very happy sitting in front of my laptop in my pyjamas, tapping away, but I don’t want to live that way all the time”.
Arvon, she explained, is the antidote to that solitude. It’s a chance “to meet in a beautiful house like this in a gorgeous part of the world, and to be surrounded by fascinating people for a week and eat great food”. “I always learn so much,” she added. “I learned so much from the writers on the course, from my co-tutor... it’s just a very, very welcoming, open organisation”.
Finally, I asked her for the one message she’d want us to take away.
Her advice was something drummed into us all week. First, “think about how you want to end your story, and that will help focus your mind”. Second, understand that the first draft “is not the end, that’s only the start... it’s all in the edit”.
But most importantly, “you’ve got to love the process”. She connected this back to her own work on her challenging novel: “Even if nothing happened, it would be... I’ve had such a great time writing it”.
“Don’t fixate on the goal,” she concluded. “It’s lovely to see your book in a bookshop... but you have to love the act of putting words on paper. And I think everyone here this week does love that”.
She’s right. And having a tutor who so clearly still loves it too makes all the difference.
Lois’s three travel books are Lois on the Loose (2007), Red Tape & White Knuckles (2013), and Revolutionary Ride (2017).
They are available in all good bookshops, on Amazon, Bookshop.org and of course through: Lois' website (click on link).
*For readers who don’t know, Arvon is a charitable organisation that runs residential creative writing courses and retreats in the UK, offering people time and space to write.
Thanks for the great write-up. Happy memories of the Hurst!