Writing the Car is about custom car making and creative writing. It is about writing in ways that point out similarities between those procedures. It is writing that sets out to carbon copy the customizing process it writes about. For instance, how story ideas might create text that in turn reproduces elements of custom car making nuance such as stripped down, smoothed out, streamlined writing, or pared down exposition describing the radical juxtaposition occurring between a curvilinear roof-line and the raw-reverse curve of a quarter panel. Writing the Car is about writing ideas about shape - as shaped ideas - and written as such. It is not hard to see how the customizing of conveyor-belt-produced cars fits with the notion of returning uniqueness to an art form. Writing the Car attempts to fashion a newly striking creative work made up of changed-shape parts, and a new kind of PhD submission, also made up of changed-shape parts. [...]