Why Empty Parking Lots at Night Speak to Me as a Writer

There is something about the glow of a single sodium light over rows of empty bays that pulls a sentence out of me every time. I will admit it sounds odd to anyone who has not tried to find their next scene while wandering a deserted Westfield car park at eleven p.m., but that is exactly when my best pages begin.

Most of the readers who land on this site know I am a person who turns lived experience into prose. Empty parking lots at night have become one of my most reliable sources. They are liminal, they are quiet, and they are free. In a country where a flat white costs six dollars and a decent meal sets you back twenty, free quiet is worth celebrating.

I want to explain how a slab of bitumen under fluorescent lighting turned into a recurring character in my work, and why I think other writers should pay attention to the spaces we pretend do not exist.

The geography of stillness

Australian car parks are vast. The big centres in Parramatta, Chermside, or Joondalup sprawl across hectares, and after the shops close they turn into flat oceans. I love driving past the perimeter at midnight and watching the way the light catches on the painted lines. The Australian writer Jessica Au wrote about Sydney after dark in her novel Cold Enough for Snow, and her attention to overlooked city corners made me realise I was not alone in this fixation. There is a whole literary tradition of writing the unglamorous edge of a city, and car parks fit neatly into that lineage.

When the wind comes off the harbour or the bay, the sound behaves differently over a wide-open space. A distant car door sounds closer. A lone footstep sounds louder. The lot becomes a kind of sound studio for memory, and that is where my sentences get sharper.

A late-night ritual I do not want to give up

I have a habit. After the kids are asleep and the kitchen is wiped down, I grab a notebook and the car keys and drive ten minutes to whatever shopping centre is open past nine. Coles and Woolworths keep longer hours than the boutiques, so the lots stay partially lit and mostly empty. There is a council by-law here that forbids overnight camping in shopping centre car parks without permission, and I find that interesting. It reminds me that these spaces are governed even when no one is watching them. Rules still hover over the silence.

I do not stay long. Forty minutes, maybe an hour, parked in the third row with the engine off and the hazards blinking. I write scenes that happen nowhere else. The asphalt holds the kind of attention a café never can.

Memory lives in the markings

Every parking bay is a small rectangle. Every line was painted by a hand that did not know what it would later witness. I have written a whole paragraph about the way yellow paint fades differently on the western edge of a lot in Brisbane because of the angle of the afternoon sun. Australian summers leave their mark too. The tar gets soft. The thermoplastic arrows buckle. I find those imperfections useful because they prove time has passed over a place people think of as fixed and functional.

When a memory surfaces in those rows, it is usually tied to a specific bay. Number 47 outside the chemist. The spot under the gum tree where a possum once stared me down. Concrete holds those coordinates better than any diary.

The poem that started it

A friend sent me a piece years ago that I still think about, and I keep returning to when a poem arrived. It is a short read about the moment a writer realises the small strange places are the ones worth keeping. That essay changed the way I structured my own drafts. I stopped trying to build big scenes and started listening for the tiny ones. A car park at night is the perfect training ground because nothing dramatic has to happen there.

I can sit in an empty bay, watch a single ute pull in, and the driver might be anyone. A shift worker heading home. A mother of three sneaking a cigarette. A teenager who lied about where they were going. Each one is a story I can borrow and bend.

From lot to manuscript

Over time, these late-night sessions turned into full pieces. The short story Sleeping with the Enemy began as a single line scribbled in bay 12 of a suburban centre in Penrith, and grew into something I am still proud of. I do not romanticise the work. Some nights the sentences refuse to come, and I go home with nothing but a flat battery and a crick in my neck. But the lot is patient. It will be there next week, lit and waiting.

Other Australian writers I admire have done similar things. Tim Winton has spoken about writing while driving along the coast. Anna Krien has written about the edges of Melbourne. We are a country of wide, overlooked spaces, and our literature has always made room for them.

If you have a place like this — a loading dock, a ferry terminal at dawn, a back lane behind a pub — share it with me. I am collecting essays and small fictions for the site, and the submission inbox is open. Send your piece through the contact page, or drop a comment below. I read everything that arrives, and I reply to as much as I can. The empty places want your words as much as you want to give them.