Finding Writing Inspiration on Vacation
I admit it. I bring the over-scheduled busyness of life with me on vacation. I kid myself that after nonstop seeing and doing for three or five days, I’ll be rested and ready to return to daily life with vigor.
Still, I can’t pass on the opportunity to feed my mind with the experiences of new places. For me, this is what inspiration is made of – seizing the unfamiliar and working it into my fiction. The point of vacation is to escape daily reality and return refreshed, and that’s why I find it beneficial not to doff my writer hat on sojourn.
Think of it as adding more life for your art to imitate. Here are some ways you can unwind and still enrich your craft.
Imagery
Revel in the beauty of God’s creation and bank fresh images. Let waves remind you of noisy crowds – or vice versa. Take in the size of the mountain and think about whether your character’s insurmountable odds are that steep. Send picture-text metaphors to yourself to add to your inspiration file back home. On a recent trip to Hilton Head Island, I imagined the Spanish moss as a net draped over a plantation museum’s oaks. I asked myself what would get caught in that kind of snare, and a short story quickly resulted.
Perspective
New perspectives abound among unknown people reacting to unfamiliar things. Try to spot denizens at tourist attractions, and imagine whether they see a source of revenue and a necessary evil, or the cultural pride of the town. Pick up a newspaper to catch the flavor of local sentiments. As an outsider, record any bewildered or frazzled thoughts and keep them on reserve to capture character errors from the most sympathetic perspective – your own! For example, having full-out run through enough airports by now, a character tapped those impressions and hustled down that corridor once I was back at my comfortable workspace.
Plot
Travel invariably presents situations that are outside of the circle of normalcy. These are fertile grounds for growing conflicts. When you notice signs herding you from one place to the next, consider what might happen if they weren’t there – or if your character disregarded them entirely. Can you harvest complications from your own faith-testing moments and layer them into your work? If you’re having a splendid and trouble-free time, what is the one thing that would change that? Then what would you do?
I don’t turn every outward venture into a research trip, and not every vacation has to be a working one. There is plenty to be said for letting existing ideas percolate with a nice long break. Nonetheless, tucking my creative spark in my carryon bag recharges my writing and motivates me to get back to the keyboard once the pictures are downloaded and the pocket notebooks are unpacked.
