Everyday Canvas

Traveling and Writing

Prompt: If you travel a lot, how does traveling affect your writing, and even if you don’t, in what ways do you think traveling experiences might help your writing?

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I am not traveling like crazy anymore, but I used to.

Traveling and gathering new experiences and insights surely has a positive effect on writing. Plus, as writers, all we need is paper and pen and it is available everywhere we can go.

On the other hand, it is a fact that, at times, I couldn’t go anywhere without my netbook or a laptop because I like using the keyboard and seeing what I write on the screen in front of me. Yet, in the far distant past, I used to borrow or rent typewriters where I went just to copy and send what I had put down on paper with a pen, but those days are prehistoric for people who are born after the eighties. Still, paper and pen can be enough to jot down what we see and feel.

When we are on the road or when we visit a place for the first time, we find so much to learn from the tastes, smells, sounds of a place to the people or nations who are hosting us. In most situations, we easily recognize the strangeness or the familiarity of mundane things and our own shortcomings, too, when we are face to face with a different culture.

Even in the internet age, the better authors make it their business to visit the settings of their stories because seeing a video of a site isn’t enough. A writer needs to breathe the air, understand the positives and negatives, sense the depth and riches of the local nature, and feel the pulse of the residents of a place, so he or she can reflect all those things inside her words to instill a certain truth to his or her work.

Being a visitor or a tourist makes a person ready to notice things. This noticing habit, or astonishment, can later be adapted to everything and everywhere else, including our own hometown and street. It may even let us notice the peculiarities inside ourselves and our everyday life.