Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from your travels and adventures

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count—I’m so glad you stopped by. This month, as you’ll know if you stopped in on Tuesday, we’re talking all about inspirations. We’re talking about the many places and things we writers get inspiration from, when we’re writing our books. Why are we talking about this? Well, because a lot of us find ourselves blocked when it comes to finding that inspiration, that muse, and I’d like to do whatever I can to make sure we get past that block. Sometimes, all it takes is remembering some of the things that used to inspire us, in times past.

Tuesday, we talked about being inspired by our everyday lives, and the things we see around us on a daily basis. Today, let’s take a different spin on a very similar thing.

Inspired to Write: Getting inspiration from your travels and adventures

I, personally, love to travel. And I know I’m not alone. In fact, it’s a very trendy thing to do, these days. People want to travel, they want to see the world in all its wonders and terrors and highlights and pitfalls—and you know what? That can make for some amazing inspiration, right there.

Whether you’re traveling to a country fairly similar to ours, like the UK, or going all-out and experiencing a culture very dissimilar, like that of the Russians, you’ll find that there’s inspiration everywhere.

For me, the biggest thing I started noticing when I really got into traveling was the people. And for someone who prides herself on writing realistic characters and characters that everyone can find they relate to in some way or another, that was a really big thing to inspire me. What was it? It was that no matter where you go, no matter what you’re doing, no matter what kind of culture you’re in or what country you’re in or what time of day it is, most people really boil down to the same things. The majority of people in the world are kind. They’re nice. They’re just wanting to live out their lives in the best way they know how to do, and leave a mark for themselves in one way or another. They take care of the people they love, whether that be family or friends. They work hard, and they play even harder—no matter what form of play that is. People, and therefore characters as well, are the same no matter where you go.

But it’s not just the people who will inspire you, in your travels and adventures. It’s the sights, the smells, the tastes and touches, the experiences you’ve never had in your life before this moment. These are all things, things from the real, living world, that truly, deeply, and honestly inspire the words we write on the page.

And these are the things that—because of how deeply we ourselves have connected with them—our readers will connect with even deeper, within our stories. These are the things we’ll find our readers coming back to, because when it all boils down, everyone knows the real world. We know how life works here. We know what people are like, both the good and the bad. We know there is darkness in the world around us. And we know that the beauty can, and often does, outshine it in the end—just like it does in story, because art always imitates life.

Next week, we’ll chat a bit about getting inspiration from the media we see and hear all the time!

[love]

{Rani Divine}