How Travel Is An Engine For Writing

You'll find my attempt at a post with the aforementioned title, as suggested by Joe Crawford via our post title trade! Read more about the initiative, or contact me if you'd also like to trade!

I'm writing this from Albania. Why? Good question. It's just where I'm currently living, so wherever I go, the words follow.

I’m writing this from Albania. Why? Good question. It’s just where I’m currently living, so wherever I go, the words follow.

Until Joe gave me this title to write from, I hadn’t considered how my experience of living in different countries affects my words. But it does. Why wouldn’t it?

So I thought about how it might make me a better writer. Is it because it gives me material to work from? Possibly. Because it gives me a different perspective? I’d say so? Or, because writing helps me process uncertainty, which moving to a new place brings with it in droves? Of course!

The most impactful thing, though, is it forces me to pay attention.

At home (which I count as whatever domicile I’m currently occupying, but for this exercise, I’ll say my birthplace in Australia) I’ve realized I exist on autopilot. Same everything.

Yet...whenever I arrive in a new place, every detail demands my notice.

It’s overwhelming in the best possible way, and it’s writing fuel.

If I go about level deeper into this inquiry, I realize something else: travel strips away many of the narratives I tell myself about who I am. At home, I’m just like everyone else, in most ways. In Albania, I’m the strange guy with terrible pronunciation trying to order bread.

That dissolution of identity? That’s where the good stuff lives!

And then comes my favorite part of this hyperawareness. The endless questioning.

Why do people here gesture like that when they talk? What would it feel like to grow up speaking a language that uses different sounds? How does geography shape personality?

I don’t have the answers, but wondering leads to writing.

I’ve been to several countries, and each has left traces in my work.

Travel reminds me the world is vast and strange, yet so small. Full of folks living different lives with different assumptions about how things work.

That’s the engine. Not the locations or the moments, but the constant reminder that there are infinite ways to be human in this world.

And infinite stories waiting to be told.

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