Looking For Writing Inspiration Abroad

*Collaborative Post

Writers know the continual difficulty of finding inspiration, thinking of new avenues for their work, and breaking through the usual creative blocks. To get through this, some alternate methods of success might be the best way forward. One of the best and most permanent methods of inspiration is heading abroad. Sometimes, you need to head outside of the box to think outside of the box.

Booking your plane tickets and planning the journey can be a great start, but if you’re not sure of how to find inspiration while there, you can often slip into recreation, simply drinking mojitos from morning to night and never really fulfilling the purpose of your original plan.

Consider the following simple methods of finding writing inspiration abroad for the best chances.

Write About The Experience

Writing about your experience while travelling can help provide all the content you ever need. This doesn’t mean you need to write in full prose about your journey from day to day. Simply notations such as journal entries, notes, scrapbooking your journey and even writing about people you meet can help you begin to bring together places, people and events in your mind, and this can serve as the content for many new writing exploits to come.

In order to write about the experience, you will first need to find an experience. Get involved with local activities, try an extreme sport you have never tried before, join volunteer group efforts or art history classes at the local museum in your country of choice. Try and aim for as much varied experience as you can, preferably out of your comfort zone. Learn of the great art through visual and audible stimulation you might find at local festivals or celebrations, and try to learn some of the lore and history behind these events.

All of this can help you become a better writer, bursting at the seams with content to place on the page. Be sure to document these memories in your own way to ensure you remember the small things, as memory can often be an unreliable vessel when experiencing so much.

Follow The Greats

Travel is nothing new as a boon for the burgeoning imagination of the writer. It’s likely that some of the greats you respect once experienced the difficulty you did, and decided to leave common borders to experience something new, and absorb the culture. For example, Hunter S. Thompson was known for visiting San Juan in Puerto Rico, spending lazy mornings wandering around the landscape and floating in the ocean. While you may not want to follow the behaviours of certain writers (this is perhaps the curtest example,) to visit their old haunts can help you see as they saw, to potentially become inspired in similar ways, and if nothing else to pay your respects to those whose literature has moved you.

To find where your favourite authors may have travelled, this article may help you https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/13/authors-travel-inspiration_n_7557708.html?guccounter=1 – with the willingness to research and find the beauty in the world around us, we can too develop our creative genius as these people once did.

Creating Your Own Prompts

Creating your own writing prompts can be a great way of practising your style, and giving yourself new content to consider. It can help you avoid the mental drudgery of working through a problem in your novel or essay, at least for now. But how can you make your own prompts? Well, it might be that you live them out, or that you find them in the situations you see around you.

It might be that you’re inspired by a certain decoration on a novelty vehicle, that you live it by asking that hotel clerk for dinner or lunch, or that you drink in a bar with foreign nationals and talk about soccer. These small writing prompts on a daily basis, inspired by your newfound surroundings, can spur creativity, and when backed up by the small local experiences you find every day can breed novelty and interesting narrative avenues over the course of the day.

Living, Reflecting & Research

Writers often thrive by absorbing the environment around them. When it comes to developing your best work, sometimes you need to find a new environment to absorb, and new novelty to gain. This can help you live, reflect and research effectively in a new environment. It might be that you need one on one access to a national historical archive, or that you simply need to relax into life somewhere in order to gain a comfortable understanding.

This might mean renting or purchasing an apartment in an environment such as Indonesia https://www.rumah.com/apartemen-dijual/di-area-kelapa-gading-idjk05007 – Malaysia or Japan could help you find a common stability, allowing you to focus completely on your writing in an area with good cost of living and the ability to sustain your writing exploits in the long term. Another great benefit of this is being able to live in somewhat isolation. While some writers find complete and total inspiration the more they can socialize, others need time to relax and consider their work for the long term, making slight adjustments where necessary and hopefully improving their style.

With a small place to call your own, this could be completely possible in every way.

Open A Blog

Travel writing is absolutely a valuable method of writing, and it could even net you views online. Why not open a blog? The art of writing about travel in an enthusing, stimulating and novel way can help you practice your style, show people how fun and exciting your trip is, as well as provide a platform of your experiences to recollect.

Why not do so? Bringing along a writing notebook and documenting your daily or less frequent but more interesting experiences might be the shift in writing style you need to come back to your usual efforts gracefully and with energy.

With this writing and travel advice in equal measure, inspiration could be yours, as well as a beautiful experience you won’t soon forget.

*This is a collaborative post. For further information please refer to my disclosure page.