How Traveling Shaped Me

In a creative writing class, I mentioned once how I'd been commuting since I was about nine years old. My school was forty-five minutes away from my house and at first I rode the bus, then I quietly rode the train, for this time period there and back every day. Sometimes I brought a music player, but often I didn't; I was happy looking out the window, watching the scenery going by and being alone with my thoughts. My professor declared that this had had a dramatic effect in shaping my personality, and it could be seen in my fiction.

I'm not sure how dramatic the effect of being a long-time solitary traveler has been on me, but I can't deny that it has had an effect. In addition to my school commute, which isn't too out of the ordinary, I also travel most vacations and am accustomed to long plane trips. When looking back at my stories, I see a theme of both aloneness and movement. Several stories of mine have been exclusively about characters traveling on trains, buses or trucks, thinking about their lives, moving across an uninhabited landscape.

Personally, I find I do my best thinking while traveling. I'm on a train as I write this, traveling home to Boston for the week, and I need very little stimulation -- a little music and looking out the window is good enough for me. I feel peaceful and pensive while I'm traveling, and I've thought up some of my best story ideas while whisking across a landscape. If you want to get yourself in a thoughtful or creative frame of mind, try hopping a bus or train somewhere. Look out the window and try to absorb everything you see. You never know where a trip will take you.