This issue is concerned with the theme of place, in particular the idea that where we are, right now, speaks to and of some aspect of ourselves as writers. This exercise is one of a series of ‘travel’ exercises.

Write scenes in which a character you’re working with ‘arrives’ in a series of different places, with no real explanation of how they got there. The key is to try to understand or evoke the ways in which the character adjusts to the unknown, to the mundane ‘otherness’ of the exotic.

In some sense, we travel in order to lose the ‘I’ with which we are daily burdened - the ‘I’ who is responsible, obedient, timely, perhaps even the ‘I’ who is honest and loving. Travel allows us to cut loose from expectations - both what we expect of ourselves, and the weight of expectation of those who know and love us. We abandon, temporarily, the neuroses and everyday worries of our daily clime.One of the most common forms of story begins with the arrival of a stranger. In his essay on travel, “Notes on Travel and Theory” James Clifford writes:

The Greek term theorein [is] a practice of travel and observation … a man [is] sent by the polis to another city to witness a religious ceremony. ‘Theory’ is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize, one leaves home.

I love that final sentence: “To theorize, one leaves home.”

This exercise invites you to force your characters to ‘leave home’ and be forced into a retreat from, and recuperation of, their sense of self, into a discovery of who they are, who they think they are, and what they think of the world.

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Issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author