Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
One wondrous aspect of writing is that it calls upon us to find that gold vein of creativity. One of the toughest aspects of writing is that it requires so much creativity–book idea, hook that communicates quickly and intriguingly, format, word choice, etc. We’re talking blessing and bane melded inextricably together.
This week I’d like to suggest some ways to jumpstart creativity, to kick it into gear so the writer is cruising along “in the zone.”
Let’s start off with the most basic kind of creativity: How we see things. I recently read an article in Publishers Weekly that caused me to question how I see things. Maybe it will stimulate a new way of viewing your surroundings.
The article centers on Tony Hiss’s latest book, In Motion: The Experience of Travel. Hiss likes to write about travel–not travel guides to Europe or to Africa but more about how travel sets our minds in motion. “Putting our bodies in motion puts our minds in motion. But in what ways?” he asks.He coined the term “Deep Travel” to explain how travel affects our insights. Deep Travel uses all our senses to take in everything at once. “It’s this remarkable ability that gives us a different perspective, a wide-angle, wide-awake awareness,” Hiss explains.
Travel wakes us up; we see things vividly. In strange places, we have a heightened awareness. I recall decades ago the first time I saw the town of Oxford. The train chugged over a hill and there, laying splendidly before us, were buildings all constructed of the same ancient golden stone. The sun shining down on the city made me think of a heavenly place that isn’t brilliant in color but instead a soft gold that soothes in its beauty.
Now, to the resident of Oxford, riding the train from London is unlikely to stimulate any heavenly thoughts unless the person is weary and oh-so eager to slip on home. That person isn’t likely to even be looking out the train’s window.
Hiss posits we all have three ways of experiencing the world: daydreaming, when we’re free-associating; focused attention, when we are concentrating on something; and Deep Travel. School moves us away from daydreaming to focused attention. But Deep Travel isn’t even acknowledged as a way of seeing things.
When we’re in an unfamiliar setting, whether that be a foreign country or parking our car on an unknown street, Deep Travel kicks in. We have to notice everything around us to move forward. Cruise control is turned off; we’re “driving” manually. Hiss describes experiencing Deep Travel as observing “in between” places rather than observing all the obvious aspects of a locale. It calls us to wake up to our surroundings. When we do, our creativity kicks in.
Can you recall a time you experienced Deep Travel? How could we use Deep Travel in situations we generally feel we need to endure, such as airplane flights?
What an interesting concept! I can say for certain that I experienced Deep Travel on a missions trip to Kosovo in 2006. What an eye-opening, mind-bending experience! When I came home, my head was so full of what I had felt and witnessed, I had to start writing again after not doing so for a long time.
Closer to home, I used to take walks in a forest preserve a few minutes from my old home. There isn’t a ton of forest area in suburban San Diego county, so this was a strange experience for a native like me. It was also an area that had been touched by one of our horrible wildfires a few years back. There was a strange, desolate beauty to the charred, scrubby trees. I always returned home ready to bang out another chapter on the novels I started after my Kosovo trip.
I love the concept of Deep travel, too. Thanks for sharing. I’ve always felt that I need to get away to see better what’s so close. Deep travel also highlights the good in your life. The rest can then go.
But how to transfer this to air travel…the only thing that comes into my mind is to try to get into flow…then the time disappears. One of the tricks to achieve the flow is to savor the good in your surroundings: focus on the good, let the other stuff go. Sounds a bit like “waking up to your surroundings”.
I hope to deep travel through this journey we call life. Blessings!
Interesting post on Deep Travel. Thank you for calling attention to it!
If I’m understanding the concept right, Deep Travel could also be awakened when we act as though we are seeing or experiencing something for the very first time.
I love that you asked, “How could we use Deep Travel in situations we generally feel we need to endure, such as airplane flights?” I think we could use “Deep Travel” in this instance by really using the five senses to experience what is going on around us. We can feel the vibrations of take off and landing. We can notice the excitement and nervousness of a child on his or her first flight. We can smell the mixed scents of luggage, slightly stale air, and various perfumes of people around us. All of this observation can lead to new ways to describe or understand an event.
I do find that travel helps soothe and refresh me (and my creativity), especially in experiencing nature or people in a new way.
Thanks again for this post!
Janet,
What an excellent topic for this week. The pursuit of developing vibrant characters, sinewy plots and rich prose taps into our deepest wells. Travel has always been a source of refreshment and inspiration to me, one that has me reaching for pen and paper. Perhaps it’s because our role is to transport readers and fill their senses with a new, palpable reality. I look forward to your posts this week.
I love it when someone puts a name to something I’ve felt intuitively. I’ve been talking about this heightened sense of reality that comes with travel ever since I experienced it backpacking through Europe and Israel in 1972. Those three months were then followed by an equal period of time during which I seemed to need more sleep than ever before in my life, almost as if my body demanded time to process what I had experienced. I don’t focus on the flight itself (though I love being up in the air, and always want the widow seat), but I find myself wanting to walk. In a new city, I want to spend a day or two, just walking. That’s my way of exerting ownership over the new local. That translates to my writing, as well. I want to walk a local before I can write about it. Neat term: Deep Travel.
Going back to college, when I was flying between Indiana for school and a home in Oregon, I found each airplane flight a time to get perspective. Looking at the cars racing along the ribbons of road, and as we took off/landed seeing both cars and pedestrians going every where I realized how much we all look like ants, and from a higher perspective wondered how important each individual’s travel must seem to them.
This was before I became a Christian my senior year, and then instead of just the people/ant analogy I began to realize how much of our lives – not just our physical travel but everything that seemed so critical – was just filler when viewed from an eternal perspective.
Admittedly, I’m not the best at keeping that same perspective when my feet are back on the ground, but am getting better. This thought of ‘deep travel’ will make me think about other experiences in looking for what I’m missing there as well.
Rich Gerberding
Chillicothe, IL
I experienced “Deep Travel” when I went to Hawaii. Coming from Southern California, I had expected to find a familiar environment. The differences caught me up short.
But I don’t think we need to travel to experience “Deep Travel.” I think the experience is what Caroline said—we see as if for the first time. Sort of like a child.
I was walking from our church parking structure, past some construction and landscaping projects, toward the sanctuary one Sunday with some grandparents in front of me escorting a two-year old. He would run from one roped off excavation to the next and the grandmother would coo about each hole and how that one was deeper, this one already had a tree, and the next one had a funny pipe sticking up. Suddenly, I was noticing holes I would have walked past without giving them a second (or first) thought.
So my new question is, What would a pre-schooler see here (or smell, taste, hear)?
Rebecca, I agree that another way to talk about Deep Travel is to ask, “What would a kid see?” Children re-open our eyes to the world.
I remember our young grandson asking us what was the name of a bird who was singing. Turns out the answer was a mourning dove. Sean responded with, “But it’s the afternoon.” Ah, another way of viewing the world.
Michael, thanks for pointing out that the writer’s job is to transport readers.
My parents, both teachers, believed in the educational value of travel and sacrificed to make that possible. I remember so many places that nurtured my imagination: Disneyland, the Anasazi cliff dwellings, Old West ghost towns, a Mexican sleeper car , and graduation trips to Hawaii and Cambridge, England. My military husband took it from there with tours in New England and Germany. I am grateful for these blessings. These places are alive in my memory, and I draw on them to paint settings with words.
My parents’ love of travel was a key element in shaping my creativity. (You didn’t ask, but I’d say the other two key elements were the study of foreign languages and reading aloud to each other in the evenings instead of watching television.) Not everyone can travel broadly, but there are interesting things to see within 100 miles of almost anywhere. Field trips shouldn’t be just for schoolchildren! 🙂
Ah, it’s nice to have a name for that concept! I’ve just begun my second year of living in Sydney after living in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Michigan. Until we had company from the U.S. last week, I’d not noticed how many things here seem normal to me now. But showing them around made me notice things again, like how much I love the architecture at The Rocks. 🙂
In one my master of creative writing classes, we have to write a travel piece later this month. I think the idea was to encourage us to write in this Deep Travel style, though it wasn’t said that way. I’m looking forward now to finding a new part of Sydney to explore for the first time. 🙂
The concept of Deep Travel has reminded me how looking at the present and especially the past can be a wonderful eye opening experience when you try to look at it through a child’s eyes. Thanks for the thought.
Thanks for this post, Janet. I know now why I yearn to go places I’ve never been before, even if it’s just the next little foothill town or taking the unknown route to a familiar place. The anticipation and stimulation is addicting!
Sometimes what you see is influenced by what you are looking for. I posted at my blog on Sunday about how when diving, so many people finish the dive and say they didn’t see anything. Yet there were schools of fish, acres of corals, lots of crustaceans, etc. The reason they “didn’t see anything” is because they were so concentrated on finding the one thing they wanted to see (sharks, rays, or tiny rare juvenile fish), they missed everything else.
(http://karenrobbins.blogspot.com/2010/10/sunday-worship-thought-what-do-you-see.html)
This is such a provoking piece….I must visit it again. But I am thinking over the last few weeks of personal traveling that I have been doing while working in Connecticut. Every day off from work has provided an opportunity for exploring…new vistas of daily delight as I especially explored so many historical sights. Each morning as I left the hotel I asked the Lord to “give me eyes to see.” From the changing of the leaves to wandering through graveyards over three hundred years old, I felt the creative well being primed. I think of one of my favorite quotes by Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” I really want to probe into this blog more deeply.
Janet, may I make a bit of a historical clarification regarding your original post, where you write that Hiss “coined the term ‘Deep Travel’”? Hiss certainly stipulates his own definition for this term, but the term itself predates his book. “Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad” (2007), an anthology I edited for Ninebark Press, which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal, predates Hiss’s book by three years. In fact, I first used the term “Deep Travel” in my writing in graduate school at the University of Denver’s Department of English in the early 1990s, and first “published” on the term in the critical introduction to my 1995 dissertation, “Nomadic Foundations.” When my co-editors and I at Ninebark published “Deep Travel” in 2007, the term, to our knowledge, had not been used in publishing. Currently, though, the term is clearly enjoying multiple “births,” and I am happy for that, as certainly it is an evocative phrase, rich enough for varied interpretations. I should stress that it is also very likely that Hiss came up with this term independently and has never heard of our book. (This may be true for other writers as well, as in 2009 the University of Iowa Press published David K. Leff’s “Deep Travel in Thoreau’s Wake on the Concord and Merrimack.”) However, I do hope for more awareness, especially on the part of reviewers and commentators, of the literary history of this term, doubly important since Hiss’s book, from a New York publisher (Knopf), is receiving national critical attention simply not given to works published by small not-for-profit literary publishers such as Ninebark Press. Ninebark’s 2007 “Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad” brings together thirty-four poets whose lives have been significantly enriched by journeys to places ranging from Antarctica to Zagreb, and includes poets ranging from Pulitzer-Prize winners Charles Wright and Rita Dove to more ecently “emerged” (and emerging) poets, such as Brian Turner, who writes powerfully of his time in Iraq. In the foreword to “Deep Travel,” I define the poetry of Deep Travel as poetry that begins in openness to discovery, stating that for all the poets collected in the anthology, “crossing the border altered their perspective on both self and world, their understanding of poetry’s aesthetic and human value.” Poems of Deep Travel are at once “poems of intelligence and empathy, of roots and wandering . . . weav[ing] their readers across artificial boundaries into an unbounded world.” Best wishes for Deep Travel, in all of its incarnations, to you and your readers, Sandra Meek.