Is it possible to move your whole life to another country in two suitcases?
Yes, yes it is. In one hand you hold your passport, and in the other hope for a new life filled with infinite possibilities. Moving far away from everything you know for an extended period of time forces you to leave everything you know behind and start fresh; Be on your own for the first time, nobody knows who you are or your first language, nickname or mannerisms. You become a blank page that is now painted with lessons of challenges abroad. It changes you, and an author can feel it ten times more. Writers have a heightened emotional sensitivity in a way that gives them the power to describe everything around them, to deeply perceive what’s around them, therefore absorbing new environments is greatly beneficial.
The home sickness does kick in though, and there is a new set of obstacles, sometimes in a new language, that you must overcome in addition to no security net of familiar people to rely on.
Joan Didion is an American writer and journalist, born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. She explores this feeling of homesickness in her essay “On going home” (1967) in which she reminisces on her dusty house where she grew up. She misses the sale-leasebacks conversations with her family that were code for things she liked best, and the river she would drive across to see a family graveyard.
Hands of woman reading book (Image source: Pexels)
I, too, miss my country’s high mountains with a white crown, and wonder if the three empty seats on my graduation day would have been filled if I had stayed. I wonder, if instead of skyscrapers, I would see majestic trees when I lift my head as I stroll through the land. However, I do believe moving is a great step towards character development. Both for one’s self and the writing craft.
Joan moved to New York in 1956 after winning a Vogue magazine writing contest. Subsequently, she was hired at Vogue, first as a copywriter and then as an editor. She was supposed to be there for only six months; however, she stayed longer and that experience far from home built her character. She learned to sharpen her prose. Every word counted and she became one of the foremost voices of New Journalism. Even if the long-distance phone calls with her family pained her, that newfound independence gave her new perspectives about herself and thus sparked new ideas.
Her first novel Run River (1963) is set in Sacramento, the place where she grew up. The novel stems from the deep nostalgia she had at that time. In the book Writers at work: The Paris Review Interview, fifth series there is an interview of hers where she explains that now that she’s lived away, she wanted to describe every landscape that she cherished in her memories, something she wouldn’t have realized was so precious if she had stayed. Additionally, she had inspiration for her upcoming novel when she was at a casino in the lobby of the Rivera Hotel in Las Vegas. She saw a woman coming in and she realized that the main character for Play it as it lays would be an actress. A further example of an expanded worldview that comes from travelling, stepping out of your comfort zone.
Person typing on typewriter (Image source: Pexels)
A new environment can inspire, and give a writer a different perspective about the world that is slowly translated onto the page. The author Ernest Hemingway was also inspired by his traveling and his time in Spain: learning new perspectives on Spanish culture inspired him to write The Sun Also Rises (1926). George Orwell when moving to Barcelona, Spain, to work as a journalist unexpectedly enlisted to fight against Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War where he had a chance to self-reflect about his political views on Anti-totalitarian States, later inspiring him to write Animal Farm (1945).
New environments, new ideas. I myself came up with the concept for my upcoming novel on a bored shift at my part-time job abroad. No customers, a frozen clock, and a burning idea that could have only come to fruition in that coffee scented environment.
Of course, no person or author needs to move to have their character development moment and explore the self through writing, but it does speed up the process by expanding their worldview beyond the comfort of the four walls from a childhood bedroom.
