How to Get Writing Inspiration When You Can’t Travel

Voyage Scribe is a community and resource that helps writers gain writing inspiration from travel. But how do you get that kind of writing inspiration when you can’t travel?

Hopefully the coronavirus lockdowns didn’t ruin any writing retreats you had planned. But even if it did, you’re not out of luck. There are a variety of different ways you can still “travel” and reap the benefits travel provides for writing inspiration. Here they are!

1. Travel through books

When we can’t travel in real life, books are the next best option! I recently published a blog post with my 27 favorite books to travel through.

This post organizes the books by region of the world, so pick a place, pick a book and travel from home!

Reading books is also just the absolute best way to improve your writing. Study how other writers write to capture the setting of their books. How can you recreate that in your own writing and based on the memories you have of your past travels?

2. Travel through movies

Watching a movie set somewhere you want to write about instead of reading a book set there is like the equivalent to going on an organized tour of a country instead of planning everything yourself. It’s the lazier option.

And when the world forces you to be stuck at home, you deserve a little (or a lot) of laziness.

Simply Google the place you want to “visit” + movies, and you’ll have a hopefully long list of options to choose from. When you’re over being lazy, try to see if you can recreate the setting you see on screen in writing. Try to be as vivid and descriptive as possible.

3. Write about your past travels

You can’t travel to new places now, but you can use your memories to travel into your past trips. If you keep travel journals (you should), reread them. Immerse yourself into places you’ve already traveled to and extract writing inspiration from them.

If you’re unfamiliar with Voyage Scribe, luckily I’ve been providing a resource for just that. Every month I create a writing prompt to help inspire new writing ideas from your past travels.

If you missed it, here’s this month’s travel writing prompt to help inspire you. You can also sign up to my newsletter to get these writing prompts sent to your email every month.

4. Change your scenery

Whenever I travel somewhere new, I’m instantly hit with writing inspiration simply because of the change in scenery.

Okay, so you can’t hop on a flight and change your scenery to the beaches of SE Asia or to the mountains of the Alps. But you can change your writing scenery in other subtle ways.

Try moving to a different room in your house or sit outside to write.

When I was under self-imposed quarantine in my bedroom after getting back from Colombia, even changing where I wrote in my room helped.

Granted, my options were limited: My writing desk, my bed or on the floor on my yoga mat (in different corners of my room to switch things up).

How creative can you get?

Looking for ideas? Here are some ideas I came up with places for a solo writing retreat during COVID.

5. Try something new

The best thing about traveling is that you get to experience new things, and those new experiences can help inspire writing inspiration. But you don’t have to travel to a new country to do that.

Find new hobbies or activities you can do at home that the characters in your book or story might do too. What would your characters be doing if stuck at home too?

Try cooking new foods that characters in your story might eat. Describe in detail what that food tastes like in your writing.

6. Airbnb Online Experiences

If you prefer to learn something new from a real person, you can still do that without leaving home. Airbnb is best known for an accommodation platform, but it also offers experiences you can book to learn more about the culture of the place you’re visiting and meet locals.

And now, you can do that online with Airbnb Online Experiences! This is the perfect way to get hands on research for your book, and it’s a lot cheaper than traveling to a country to get it.

There are some really interesting experiences, so even if you’re at the stage where you don’t have a story idea, you can certainly come up with one based on one of the offered experiences.

7. Virtual Tours

Thanks to the power of the internet, you can now visit places you’ve always dreamed to travel to for writing inspiration from home. Sure, it won’t be the same. You won’t meet the locals, smells the scents, hear the sounds or feel the atmosphere.

But you can check out what it would be like to visit, and you can use that to help you establish setting in the story you’re currently working on.

Here’s a great list of virtual trips you can take.

I especially recommend taking a virtual tour of a museum. Museums are particularly inspiring to me. In fact, they’re one of my favorite ways to gain writing inspiration, and that’s why I always try to visit them when I travel.

Bonus: Here’s an exercise assigned in my first creative writing class in college; it can be done through virtual tour, too. Pick an exhibit item, and write a short story about it. See if it helps you with a new story idea or with new ideas for your current story.

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Do you have any other ideas on how to get the same writing inspiration travel can offer from home? Leave them in the comments below!