I know some people hate driving, especially long roadtrips. I love them for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they’re great for writing.
On Monday, I did a 7 hour round trip to Orange, which is living up to its name, and throwing in a whole extra palette of reds and golds and yellows, with its glorious autumn display. For that I had company, so my unsuspecting passenger go to be a sounding board for working through ideas on character development. Well, that’s not entirely true – the ‘unsuspecting’ part – my family are used to it by now.
For most of my recent trip, to the Clare Valley, I was by myself. I know a lot has been said about the allure of the open road rolling out before you, but I’d like to add that there’s something very satisfying about solitude + speed + very loud music. That might sound reckless, but I’m tediously law-abiding. The speed limit is speedy enough, especially if I put the windows down and scream sing Five Finger Death Punch or Nick Cave songs to fields full of sheep. They don’t seem to mind.
Of course, it’s not all fun and games and Whiskey in the Jar. I bought the worst coffee I have purchased in years from Horsham and then had the early morning torment of needing the caffeine but not wanting to drink anything that bad. Oh, don’t worry, the siren song of sweet caffeine was way stronger than the sensibilities of my taste buds. Reader, I drank it.
And then feared for my sanity when I encountered … this … thing …
But, traumatic as that was, it’s all grist for the mill for writing. There’s a lot of inspiration to be drawn from a landscape, and I drove through some beauties. One of the reasons why writers need to go to the place where their story is set, is totally not because travel becomes a tax deduction. It’s to soak up the sense of the place. This is especially awesome if you are writing something set in a real-world place which is beautiful and has great coffee.
Manuscript number four started out, years ago, when I wrote down a dream I had about the sort of wedding jewellery they wore in Arlvagne, and their barren queen who longed for a child. Yes, it came complete with the country name and, no, there’s no such place, so I figured it was fantasy.
So, obviously, dragons. Check.
And a world. Bother.
My roadtrip involved 3,250 km of driving around the back of the Snowy Mountains, down to Melbourne, then west past the Grampians and over the Murray River, into South Australia, through Adelaide and up to the Clare Valley. After the weekend I stayed in Hahndorf, and then Ballarat. From that lovely old gold-mining town I headed through Daylesford to Kyneton.
I had some great-great-ancestral types out that way and I drove past their old property at Pastoria. I was almost lost when I missed a quick left, then right, turn over the Burke and Wills Track (ah, the irony – inept explorers FTW) and then I was paced by a camouflaged APC in Puckapunyal before I rejoined the motorway heading north again.
As I went, I thought about my story and the landscape of the world where it takes place. I noticed the way that the white trunks of the gums can catch the light and look like rows of bones, lined up on the hill. I noticed that the bark of the red mallee hangs in wretched strips like flayed skin, with the livid trunk of the tree smooth beneath it. I noticed the granite rock formations that jut out of the soil, the grass growing up to lap at their edges, and the sheep that graze among them, almost indistinguishable from the stones.
These are the rocks and bones that will make a true foundation for whatever flights of fantasy I want to add in building a landscape for the world I’m writing. It’s not the same process as writing about a real place. I don’t want to just cut out a patch of the Mallee region, or a wedge of the Macedon Ranges and slap it onto the map.
But the landscape that is emerging, as I write, has definitely been influenced by the places I drove through because the mechanics of driving – of watching the road, the other drivers, speed, steering, all that stuff – only takes up a bit of my brain.
The rest is noticing details of the landscape, thinking about the story and, like any writer, wondering “what if…”