In a recent post I bemoaned the fact I have a backlog of too many ideas and not enough time. Your responses were reassuring, and it’s good to know I’m not the only one who struggles with an off-kilter inspiration-to-output ratio. My first overseas trip for a few years has done nothing at all to help that situation. If anything, it’s made it worse. But in a good way.
Lisa and I managed to visit to Lanzarote a couple of weeks ago. It was a holiday we’d attempted to take three times previously, only to be derailed at various stages by pandemics, heart attacks, budget airlines and dodgy travel firms. The world of 2022 remains a horrifically volatile place, and it felt indulgent taking a holiday when so many people are struggling, but it also felt good that we were able to pause for a while and soak up new surroundings.
It’s always invigorating to be able to look at the world from a different angle. It makes me realise just how small an area our lives typically operate within. What’s normal to you in your day-to-day might seem bizarre or extreme to me, and what I think of as mundane might be the height of excitement to someone else. When I was very, very, very young I was convinced that holidays worked on some kind of exchange system – you went and lived someone else’s life for a week or two, and at the same time they came and tried out your world for size. My tiny, pre-school brain had assumed that everyone led the same kind of lives, they just happened to do it in different places. I should add, by the way, that this was just a fleeting misapprehension, and that by the time I reached school age I’d realised that swapping two weeks at the seaside for a fortnight living in our semi-detached house in the middle of Birmingham would have been a bum deal for whoever owned the caravan we’d been staying in.
My point is, we sometimes have a tendency to assume that our lives are normal/typical/as good as things get.
I think the pandemic and the various lockdowns most of us went through have further distorted this perspective. A week sitting by the pool in a quiet little resort felt at times like a trip to another planet, non-stop brain food. Who’d have thought that a coach trip through the lava fields of Lanzarote would have provided inspiration for a key scene in the upcoming AUTUMN: EXODUS?
I guess I just wanted to post this as a counterpoint to my previous post about ideas. I doubt that any writer will ever use up their entire reservoir of ideas, no matter how long and prolific their career. My beef was with the onward march of time, not my overactive imagination! Finally getting away again was a welcome reminder of the unquestionable importance to me of looking further than the end of my nose and grabbing every opportunity that comes up. Better to have a thousand unused ideas and have lived, than to have worked non-stop and be scratching around for things to say.
I watched a great video on YouTube today which happened to contain a quote from Irvine Welsh that summed up the point of this post. Unfortunately I only have an auto-translated version of a Ukrainian translation (if anyone can direct me to the source of the quote I’d be grateful), but here it is: “It’s only when you start travelling that you understand what’s wrong with the place where you were born and raised.”
