Travel + Research = The Perfect Combination for Writers

This is Why I Visit the Places I Want to Write About

Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

“Montparnasse” by Ernest Hemingway

I’ve just returned from a 15-day trip to Europe and the UK. It was a whirlwind of experiences, and it will take me a few weeks to analyze and sift through the memories, the photos, the inside jokes.

But one thing is certain. What I saw, what I felt, what I smelled and tasted and heard, will make it into several books and stories. Ireland especially was fruitful: Westport House in Westport, Ireland goes into a holiday-themed short story. The empty Trinity Library goes into Jayne Thorne #5. The Croaghaun Cliffs of Achill Island will be in my next standalone, albeit transplanted into a fictional town. I was playing Tetris with the memories I was making, slotting experiences into different stories as they came. It was delightful, invigorating, and overwhelming.

I wonder, though, if it’s easier on the noggin to be focused on a single story, researching deep and thoroughly, as my friend

Ariel Lawhon

was? I’ve learned when a place speaks to you, you must return to experience it fully. There are places from the past two weeks I will definitely be returning to in the near future.

The last intense European trip I took, Paris was my target. I had no idea where it would lead me, as I don’t know where the past two weeks will lead me now. Here’s what I wrote the last time I was processing the trip of a lifetime.

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Hemingway’s morbid poem aside, nothing speaks to me like the idea of 1920s Montparnasse. It’s so utterly romantic, a generation’s best and brightest living, breathing, creating, loving, drinking, eating, fighting together. And a Parisian backdrop… what could be better? The “moveable feast,” as he referred to it, has always seemed to me the height of collaborative creativity.

I’d dreamed about it, read about it, but I’d never visited, not until my husband surprised me with a birthday trip in 2014 (so much for the seven years of French I took in school, right?). I fell in love, naturally. Paris is a hard city not to adore. It has a vibe of its own, like New York, and London. Unique unto itself, impossible to describe properly to those who haven’t been there.

That trip, we saved Montparnasse for last. My expectations were utterly unrealistic, which I realized the moment we stepped off the Metro and were greeted by…a Starbucks.

Where is the romance in a Parisian Starbucks? Where were my ghosts? Where was the creative spirit I knew lingered in the city’s dark recesses?

Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

We had a snack at Le Select and then wandered off to look for Sarte’s grave, which we couldn’t find, and decided the whole afternoon must be an existential joke, then decamped for Montmartre and Sacré Coeur, with its lovely views of the city.

I stood there on that windswept hill, bereft. What I was searching for was down there, somewhere in the city of light. I knew it. I could feel it reaching for me. But my time in Paris was up. We had to leave in the morning.

That evening, sitting at a little café we’d been frequenting all week, running the day over in my head, my disappointment both with Montparnasse and with myself for not experiencing it properly, a woman sat down a few tables away. She was so utterly and completely French that I had to write her in my notebook. After a cursory description, my writer’s mind took over. Several pages later, I’d sketched a strange little story about her and what she was doing in Paris.

This became the basis for my novel Lie to Me. It seemed my brief encounter with Montparnasse had given me something after all.

Back home in Nashville, as the book got underway, I made plans to return to Paris. This time, I wasn’t going to rush into Montparnasse with high expectations. I was going to spend time there, get to know it, write in its cafés, experience its shadows and light. Montparnasse is a special place. It wants to be coaxed into showing you its best side. Rushing in was never going to work. I needed to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps, to drink and love and create on-site.

Trip two, we were leisurely in our approach. We ate in all the restaurants in the 7th, walked the streets morning, noon, night. We bought fruit from the markets and got lost down alleyways. We spent a whole afternoon at La Closerie des Lilas. Inside the dark, silent bar, the tables all have plaques, a veritable who’s who of creativity and history, all placed by their favorite seats. I’d found the ghosts of Montparnasse, at last. I located Hemingway’s plaque, sat in his seat, drank champagne and ate olives, and existed. And then, I wrote.

And as I did, I realized there was something there, in the room with us, an energy I could feel like water on my skin. I tried to capture it in my words. I got very teary and overwhelmed at one point, not like me at all. It was incredibly special. I came home rejuvenated by the experience and finished the book, which I can honestly say was my most challenging to date. The scenes I wrote in the dark bar made it in, as did many from that week.

I still feel like that afternoon in Paris turned the tide for me, both as a writer, and for that particular book. I achieved a lifelong dream, to write a book in Paris. Parts of one, at least. 

It’s amazing how expectations can ruin the journey for us. If we’d only stop and smell the roses, quite literally, what would we experience? It was a great lesson for me, as a writer, and as a human. To exist within the place, instead of thinking it will come to you.

Do you have a special place, a place of the heart, that you’ve visited, or want to? Tell me about it!