Sometimes, I like to turn my real travel experiences into fiction stories. I tend to do this when I can easily imagine ratcheting up the tension of a trip beyond my actual experience.
As an example, when I was living in Dubai, I took a trip to Oman with a friend. We both had a great time, and became closer on account of the concentrated amount of time we spent together. I wanted to write about the experience, and from another angle perhaps I could have, but I kept imagining a what if scenario instead. What if we hadn’t really gotten along? What if tension had developed between my friend and I, and I learned something about her that I hadn’t expected or wanted to know? That’s where the seed of my fictional story sprang.
So, if you’re thinking of turning some of your real travel experiences into fiction, here are some ideas and steps to try:
Choose a relatively placid experience
Try to pick a trip or a few days of a trip when nothing too out of the ordinary occurred. This will allow you to let your imagination do more of the work, rather than being tempted to stick too closely to the original experience. In fiction, it’s often helpful to have a baseline of real experience to draw on, but remain quite open to letting your imagination do some heavy lifting as well.
Come up with a what if scenario
Go crazy here. Keep coming up with questions based as much or as little as you like on the actual setting and circumstance you chose. For another story I wrote, also based on a travel experience, a what if question I asked was: what if this friendship meant more to the protagonist than the friend she’s going to visit? (As you can see, a theme of great interest to me is friendship!) But any question would do: What if that waiter had stolen your wallet? What if your travel companion went missing? What if the monument you wanted to visit suddenly no longer existed?
Decide on your theme
Now that you’ve gotten quite carried away, it’s time to reign in the story a bit. As you may have read elsewhere, a story is a character going through a change. So what is the change you want your protagonist to go through? And how does that tie to your what if scenario? For me, in the first story idea I mentioned, the main character learns that she can’t trust her friend as much as she had thought. She becomes a bit more worldly-wise in terms of the relationships she forms. This isn’t what actually happened to me, but the what if scenario I chose (What if tension had developed between my friend and I, and I learned something that I hadn’t expected or wanted to know?) seemed to naturally lead to that kind of lesson learned by the protagonist.
Start writing
With your what-if scenario and theme in mind, get to work! Establish that what-if scenario right at the opening, as that’s most likely going to be the most intriguing moment to catapult the reader into your story without looking back. Then, draw out that what-if scenario, trying to stick to scenes and revelations that bring your character closer and closer to changing, to learning their small lesson about the world and their place within it.
Being in a new place is great inspiration for a story, and also great fodder for fiction.
