You’ve met some amazing people in your travels. Whether you met a monk on a meditation retreat in Thailand or a baker in Rome, a fellow traveller in India or a local family in Dubai, the people you’ve met during your travels have taught you invaluable lessons about this new culture, and about yourself and your travel journey.
Why not write a travel story about this relationship, and what you learned from this person?
Perhaps the perfect person jumps to mind right away, or, you could make a list of the meaningful people who have crossed your path. The perfect person jumped out at me right away. Khun Nee is a woman I met in Thailand who helped me with her massage therapy treatment. You can read my story about why meeting her was meaningful here.
Here are some steps to writing about a meaningful person from your travels:
- Describe how you met, and your first impressions of this person. Use dialogue, physical description, and the context in which you met this person. Most likely, your first impressions will have changed over time. This makes for interesting dramatic tension, so highlight your first impression, even if it’s unflattering, to show how this impression shifts over time. For example, when I first met Khun Nee, I questioned her ability to heal me and solve my problem conceiving a child.
- How does your relationship develop? Describe the ways in which, and the context within, you get to know this person. Pinpoint a particular scene that highlights the development of your relationship, but also provide a summary of the time you spend together. Zoom in and zoom out to show particular moments in your time together, as well as a breadth of experiences.
- Begin to reveal how this character and the development of your relationship aligns with your own goal / quest on your travel journey. This person is meaningful to you because they have met you during a time when you are seeking and desiring something particular through your travel journey. How does this person and what they teach you connect to your own quest?
- Finally, what does this person show you? Is it a direct instruction, or, more likely, do you learn through observing this person’s actions and listening to how they interact with you and others? This lesson can reinforce what you have already begun to realise during the time you spent together, where you interpreted their actions in light of your own goal and / or quest.
Writing about meaningful characters is a really fun way to honour someone who taught you something about yourself, as well as express something about the new culture you travelled to.
It’s also a relatively simple story structure, which is generally appealing to readers for its simplicity and relatability.
