I recently got back from my cross-country adventure to Yosemite and back to Pittsburgh by train. Trains and buses are my preferred method of traveling when I have the time. Planes are efficient, sure, but there’s something special about seeing the landscape go by while you’re passing through it that’s inspiring for me. The constant stream of inspiration and potential new ideas going by outside the window makes it easy for me to get my head into a creative space.

In that spirit, I thought it might be fun to write prompts based on the things that gave me ideas or piqued my interest during the trip. Here are 3 writing prompts based around travel.

Exercise 1: Travel snags.

Some kind of problem is inevitable when you’re traveling. On this trip, mine happened before I even left Pittsburgh: we were missing a flight attendant, and couldn’t even board the plane until it had a full crew. 

Now, a missing flight attendant can be a prompt in and of itself—because where did they go, exactly? My brain at least started making up stories the second I heard that’s why we were delayed, and if you feel like running with that idea, go for it.

The main idea for this prompt, though, is that something goes even more wrong than it did for me. Once we realized we were delayed, all of us with connecting flights started anxiously tracking the minutes, watching our leisurely layovers shrink into cross-terminal hustle. I made mine—barely—but, from the conversations I overheard as we disembarked, others on the flight with me weren’t so lucky.

So put yourself into one of those passengers’ shoes. Imagine a character who’s stranded mid-travel, and has to stay the night in a place somewhere between their departure and their final destination. Open the story with the moment the character realizes they’re not getting to their destination, and use flashback and narrative to fill in the details of their trip while they’re dealing with their predicament. What other plans is this change in schedule going to interrupt? How are they going to pass their time in a place they hadn’t planned to linger? 

Exercise 2: Small town stories.

Trains don’t only stop in major metro areas. There are lots of smaller towns along the tracks, and some of them even have an operational train station. Often, these are places that used to be bigger than they are now, or have some other historical importance that at one point justified a railstop.

On this trip, for instance, I passed through Helper, Utah, a town that looked like such a bizarre place for an Amtrak stop that I had to look it up. With a population of right around 2,000 people, Helper’s own city tourism materials call it “a living ghost town.” A hundred years ago it was a hub for the smaller coal mining towns that dotted the area. Now, most of those have been abandoned completely, and Helper serves as the launching point for tourists exploring the ghost towns that surround it. I don’t know what I’m doing with this information yet, but it definitely went straight into my “cool ideas” folder because I could see this making an evocative setting for a whole range of stories.

You don’t need to take a cross-country trip to find these kinds of places. There are tons of small towns with unique histories all over the world. Maybe there’s an exit you pass every day on your commute for a town you never knew existed otherwise, or a bus you see passing by whose route includes areas of the city you know only by name. And, of course, you can find them on the internet. You can go to City-Data.com, pick your state from the menu, then filter cities to only “Very Small Towns and Villages”, or go on Google Maps and explore down the highways until you see a town name that intrigues you.

Pick a town and do some quick internet research. Jot down any unique details about the town’s history you learn. Do a Google Maps street view tour and think about what places you might go if you were visiting the town. Is there anything there you wouldn’t expect to find in a small town?

Now, put a character in this town who’s a first-time visitor. This character has a conversation with an inhabitant of the town that sends them on a quest or adventure related to the town’s history or unique identity. Write a scene that starts on that conversation.

Exercise 3: Wide open spaces.

Something that struck me traveling across the western US in a train is just how much open space there is between the places people inhabit. We passed through a lot of stretches that seemed pretty empty, just looking out the windows at it going by. 

That feeling is deceptive, though. There’s something going on in all of these wide open spaces—it’s just not something that’s readily apparent. For this prompt, use one of the pictures of a seemingly open, empty space below and dig a bit deeper into it. What wildlife lives here unseen? Are there any small details you might miss at first glance that catch your eye on a closer inspection? When do you think was the last time a person walked across this space, and why?

For this prompt, inhabit a person or animal that’s come to this landscape searching for something or someone. What is it, and why do they think they’ll find it here? What details do they notice about the landscape as they’re moving through it? What do they hear? What do they smell?

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