Denise Gosliner Orenstein: How to Travel for Free

Have you ever fantasized about traveling to a different country or continent? Do you crave adventure and excitement? Short on cash? Not enough vacation time? Restricted by parents and school? Here's my solution:

Write.

The world of the imagination is a powerful tool, one which offers great riches and freedom. In addition to allowing one to visit new places, it also provides the opportunity to inhabit the complex emotional lives of others. If you are curious about what it means to be homeless, a musician, an inmate, a scholar, or the bush pilot of a float plane, give yourself permission to find out. Locate that place inside yourself that identifies with your material and then explore, languish, linger there. When you emerge, you will have inhabited your subject matter and be able to write effectively from this perspective.

As the author Eudora Welty wrote: "All daring comes from within." It is a true gift to live a life of great adventure without ever leaving home.

Many of us have been taught that writing is a process of quiet reflection, and that the author should follow a clear path which leads to a safe, predetermined destination. I beg to differ, and encourage you to squirm in your seats and to consider writing as a dangerous activity, one without marked trails. Effective storytelling is often the result of plunging oneself into uncharted territory, and having the courage to see the subject matter at hand with new perspective, as well as to experiment with language in entirely new and dangerous ways.

Writing is not for the timid; it provides the opportunity for discomfort and for the testing of courage. A good story or book avoids comfortable clichés, jargon, and generalizations, in an effort to unearth precise, vivid, evocative language that surprises, disturbs, thrills, and resonates long after the piece has been read.

I am rarely bored or restless since this opportunity for travel and adventure is ever present in my life. I relish those moments when I have nothing to do and no one with whom to talk, as it is during these times that I am most receptive to my own imagination and most able to create my own worlds. So the next time you are stuck at home with nothing to do but stare at your computer screen, stop staring and begin typing. Think of what it might be like to live in a different culture and experience the world through a different lens. Stop wishing you could hop a train and speed your way across the country. Stop worrying about all of the restrictions on your life. Delve, head first, into the complicated world of your own imagination and will your fingers to type what you fear and what you wish for. Seek danger. Experience discomfort.

Be thrilled.

Denise Gosliner Orenstein
Author of The Secret Twin