Four Things Solo Travel Can Teach Writers

John left last night. He caught a taxi for the airport at midnight, heading back to his job, our house, and our cats and dogs, who are probably ticked-off that we dared to leave them in the care of strangers.

The minute his taxi disappeared down the street, I was lonely. I went back up to the room, got out my Kindle and read part of a Stephen King novel. I listened to the sounds of Florence through my open window–the only air conditioning in the Hotel Medici. The cathedral bells gonged, laughter echoed from a tavern up the street, a quarrel erupted from a shop. Before long, I nodded off. I slept well. And I woke up still feeling lonely.

Traveling alone is different from traveling with people you love, and I should know: I spent most of my youth on the road by myself. Traveling alone, you have no one to marvel or laugh with. You see something astonishing and want to exclaim to the person next to you, but the person next to you is a total stranger who isn’t interested in your amazement. And if something goes wrong–your suitcase breaks in the middle of the street, your money gets stolen, you get lost in a strange city where you don’t speak the language–you have to find a way to handle it by yourself.

Still, there is something special about solo travel and, even though I’m missing my family pretty keenly right now, it’s struck me that it’s usually when I’m by myself that travel has moved beyond sightseeing, when it’s become something deeper and richer than tourism. I’m thinking that writers especially may have quite a bit to learn from traveling on their own.

For one thing, traveling alone forces you to step back and look at experiences. When you’re by yourself in a country not your own, you’re a bit like a ghost, anonymous and invisible. I don’t want to use the term “cut off” here, because you can always make connections with people if you need to. It’s more like you’re standing just outside the stream of life, watching from the banks. You can see things from there you’d never notice otherwise. You get a view of how things work, how they move together. And that’s exactly what writers need to do–step a little outside of things.

Second, solo travel sharpens your observational skills. When you’re traveling with someone else, you laugh and chat and share panini. You notice things, of course, but you also spend a lot of time in conversation. But when you’re alone, you pay attention to everything. You become aware of street sounds, the quality of the light, the smell of the air, the rhythms and melodies of speech, the way people move. Charles Baxter has written that one of the purposes of writing–of all the arts–is to jar people into noticing their surroundings, things so familiar they no longer pay attention to them. Traveling by yourself gets you to do exactly that.

Traveling alone also makes you realize how big the world is. There is a lot of talk about the shrinking global village, but when you’re alone in another country, you realize that vast distances remain. You become sharply aware that, of the nine billion people in the world, only a couple dozen care about you–and all of them are very far away. In other words, solo travel puts us in touch with our essential aloneness, forcing us to face how tiny we are in this large world. It might be a painful lesson, but it’s an invaluable one for a writer.

Finally, traveling alone calls you to take risks in much the same way writing does. Trying new things even when they seem a little crazy, going out on a skinny little limb–that’s what writing is all about. Of course, risk-taking on the page doesn’t require that we also be risk-takers in life: Emily Dickinson hardly left her room. But the two often do correlate, and solo travel is the perfect way to practice.

After John left, it took awhile for me to remember the rewards of traveling alone. But the feeling came, this morning after breakfast. And now, as I sit here on my suitcase in the Florence train station, I’m ready to head off into the great unknown once again. Still missing John, but feeling that old pull, that call to adventure.