When All Else Fails, Go to the Airport—Jillian Grant Shoichet
My new writing projects usually begin with a spark: a first line, a vivid image, or an unexpected or remarkable event that fuels my new-project fire. I’ve been this kind of writer long enough that, even during periods of writing drought, I generally have faith that a new idea or plot will come to me—eventually—and the writing will flow once more, likely without too much painful emotional expenditure on my part. This doesn’t mean I don’t experience writing blocks. I do.
But this blog post addresses a slightly different creative problem.
I often find myself with the time and creative energy to write but without a strong desire to continue working on a project already started and without the spark that I typically need to jumpstart something wholly new.
I’ve got the time and the will; I just don’t have the right direction.
When this happens, I imagine myself in an airport.
I suppose I could imagine myself on a cruise ship or a beach or a bus stop or the viewing platform at Niagara Falls—anywhere that offers me the opportunity to observe detail and character without drawing attention to myself.
But I choose an airport because it represents something akin to C.S. Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew: a vast, treed expanse with mirror-like pools pitting the forest floor in all directions, each pool a portal to a different world.
The airport suggests the same sort of infinite possibility. In an airport I can sit, invisibly, and observe the sort of details and characters that might be more familiar to me—people from my own environment en route to elsewhere. But I also have the opportunity to observe things that are wholly unfamiliar: things that enter my world from alternative spaces.
And because an airport is, by its very nature, a wholly unnatural environment for almost anyone and everything in it (a library in an airport? A tropical rainforest in an airport? A pet spa in an airport? A five-storey waterfall in an airport? An indoor Asian street-food market in an airport?), the details I observe are unusually clear and precise.
Removed from their natural context, the characters in my imagined airport are intriguing in a way they might not have been had I encountered them on the streets of Victoria. I am more aware of what they’re wearing, how they hold their phone, how they pick their nose, the timbre of their voice and the expressions that move across their face. I have a sense of where they think they’re going and who they think they are.
I also have a sense of where they’re (maybe) really going and who they (maybe) really are.
So when I have the time and the creative will but no direction, I open a new document in Microsoft Word and I go to the airport. I look up at the [woman, man, child] sitting across from me.
This is what I see:
[ …. ]
This is why they’re at the airport:
[…]
This is what they don’t think anyone knows about them:
[…]
This is what they think when they catch me looking at them:
[…]
Sometimes, this intimate observation leads to a longer written piece. Sometimes my gaze moves on and I describe something or someone else. Sometimes I leave the airport with more than I expected. Sometimes I leave with less.
Regardless, I’ve exercised my creative will and I’ve used my writing time well.
Over the years I’ve populated entire airport lounges with unusual characters and details, many of which have since appeared in various writing projects. And each time I complete the exercise, I feel like I’ve travelled somewhere completely different.