Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

A quick word about travel.

In fantasy novels travel is a hard one to manage. As a writer you find yourself researching how fast and how far someone can walk, how far a horse can carry a character, and how they were used historically (hint: galloping for long distances was not a thing unless like the pony express you could switch horses very regularly), the drawbacks of using cart, carriage or dray, not the least of which being the animals pulling them will be worth a fortune in themselves. Get pulled appallingly slowly in an ox cart through any slightly uncivilized area, you’ll be down the ox in pretty short order, as the animal represents an astonishing amount of meat alone! There was a reason folk travelled in caravans, banded together for mutual protection, or lived with their animals and did not travel at all unless to market to trade and sell said animals.

And that’s before we get to wilderness travel, or speed of shipping (trireme vs. caravel vs. longship is interesting, but only when they travelled the same waters to and from the same ports, and even then our best guesses for speed are often just that, and man are there some rabbit holes to fall down!).

But that’s just the mechanics of travel, which tedious though it can be when you are managing timelines of characters in separate places and need them to converge in one place at least semi‑realistically, is really the least part of it.

Heroes go on journeys. The travel is physical, intellectual, and emotional. The challenge represented covers those aspects also. Heroes travel their character arcs as much as they cross the lands they visit. Travel in ancient stories represented exposure to the unknown, when most folk lived and died in say a four mile radius of their birthplace, travelling two hundred miles was an epic trek, potentially though multiple lands where different languages were spoken and different cultures observed. Sailing further was the equivalent to us of interstellar travel, mindboggling in its complexity and danger, visiting alien worlds and cultures with no common touchstones.

Readers and writers travel via words written, their minds roaming freely. The imagination is a wondrous thing, and as a young man I figured it the only thing I needed to create worlds, an imagination fed mainly by words, but also by images, movies, documentaries, TV shows, even cartoons. I still think it can be enough, but the imagination can feed on almost anything, so why not give it more to work with?

Travel. As a writer, going to places and putting yourself physically in an unfamiliar environment, is amazingly stimulating. You don’t have to go far, within fifty miles of your house I’m betting there are tons of places you’ve never seen, or taken for granted: this was true for me in Scotland, and still true in Colorado. These nearby treasure troves of the unexpected may hold traces of a past you can imagine your way to, places with unfamiliar accents, even if the language is the same. Animals, landscape, exposure to skills or art can all be on your doorstep, if you choose to look. Of course, the further you roam, the more pronounced the changes in architecture, language, weather, food, history, customs. Five hundred years ago a voyage of years turned young sailors into the astronauts of their era, nowadays we can do the same thing in hours. Yes, the world has grown smaller, but not so small that unrelenting homogeneity is all we find after we leave an airport into a country we’ve never visited before.

I’m not a travel junkie, but every journey holds seeds of stories for me, makes me more open to new ideas, or twists on old ones made new when seen through an updated lens. Put down the camera, and be there, smell it, get the sense of scale, the interaction between buildings and people, the purposes of both. Being human is universal, but languages change the way people think, and how they express themselves, religions shaped days of the week, hours of the day, food eaten and when, and how. I could learn all these things via book or screen (and that is tremendously useful, and not to be set aside!), but feeling it is more visceral, leaves an imprint that can be drawn upon, consciously or not, at a much later date. I’m a great believer in not trying to literally recreate or replicate a current day or historical culture into a fantasy context, but to put impressions and ideas together, linked by some “what ifs?” and an understanding that people share basic drives and desires, expressed over and over in different forms, influenced by geography and climate, what food is available and how it is caught/harvested, and so on, and those necessities drive the stories told to children, the lessons of survival the culture passes on from its earliest days, and built upon in a way that has almost infinite variety. Make your protagonists nonhuman and the already infinite variety gains whole new dimensions.

So: travel. Characters do it as part of their hero’s journey. Often slowly, and on foot. Readers do it when they turn each page or swipe on the screen. Writers benefit from it as a way to capture insights into alternate worlds, and find the small touches that make those worlds more real, allowing imagination to do its wondrous work, so together reader and writer create a story in which heroes are real, and their journeys matter.