Road Trip Wednesday: Setting

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: What is the most inspiring setting you've ever visited? 

The picture on the left is of the mountains in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I lived in Almaty for a month, and the walk to the university involved fifteen minutes of walking along a canal with an incredible view of the mountains, and fifteen minutes of walking in a beautiful park.

Almaty was a new, foreign, and beautiful city. I fell in love with it.

But it hasn't--and I don't imagine it will--inspired any stories. The city that has inspired multiple stories, and really, has had the strongest influence on who I am as a writer? 

Orangeville, Ontario. 

Uh, yeah. That's Orangeville, and it's as average of a town as that picture makes it look. I have family there, so my summer vacations have been in Orangeville for as long as I can remember. Maybe I'm so inspired by it because it was the first time I saw people living day-to-day lives outside of Nova Scotia, but I didn't think that way when I was five.

I was fifteen when we were driving through Orangeville on a vacation and I thought: Wow, this place is small. Really, it's not that small, but it certainly was in comparison to the city I grew up in. 

From there, I thought of what it would be like to live in a small town, and from there, characters were born, and from there, a plot was beginning to form, and by the end of the car ride, I knew I had something good.

And for a fifteen-year-old who didn't know who I wanted to be as a writer, I did. I wrote a ridiculously long piece of  fanfiction and had the most fun I'd ever had writing. Looking back, it's so bad--I was re-reading it the other day and yelling at myself, honestly--and I wasn't totally oblivious to that back then, especially once I had some distance from it. I knew the writing wasn't great--not to mention that I was yet to realize loose and lose were two different words, the dramatic "I don't want to loose you!" scene lost some of its effect--and the plot was sloppy, but there was something in the characters and the heart of the story that was worth something.

I realized that I'm a character-driven writer, that I love to write about relationships (romantic and non-romantic ones) and it's what I'm best at it, and that I really love to set my stories in small towns, or at least in a setting with few people and few distractions from each other (like the cottage where three people stay in Duets.) The majority of the work I've written since then has taken place in an intimate environment, even if that wasn't my intention when I started the piece. It always turns out that way.

I always loved going to Orangeville because I loved seeing my family, but now, I love the town itself, too.

What setting has inspired you?