Over the last few months, I’ve been able to take advantage of the Pfizer vaccine in my arm and travel to Arkansas, Massachusetts/Maine, and Chicago, and it made me realize that haven’t journaled much about the trip I took up from Alameda to Crater Lake last August to do some research for my novel.
Since I couldn’t travel much during the initial months of COVID quarantine, I decided that my main character, Ben, would do the adventuring for me. I had never driven north of Gualala on Highway 1 in California and had never been to Crater Lake in Oregon, so I had to rely on Youtube videos and Google searches to write about the cool places Ben would stumble upon on his trip. Now, is that the ideal way to do research for a novel that people who have actually been to these places would hopefully one day read? Uh…no. So after four months of lockdown and a temporary dip in COVID numbers, I decided to break free from Alameda, follow Ben up the coast with my dog, and make sure I had accurately depicted his journey.
The “why” of my trip made me think back to a Master Class session I viewed a couple of years ago from famed photographer Annie Leibovitz where she talked about why individuals should consider taking up photography. She said that “It's actually a wonderful medium for a young person to just go out and discover themselves and discover the world around them and it gives them permission to go out and look and have a purpose and observe." (I also wrote about this class in a post from 2019).
I think the point she’s trying to make here is that photography gives people a reason to leave their houses and see amazing things, just like my novel did for me last year. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the frustrating publishing aspect of writing that I forget about what else it brings to my life. Like a reason to just go out and discover myself and the world around me. For example:
