Thoughts of a Sundrenched Elsewhere: Writing Prompt #1

• OK everyone, since this is my blog, I can blog it the way I want, right? So, what I want, more than anything is to write and get feedback. I love the energy of being in a room full of writers (usually women) all working on the same idea, then sharing what we have written. I love this part, especially. The reading aloud and the hearing. The excitement and apprehension of sharing, the feeling of being in 1st grade again, jumping off your seat with your hand in the air because you have the right answer. Actually, I was never an edge of the seat jumper, hand flipper, but I have since experienced that very feeling when writing in a group and sharing time comes! I just love to write.
  
  So this is the 1st of 3 or 4 prompts a month that you will find on this blog. I will challenge myself to write, give other writers a bit of inspiration, and hopefully, we can all enjoy some thoughtful dialogue and criticism on what we have written. We shall see.
  
  The first prompt comes from The Writer's Idea Book by Jack Heffron. It's a conglomeration of a bunch of ideas, with the main idea being travel.
  
  Thoughts of a Sundrenched Elsewhere
  
  "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accomodate...And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again--to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more." Pico Iyer--"Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World"

• Write about your desire for travel, be it great or small.
• Write about the place you most want to go--for a visit or to live. Open with details, unbarnacled with explanation.
• Write about the best place you have ever been. "Best" can have a few meanings: most exciting, most fulfilling, most interesting, coming home to a place you've never been.
• Avoid, at first, explaining why you liked the place. Just describe it. Then, begin to explain and speculate upon why this place hadn such a profound impact on you.
• Think about why you are hooked on a place.
• Include the people you saw, the smells, the temperature, the color of the sky and the buildings and the leaves on the trees.
• Consider which elements of your personality are hooked into this place.