Getting Bored of Writing Your Novel? Take a Hike!

The sun beats down on the back of your neck.  Early in the cool morning, it's rays were a welcomed friend.  By midday, though, it became a torturing little leech, sucking the comfort right from you soul, and by night you wish you could've had it's truth telling shine for just a few moments longer.  The smell of pine in a quieted forest, a top a mountain that overlooks a deep, deep canyon...the faint sound of tumultuous white water, raging down it's predetermined, ancient path.  You are in the wilderness, far from things made by the hands of men.  Only God and His work remains before you... 

If you didn't read this and finish with a mental image of yourself standing on a mountain top with the faint sound of angelic voices rising in a deafening crescendo, please read this again...okay, fine, but I hope you get the point.  In my last post I wrote about three things that inspired me to write my narrative, but only really spoke about the first two.  Today I wanted to expand on that third thing, and it's all about the activity of writing in the wilderness.  It's some kind of weird mesh up of camping, hiking, writing, and gadgetry to get you there and back again...and naturally, the inspiration of it all.

I call it "Adventure Writing" (insert Superman theme music).  As far as I can tell, it's not a thing...or it probably is, but the great oracle of the interwebs (google) could only prophecy of people writing about adventures...that is not what this is.  This, my friends, is far more active in nature (pun intended).

Hammock style on the edge of a cliff

The heart of adventure writing is getting out and away from the deadly monotony of sitting at home, staring at a lifeless screen, and "working" away on your narratives.  Let's face it:  writing a novel is A LOT of hard work, and most of it isn't what we thought of when we wanted to be novelists (I for one still have this image of a half crazed, manic version of myself bent over a laptop with feverish eyes repeating the same phrase over and over again).  Adventure writing is a weird synthesis of living out what we see in our heads, and the discovery of unknown places just outside of our comfort zones.  No one has ever gone to the places we create; we are the forerunners of a pristine, new world, and when you venture out into the wilderness, it has an odd familiarity to it.

The picture above was taken when I was out in the Linville Gorge wilderness area on one of my first overnight writing adventures.  I had spent the week before this excursion scouting out the area, learning it's maps, and figuring out the perfect place for solitude and beauty.  I hung my hammock as close as I could to a cliff on top of a ridge that dropped several hundred feet below, made a fire, and wrote until the fear strangled the last bit of creativity out of me (a baby 'squatch ate my hat, but more on that later).  It was more than just an experience; it was a fundamentally life changing event.

Go. 

 Get out there, and do it.  You will learn something of yourself, and something of your story.  Your personal, human frailty will emphasize, perhaps, that one thing missing from your character's personality.  Maybe you and I will learn some of the same lessons, and maybe you will discover something beyond beautiful.  At the very least, you'll come back loving your family just a little more.

If you want to hear more about my time in the high places, you'll have to subscribe or like, or favorite this thingy I do here...figure out some way to check back in!  Hit that google+ sign at the top right, and share the crap out of it on Facebook!

Have you ever felt like you needed a serious overhaul for your writing process?  Where did it take you?  What nuggety bit of deep fried goodness came from it?  Tell us about it in the comments below.