A Novel Writer’s Travels: Inspiration or Distraction?

I recently spent nearly three weeks in the Patagonian regions of Argentina and Chile, on a tour with 13 wonderful people who are now all friends. We enjoyed a wide range of activities from learning to tango in Buenos Aires to hiking in spectacular Torres del Paine National Park in Chile.

Because I had explained I was a mystery author when we introduced ourselves at the preliminary meeting, my fellow travelers often asked me about how the trip would influence my writing. The most common question was “Are you getting a lot of great ideas for your next book?”

I usually answered that I needed to finish the mystery I’m currently working on before I could think about anything else. But hearing the question multiple times made me think about the way I deal with the information I gather during my trips. I do typically need to finish the novel I’m working on, so I tend to regard a trip in the middle of my book-writing process as mostly a “break” from sitting at my desk every day and planning and editing and marketing. Also, I typically travel to foreign countries, and my mysteries are generally set in the USA, and often in public lands and small towns there. I don’t feel that visiting a country as a tourist really gives me enough insight to use that country as a setting for a story. So, for me, these trips are mostly vacations and distractions from my writer’s life in Washington State.

An exception to this was my mystery Undercurrents, which takes place largely in the Galápagos  Islands of Ecuador. I was inspired by a trip there to write a novel about a tourist who doesn’t speak the language and was clueless about the political undercurrents in the Ecuadorian society there. I, like my fellow travelers, was mostly ignorant about the history and controversy that surrounds the islands, but unlike the others on my small tour boat, I can speak and read Spanish, so when I picked up a local newspaper, I read “Fishermen’s Union Threatens to Blow Up Tourist Boat.”

Interesting, was my first thought, especially as I was traveling on such a boat at the time. My second thought: what the hell? What was the Fishermen’s Union and why would they want to blow up a tour boat? Thanks to the internet, I soon discovered that Ecuadorian newspapers were online, allowing me to keep up with news from the islands, and later I connected with an environmental activist working in the Galápagos, who gave me valuable insights and great details for my book.

As a typical American tourist and nature film lover, I had a romanticized view of Darwin’s enchanting islands. They are a World Heritage Site, and biologists around the world consider the place a special reserve for scientific study, both in the marine reserve and on all the islands. So why wouldn’t all nature lovers want to explore this incredible place, and why wouldn’t Ecuador be oh so proud to host visitors from all nations?

In my research, I discovered many reasons why foreigners were not always welcome in the islands. So, I made my Sam Westin protagonist take up scuba diving (I’m a scuba diver, too) and jump on the chance to go to the Galápagos to participate in a marine survey, assuming that all biologists would be enthusiastically supported in their investigations there. She soon discovers that her assumptions do not mesh with reality, and unlike me, she doesn’t know Spanish and couldn’t easily uncover the reasons for the deadly hostility she encounters.

No, I’m not going to reveal all the twists and turns and revelations here. Get the book! But my point for this post is: while my tour of the Galápagos was mostly a distraction at the time I was vacationing there, the experience piqued my curiosity, and a lot of the material ended up in a book years later.

And that’s probably how it’s likely to go with all my travels. I went to Vietnam in late 2022, and then, in 2023, to Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize) and Tanzania. In the future, I might use a lot of what I learned on those trips in a book or two. A tourist vanishing in crowded Hanoi or in a Central American steamy jungle or in endless grasslands of the Serengeti? Maybe.

I have used bits of my experiences in my adventure novella Call of the Jaguar, about a 40-year-old woman who goes to the Central American to find the archaeologist lover she didn’t choose (she married a rich jerk instead), in my romantic suspense Shaken, which has a half-Guatemalan protagonist, and in Race for Justice, the third book in my Run for your Life trilogy, in which my young protagonist competes in a perilous cross-country race in Zimbabwe, the birth country of her murdered mother.

This time, while in Patagonia, we learned about Nazi war criminals hiding among the many European immigrants to the area, and about the history of the native peoples in relation to all the incoming strangers. As in the US, Argentina and Chile have challenges with both legal and illegal migrants from other countries. This made my thoughts return to my current work in progress, which has a theme of immigrants coming to the United States. It seems the entire world is concerned with migrations of people from other nations right now, so I guess I’d better speed up and finish my novel, as the theme is currently a topic of interest in so many circles.

So, are my travels inspiring for or distracting from my writing efforts? I guess I have to say they are both. Every learning experience is valuable, and it’s all fodder for the imagination, isn’t it?

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Pamela Beason is the author of the Sam Westin Wilderness Mysteries, the Neema the Signing Gorilla Mysteries, the Run for Your Life adventure trilogy, and several romantic suspense novels. She is currently working on If Only, a crossover novel that will include the characters of both the Sam Westin mysteries and the Neema mysteries. Even when she’s working at her desk in Bellingham, Washington, her imagination is off on a trip somewhere else.