Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing provides a few sparks
It may not be fiction writing, but being able to attend the Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing while I was in Melbourne was still useful for my fiction writing ambitions.
The biggest message I got from attending the Saturday sessions of this festival was the one I usually get whenever I see writers speak: published book writers are totally normal people, just like me. (Friends might say writers, and me, are rather abnormal people, but the point remains the same - the people who can walk into a bookstore and see their book on their shelves are not so different from me). This is always a refreshing message to be reminded of, and something that I suspect might not happen in other kinds of arts - say you’re an aspiring musician and you go to a concert, the musician’s equivalent of a writers’ festival, seeing your hero on stage performing probably doesn’t do much to convince you that they’re normal and just like you.
And the second message I took away from this festival was that the stories I have to tell are definitely interesting enough to be told. I saw a few sessions by writers who have published travel narrative books about their experiences travelling in various countries, and I felt sure that my experiences also lived up to them - and in some case, might even be more interesting. Whether I tell these stories as a travel narrative book or use them to inspire my fiction, I do feel reasonably confident that I have something worth saying, something that other people will find interesting. And that’s very reassuring.
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