Taking it All In...

It's been one crazy week, y'all...

As you probably guessed from my opening line, I've been spending some time in the South this week. While the majority of my movie press junkets involve a 3+ hour plane ride to the bright lights of Hollywood, my latest assignment involved a 3+ hour plane ride to somewhere I'd never been before—Albany, Georgia, better known as the birthplace of Ray Charles and one of my favorite Food Network chefs, Paula Deen, the queen of butter.

So you're probably thinking, why exactly was I in southern Georgia? Well, I was checking out the set of Courageous, the new movie from the folks at Sherwood Pictures. For the uninitiated, they're the people from Sherwood Baptist Church who came up with Facing the Giants and Fireproof, family-friendly fare on a shoestring budget that happened to do very, very well in theaters.

So to give our Crosswalk readers (www.crosswalk.com/fun/movies) the behind-the-scenes scoop on their latest work, I packed my bags and headed south.

One of my favorite things about writing for a living is the opportunity to travel. For whatever reason, and maybe it's because I lived in the same small town for so many of my pre-college years, I happen to thrive in new surroundings. I love the new sights, smells and of course, the people watching. And those varied experiences inevitably inspire my writing, too.

In fact, while sampling my first sweet potato turnover and talking to the people of Albany, so many crazy, interesting new thoughts were swirling through my mind. And while I'm not sure if they'll ever see the light of day in my actual WIP, it's always good to get outside of the world that's so familiar to me in the Twin Cities.

And really, that's just one of the great things about writing fiction, isn't it? Whether we're writing from our home office or at the local coffee shop, we get to provide a glimpse into a new world for our readers—one that's vivid and new and exciting and transports them somewhere they've never been before.

So that's why it's good from time to time to get re-inspired and switch up the surroundings yourself so you can provide that experience for your readers. Even if you don't have the time or resources to travel somewhere exotic, sometimes inspiration is found in the unlikeliest of places—like Albany, Georgia where the fried chicken and southern hospitality are nothing short of top notch.