A Manual for Voluntary Displacement

Go somewhere you have no reason to be. Not as a tourist — tourists have itineraries, which is to say, they have already decided what they will see before they see it. Go as a witness. Go without a plan.

The purpose of voluntary displacement is not inspiration. That word has been hollowed out by too many motivational posters. The purpose is defamiliarisation — the deliberate disruption of your habitual way of seeing.

The Familiar is Invisible

You do not notice the colour of your kitchen walls. You do not hear the particular frequency of traffic on your street. You have stopped seeing the face of the person you love most. Familiarity is a kind of blindness, and it is the enemy of description.

When you arrive in a place where you do not speak the language, where the signs are illegible and the customs opaque, your senses sharpen. You notice everything because you understand nothing. This is the state in which the best writing becomes possible.

Instructions

Travel light. Bring a notebook — not a laptop, a notebook. Write in the morning before the day has had a chance to explain itself. Do not photograph anything for the first three days. Look instead. Look until your eyes ache with looking.

Then write what you saw. Not what it meant — what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like. The meaning will come later, or it won't. Either way, you will have practiced the most essential skill a writer can possess: the ability to pay attention.