Author Crush Friday with Lia Riley

Glitter girls, welcome to our  weekly segment, Author Crush Fridays.Today, we have a guest post on How Travel Made Me a Writer, from the amazing author of the Off the Map series, Lia Riley! Thank you for sharing this insight with us, Lia! 

How Travel Made Me a Writer

By Lia Riley

I grew up in a small town (technically a village) in Southeastern Michigan, a place where my family had lived for over a hundred and fifty years. As a kid, it never occurred to me that I’d ever even leave my county. I would go to college in Ann Arbor (Go Blue!) and settle in happily on a lake. One day, my dad came home with startling news. He got a new job and we were moving, not out of town, or even out of the state.

Nope, we were off to Milano, Italy.

I wasn’t even the least bit excited. I cried every night before the move, dreading a new place, new school, new language, new food, new everything. I loved what I knew and it felt as comfortable as a cozy blanket.

But I didn’t call the shots so off we went. At first it was hard. I craved American food and missed my television shows. I negotiated with my parents for calling cards to phone friends and catch up on all the gossip. Yet soon the unthinkable happened. I adjusted. I enjoyed living in Italy. It was fun to be sent to the bakery to order fresh bread in broken Italian or ramble to the gelateria for a scoop of fragola (strawberry), limone (lemon) or melone (cantaloupe) gelato. On the weekends we visited Switzerland, or Venice, or Florence, or Monaco. I rode in a gondola, saw Michelangelo’s David and Sistine Chapel, wandered the Coliseum imagining gladiator battles and saw way too many dead saints mummified in churches (which creeped me out but I always had to go look).

When I returned to the U.S a few years later, I was a different person. I mean, I was still me, but my outlook had shifted and I didn’t see my life as constrained by artificial borders anymore. I ended up traveling twice to England before graduating high school, once with my dad where we stayed in the fancy suburb of Knightsbridge (a block from the famous store Harrod’s). At seventeen, he gave me carte blanche to roam the city with a tube pass and at one point I ended up in front of Buckingham Palace as the Queen passed in a horse drawn carriage (we totally waved at each other).

This was the first trip where I kept a journal and writing became addictive. When I started college, I was bitten by the writing bug and decided (against the strident wishes of my parents) to major in creative writing. A few years into my undergraduate degree, wanderlust struck again and I decided to travel to Australia for a six-month study abroad trip. There I fell in love with the cute older guy who eventually became my husband, and also spent four weeks travelling the country by myself. It was the first time I’d been totally alone in a foreign place and it was full of highs and lows.

I remember making a mistake with a bus schedule and ending up in a small Tasmanian fishing town that luckily had a ranshackle hostel. The only bad news was nobody else had visited that hostel in a month. The rooms smelled musty and the only book on the shelf was The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein. There wasn’t going to be another bus coming through town for three days. I remember taking sad beach walks, eating dinner at a pub where no one spoke to me and feeling as lonely as it was possible to feel. My journal kept me company and eventually I picked up the book and ended up devouring it in one breathless night. Ah, Aragorn and Frodo, how I love you.

I also had fun, ahem, a little too much fun. I met people from all over the world, got into trouble, learned to get out of trouble, and began relishing the idea of not knowing where I’d sleep each night.

I had a backpack and tent but wasn’t exactly a hardcore nature girl. After agreeing to go for a hike with a strange but friendly guy (bad idea), we climbed up a steep cliffface that tested my personal limits. At the top, while I was still catching my breath and dusting off my hands, he asked me, “What did I tell you my name was again?”

At the time I thought, “O.M.G, I’m trapped alone in the mountains with a serial killer and need to escape, pronto. Otherwise my parents are going to kill my stupid corpse.” I did manage to escape, by stumbling on another hiking party right before a blizzard struck. They were off to do a five-day backpacking trip and I made up a quick story that this had been my sneaky intention all along. So I went from having never backpacked a night in my life, to following intrepid bushwalkers on The Overland Track, one of Australia’s famous hikes, with absolutely no preparation, only a sense of over confidence and the limited ability to master my crippling fear of snakes.

Luckily, during that trip, I never saw a snake, but last year, I did steal snippets of that trip (namely the creepy hiker situation) for a book that I have coming out in December, WITH EVERY BREATH. I like to think that my bad decisions occasionally can come to good use as plot devices.

Travelling alone turned a new page for me. Even once I got a serious boyfriend (that cute guy who is now my husband), I really liked taking off by myself now and again. I felt like I was gaining something intangible, something I couldn’t really articulate but could feel radiating through me. I liked testing myself, overcoming challenges and improvising. I hitchhiked in New Zealand, caught a boat through the Patagonian Fjordlands and learned that being afraid of looking stupid was a bad reason not to try something new.

This came in useful when I decided to finally take the big plunge into writing books. It felt silly telling people this is what I was going to do. Most people said things like “I am going to write as well…someday,” or snort and say “Good luck with that.” But I wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. I trusted that I could do it. Mind, I didn’t trust anyone would ever want to read it, but I believed I could get to the end of a story.

When I did, it was a surreal feeling. Typing the final words to the manuscript were punctuated by mad middle-of-the-night giggles. When it was done, there was no one to tell (my husband was fast asleep) so I sat there alone, with my feet propped on the kitchen table and thought, “Well, heck. There you go.”

Since then, I’ve gotten awful lucky. I found a literary agent and then an editor who believed in my work. Often, I feel like I’m sort of faking it. Who let me come and hang out with all the other cool authors? When I went to see my first book on the shelf, it took me a few minutes to really register what I was seeing. Then, through tears, I realized how much of my life had lead to that moment.

I’m not saying that if I never moved, if I never branched out, that I’d not be a writer. I know too many talented people who can prove that idea to the contrary. But I do know that for me, travel helped me take risks, taught me to trust myself, learn that bad times are temporary, and self-doubt can only be conquered by soldiering on. So for me and my personal writing journey, I do owe the wider world a lot of gratitude.

In my debut book, Upside Down (about a girl who travels to Australia), there is a line, “If you never get lost, you’ll never be found.” That is one of the most autobiographical parts of the otherwise very fictional story. There is a big wide world out there full of heart, heartache, ugliness and unimaginable beauty and a similar landscape exists within us as well. But you have to get in it to win it.

Heather Riccio

Editorial Director | Writer | Tweet me @heatherriccio