[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
One of the main challenges you face as a writer is writing regularly. Willing yourself to go to Paris—to write—is one way to meet this challenge. Just willing yourself to go isn’t enough—that would be a trip, an adventure, a vacation, but not what I have in mind. Going for the express purpose of writing and then writing when you get there are the kind of brave acts that can help turn your writing life around. This is less about what Paris will do for your heart and your mind and more about what taking such a step means. To travel to Paris for two weeks or six months and to actually write during that time is to change your relationship to your writing. It is to put your writing first.
In this sense, a degree in Paris is more important than a degree in creative writing. Paris is a physical place defined by its beauty and its openness to strolling. It is home to the entire intellectual history of the West, the place where modern art, modern writing, and modern philosophy were born. Paris is a place where artists gather, where a Czech filmmaker, a Russian choreographer, an African painter, and a poet from Providence are most likely to collide. Paris is a place of associations: It moves the mind, stirs the heart, and resonates forever. More importantly, Paris is the place you go when you mean to put your creative life first.
Paris has served as muse to generations of artists, even to those who have never visited her. How has she accomplished this feat? Countless artists and writers have tried to say. Paris feeds an artist, motivates her, galvanizes her, and makes her murmur, “This is my home.” A mere glimpse of a photo of a Parisian street causes us to feel both uplifted and bereft, thrilled by what Paris implies and saddened not to be living there right now. We do not have to list the reasons for its allure to get to the bottom line: Paris is the place to write. Since it is the perfect place to write, it is the perfect place to commit to writing.
Of course, your main task is to write where you are, in whatever physical and psychological circumstances you find yourself. Toward that end you must educate yourself not only about the mechanics of writing, but about what it takes to get to the computer every day. That’s the education that matters. What might it mean to your creative life if you included, as part of your education as a writer, a risky experience like running off to Paris to write? Something on that order may be needed to unlock the trunk and let out those thousand poems, those hundred short stories, that full shelf of novels or narrative nonfiction. Paris—or rather, your commitment to being a writer in Paris—may prove the key.
I hope that you will go to Paris and write. I want to tell you about what writing in Paris has been like for me, what ideas Paris has provoked, and what associations it has evoked. Spending a few weeks or a few months in Paris has never been easier. As Brad Spurgeon explained in the International Herald Tribune, “Little remains of expat café life as cheap travel and electronic communications have virtually wiped out the expatriate ethos. Paradoxically, those same developments make life more practical for writers who seek to escape from the conventions and restrictions of their home countries.”
It is easy to find a Parisian studio for a month. It’s easy to keep up with your e-mail, to stay in touch with agents and editors, to find what you need, and to live cheaply and well. I am not asking that you throw over your life in order to experience Paris. This is not about expat living. I am only asking that you use Paris not as a tourist destination, but as a place to write, and that you make Paris one of the stopping points on your creative journey. It is that creative journey that I am really talking about.
—
Shutterstock image
