When you write fiction, you create.

You conjure entire people, entire worlds, up out of thin air.

Your imagination runs, and all you want is to take the audience with you.

The best part is that there are no limitations. Your new idea will be the first of it’s kind.

Is that true, though?

We like to think we are originals.

But every-time I try to put pen to paper, it’s some version of the desert, economics, and an ex-military Bedouin who loves books.

Your writing is stuck at home, in what you know, maybe for good reason.

Maybe geography, culture, and experience is harder for writers to escape than we think?

“The European writers could no more escape culture than I could escape geography. To this day if I attempt a rural setting I invariably reproduce the contours of the hill where I first walked. I started peopling my books in the place where my grandparents started peopling a new country. Departure and arrival, both good themes for the novelist, were slower then.”

–Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen