How (and Why) a Witch Travels for Fiction and Nonfiction Research | A Christian Witch's Writing Process
There's no better inspiration than putting yourself in a whole new world.
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Hey, everyone! Happy Halloween!
This year, I'm enjoying the spookiest night of the year with my dad and my husband. My dad's very much in his traveling era, with a whole list of places to check out, and one of them is where we are now: New Orleans, Louisiana!
I've always wanted to go to New Orleans. Everything I've ever heard about it, from the history to the culture and folklore, the food and the music, all just sound amazing, and so getting to come here for Halloween has me on cloud nine. Apparently, Halloween is known as "little Mardi Gras," and that's crazy, because I know how hard NOLA goes for Mardi Gras.
My husband and I are bringing the Plague Doctor fits back out for our Halloween costumes, and given it's also Daylight Savings in the small hours of All Saints Day, that means we get an extra hour of wandering around and partying tonight. Talk about lucky this year, that I could get a class schedule that lets me have 4 day weekends, and that we could score an extra hour of our trip like that!
But here's the thing: y'all know that I, as a writer, am never only going places for the vibes. Everywhere I go, I'm also cataloguing all kinds of things to use for future stories, especially if I'm in an area with a lot of culture/history. (Truthfully, I would still look for something to absorb even if I were at a beach resort, but I'm definitely more a traveler than a vacationer, y'know?) So when it comes to NOLA, God knows I'm scouting for things to include in a potential spin-off novel(la?) from This is My Blood, who has a side character from New Orleans, and whose story is yet to be resolved from where we leave off in the original stand-alone book.
So let me tell you what I do when it comes to traveling.
Travel Preparation and Tools I Take
For one thing, of course, the thing that helps the most to take along is my phone. Bet you weren't expecting that. :^)
But really, my phone is the best thing for me to take precisely because I can catch video, photo, etc., and so when it comes to preparing for any kind of travel, that's the biggest thing that needs to be out at all times. Does it make me feel like a super tourist? Yes, of course. But it's worth it when I can not only catch the exact vibe of wherever I visit, but specifically catch it through my eyes/view. The way I frame my shots, the things that stick out to me, they fill my camera roll and are more than just a hastily snapped photo. They say something to me about not only the place itself, but the vibe, and that's massively important for me to look back on. It also makes for excellent B roll for my content, when I want to put clips together for TikTok or Instagram.
Another thing I like to bring, especially if I'm out to get certain notes on history/culture/etc., is some kind of notebook or other thing to record thoughts/ideas down. Sometimes there are things that don't get captured by video, like specific historical details. Unless I'm taking photos in a museum with names on it, lots of things get lost. Moreover, I may have ideas or connections to make, and I need to put them somewhere. I could use the notes app on my phone, sure, but there's something about pen and paper that is a lot easier for me to register. I've got a dot-grid notebook with me to make sketches or notes wherever I'm going (and it happens to be the notebook with Lestat de Lioncourt's interview in it, which I thought I lost a while back lol. Pretty apt to be carrying that spirit around with me though.)
What I Look For When I Travel
Now's the fun part: what I look for when I travel. As I said, I'm a traveler, not a vacationer, and that means I'm not just ambling along the streets or sitting around on a beach. That would make me restless. Y'all likely know if you've heard me talk in videos and such, but the concept of wasting time always haunts me, and all the more when I've spent a lot of money to travel. This does usually mean that I'm looking for very specific places when I travel:
Museums of all kinds
Religious architecture (churches, mosques, etc. that are historical)
Restaurants & food scene
Local shops
Street views/ambience
Museums & Religious Architecture
I feel like the first couple things are pretty self explanatory: museums are chock full of information, with primary sources (like the artifacts being housed there from ancient times or documents/etc. from the time period the museum is about, such as with medieval history museums in once-used fortresses like Festung Hohensalzburg). Religious architecture, too, says a lot about a culture and the time period it was built in (like the many Gothic churches around Europe, like Stephensdom am Wien). They are huge monuments of artistic and religious work, and there's often museum-like information inside those, as well (or at least little pamphlets and such that I can take with me for reference later, like with St. Barbara's Cathedral in Kutna Hora).
When I say museums of all kinds, though, I'm not just talking about ancient or medieval history. I'm also talking about art and culture museums, which can have very recent stuff as well as older stuff, and which usually also tell a story about the history of a certain art form. I've seen puppet museums in Slovenia, film history museums in Germany, so much cool stuff on top of ancient or natural history. They also tell me something about the crafts that were important to people, or a people's cultural contribution to an art form like puppetry or film.
Food Scene & Local Shops
Naturally, one of the biggest symbols of a place's culture is the food. You can't come to New England and not get seafood (like Maine's lobster or Rhode Island's stuffies). You can't go to Slovenia and not eat your weight in smoked sausage and sauerkraut. And I'm quite sure I couldn't go to New Orleans without trying something like gumbo or other Creole dishes. Food is a deep, rich part of any culture, and I feel like the traditional foods can tell you a lot about what people had access to long ago, as well as how that's shaped their culture and personality. For example, with Thanksgiving coming up in America, the difference between a Southern Thanksgiving plate and a New England one is massive, and that's because New England is where the colonies were that kicked off this whole tradition; up here is where cranberries, gourds, and tubers grow in abundance, and where turkeys are everywhere.
Seriously. I have a family of turkeys loitering right in my yard every year, around September-November. It made me realize why these birds are always on the Thanksgiving table.
(Though, man... the concept of mac n' cheese at Thanksgiving is so foreign to me, and yet I'd love to make some for a side, because I love good old fashioned comfort food like that.)
Anyway, I digress. Point is, food is a way to taste culture and history vs. just reading about it, and the restaurant scene, with how people engage with each other, what people eat, what the restaurants do around here, is also more to observe. I hear it's an open carry alcohol policy up here in New Orleans, where you can buy a drink in one bar, pay for it, and wander away with it to another bar. Never experienced that up here in Rhode Island!
More than that, though, the local shops is another thing. Of course, I'm not talking about tourist shops with all their goofy souvenirs; I'm talking about the older brick and mortar stores selling more specific or interesting wares. Witchy shops, bookstores, clothing stores, all of them are going to have things a bit different than their counterparts that I have at home, and that alone will give me a whole different sense of what people are going around buying on a day-to-day basis. That lets me peer more into the real life of people, which is necessary for writing people from these places. Can't base it all off a tourist's view!
General Street View & Ambience
And that brings me to my last bit. Honestly, when I'm looking all over the place, it reminds me of the first job I worked, that was something of a big hodgepodge of social media marketing, graphic design, PR, and journalism. I'd go to events our agency was hosting and spend time getting photos and videos, as well as writing down observations about the place: what the ambience was like, where people were gathered, how people were engaging with each other when nobody was watching, all that kind of stuff. The direct things people said to me were only a fraction of what I ended up writing down in my notebook; the rest were all these sensory details that helped me paint a picture later when I went to write blogs.
I do the same thing when I'm out. If anything, this is where I slow down to a more "vacation" pace, as I like to people watch at coffee shops and see if anyone or anything in particular sticks out. I watch how sunlight comes down at certain angles on the street, or how the colors of a particular ivy-covered wall stick out against stone and sky. I listen to snatches of conversations on the street, noting accents, languages, etc., and I watch body language to see how people conduct themselves in this new area.
Given that this weekend, I'm out to party, I'm sure there will be a lot that I have to simply tuck into my brain and hope I remember. I also don't want to have my phone in my hand every five seconds, as I have been trying to reserve some experiences just for me and not always try to capture them for others, but for a trip like this, I do think I'll be filming a lot more than I have in my past excursions with friends and such around home.
Here's to hoping I get some great intel to write the story of Liam Cormier, exiled vampire of New Orleans. ♥ Have a fun and safe Halloween, everyone!
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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