If you love to travel, I'm the companion from hell. Or to be less dramatic about it, simply the most boring person you could possibly take a trip with.

R. and I are in Hawaii visiting his daughter and a grandson and I'm in a hotel room writing. The view from the room is above (though as I write I'm facing away from it.) They did get me out to look at a beach late yesterday – picture below. But for the most part I'm sitting here working on A Year Of Writing Dangerously and happily have hit Day 303. 

303. The View In Your Head

Though Nadine Gordimer’s writing room looks out on a jungle, “A green darkness of tree ferns, calla lilies…Four franipani trees with delicate gray limbs..” her desk faces a blank wall and the real view is inside her head.  “For the hours that I’m at work, “ she writes, “I’m physically in my home in Johannesburg. But in the combination of awareness and senses that every fiction writer knows, I am in whatever elsewhere the story is in.”

Some writers pin up maps and photographs or drawings of their characters surroundings, and literally create another view.  “We don’t need a view; we are totally engaged in those views created by and surrounding the people we are getting to know.”  says Gordimer. 

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“All I need is a window not to write.” Tobias Wolff