Travel. It’s a mind-expander. Not the Instagrammable, “coconut drink on a beach” kind of travel. I’m talking about the journeys where you get lost in souks and haggle over the cost of a shirt at one o’clock in the morning when the night market gets underway. I’m talking the messy, soul-stretching kind of travel that doesn’t just change your Google Maps history—it rewires your brain. Especially if you’re a writer.

Last year, I went nomad-mode: from Valletta’s old town charm to Seoul’s book-bedecked dreamscape, to the sun-soaked, old-world charms of Egypt. In Madeira, locals mistook me for Portuguese (thanks to my surname) and spoke to me like one of their own. In Egypt, they called me “cousin.” These moments aren’t just anecdotes. They’re texture. They’re the grit that lodges in your creative gears, forcing you to see beyond your own metaphors. 

1. Language Rewires Imagination

Japan has one word—komorebi— where English needs five—sunlight filtering through leaves. In Cairo, salam alaikum (“peace be upon you”) isn’t just a greeting—it’s a prayer. Transformative travel teaches you that language isn’t just vocabulary—it’s a worldview. Different languages prompt you to start questioning your own assumptions. What if my characters asked “How is your soul?” instead of “How are you?” What if their conflicts, joys, and fears were filtered through entirely different grammars of living?

2. Discomfort Is Your Best Writing Coach

If only travel was epiphanies and espressos. But sometimes it’s  discomfort. It’s missed trains, food poisoning, and getting lost with no reception and even less understanding of the street signs. Discomfort is the best writing coach you’ll ever have. It scrubs off the polish and leaves raw material for stories. In the getting lost in alleys and searching for new ways to get to where your missed train was meant to take you comes the texture of your stories.

These experiences don’t just inspire, they infiltrate. They turn your prose into a mosaic of all the places you’ve been, the voices you’ve heard, the truths you’ve unlearned. Suddenly, your fictional worlds gain de[th. Your characters aren’t brave or funny in general ways—they’re specific and sharply drawn. They’re real.

3. The Writer as Travel Guide

We writers are professional travelers. Every story is a journey. We’re the weirdos who get to build portals to Kaduna dye pits, Martian colonies, or a topsy turvy world where humans are a crime (if you’ve read my book Riddle Riddle, then you know what you know!).

But the best stories don’t just transport readers, they transform them. When a teen in Delhi sees their chaos reflected in your YA dystopia, they feel less alone. That’s the power of writing with a traveler’s mind: you become a bridge between worlds. 

4. Coming Home to a New Self

And after the travel, there’s the homecoming. Returning to Nigeria is always its own kind of culture shock. The same Lagos roads and Lagos hustle—the familiar loveable cacophony but seen through a new lens. Travel as a mind expander doesn’t just change how you see the world—it changes how you see home. 

As writers, we’re tasked with turning “ordinary” into “extraordinary” so that market woman selling akara might just be a warrior with a ladle, battling Lagos’s heat and hustle.

Village market or a desert tribe, we bring the magic.

Your Turn to Pack 

You don’t need a plane ticket to travel. Crack open a book set in Mumbai. Strike up a conversation with the uncle selling akara down the street. Let your character stumble into a world where gravity works sideways. The goal isn’t stamps in a passport — it’s stretch marks on your imagination.

So here’s to getting lost. To letting foreign skies recalibrate your compass. To writing stories that don’t just take readers places, but leave them changed.

Afraid of heights? Good. Jump anyway.

—Shopsy