This week’s post is one that is especially dear to me because I’ve just been cleared to get back on my bike, so I can go back to riding in Rouvy, a virtual cycling app that lets me ride all over the world. (Bonus: Strava can stop nagging me now.) I haven’t been on my bike in exactly two months, and I’ve missed my virtual exercise world. In fact, I love it so much that the fictional fitness app “Routz” from my first novel is a mashup of “Rouvy” and “Zwift,” another popular virtual cycling app.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I am a traveler by heart. If I’m not flying around or driving somewhere new, I’m exploring the world from home. Rouvy lets me do that; in fact, I just got off the bike from a ride in sunny Mallorca without leaving my house in currently-rainy Cleveland:
But if exercise isn’t your thing, you can still find inspiration from around the world on your computer. Google Maps is the obvious idea, and here’s a crazy thing I found while exploring the roads around Mount Fuji:
However, here’s a source of serendipitous inspiration that’s a step better. It’s called “Wonders of Street View” and it’s a collection of curious finds in Google Maps. One of my favorites was finding the end of the world:
You’ll definitely find something worth writing about, and if you don’t on the first try, just hit “Random” and you’ll get another one.
That’s the end of the easy inspiration; the thing you can do in seconds or minutes. But those of you who have been with me for a while know that the whole point of Friday Fiction Inspiration is to go much deeper than lazy/easy writing prompt fluff. I dredge up things from many sources, some of them even weird, because it’s designed not just to inspire you in the moment but to help you learn to be inspired all the time by looking at the world around you in a more open, creative way. Learning is hard work, though, so be warned: the next part of this week’s post will take you days, if not weeks, to do.
The next virtual world is games. I’m not much of a gamer anymore. Part of that is that I’ve reached that age where most popular games are just repeats or shinier versions of premises I’ve seen a hundred times by now, and often done better the first time. (It’s been out since 2000, and no one has yet topped the original Deus Ex.)
The other part is that once I started writing, I’ve rarely found a game that is more fun than actually writing something. Games ask you a question and expect you to find the answer. When you’re writing, you’re creating most of the questions and you’re coming up with most of the answers. The reason I say “most” is because if you’re writing well, you’ll create questions that even you didn’t notice and you’ll get answers you didn’t ask for.
But there is still a genre of games that holds an appeal for me: those in which exploration is the underlying purpose. Games like the 2023 version of Colossal Cave all the way back to one of the best selling games of all time, Myst and its even better sequel, Riven. These force you to explore and put things together at the same time, which is exactly what you’re doing when you write. They are ways of stepping out of your own creative process for a while and enjoy walking around inside someone else’s.
However, there is one game, Kentucky Route Zero, that I actually call one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s not actually a novel and you don’t actually read it (although it is heavily text-based), but it will change the way you think about how you read and how you write. It is the literary equivalent of an artisanal piece of dark chocolate: rich, best enjoyed at a slow pace, and if you’re expecting sweet candy you’ll be disappointed. It doesn’t have the trappings of a normal game, as there are no enemies to defeat or rewards to collect. Most of the action takes place through conversations in which you can select one option from a short menu of possible dialogue snippets, and this mechanic is why this game feels like a literary masterpiece: like a good book, it doesn’t show you what it is as it goes along, it shows you who you are.
Even if you don’t like games, do yourself a favor and play it. The experience of going through it at least once is probably worth an entire year of a college-level creative writing program. Here’s a 7-minute video that has a good description of why I recommend this so highly if you want to boost your creativity:
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