It’s been almost a week since we left good ole’ London, and I don’t think I’ve missed any place that I’ve visited for only a week as much as I currently miss that city. However, I did learn so much about writing as a whole that I was able to take home with me to Georgia.

I mentioned while on the trip that I am a creative writer that would like to be known as a Southern writer when it comes down to it. So what I picked up from the readings and the tours is to use everything around you when you’re trying to align yourself with a location. For example, Brick Lane used an actual street that we could go and visit and get curry from as it’s focus and title. Also there were really surreal moments on all the tours where the guide would, almost haphazardly, mention something like, “Oh yeah, Charles Dickens wrote about these steps in some of his works, and we just walked down them.” To the people that grew up around all these settings in major literature it was nothing to them, and in a way, it’s a goal for me to reach that point in my own writing. So, to be able to write about a location so flawlessly that a citizen of the city/town I’m writing about is just like, “Oh yeah, of course this is a real location, I see it every day, obviously the writer wasn’t making this up.” but to have a visitor to the same location already have a pretty clear idea of the settings in their mind, but be able to actually go and visit them as well and see a real and tangible experience that would add to the depth of a novel.

Overall, I learned a lot in London. Not only about what I would like to see and aspire to in my own works; but about traveling and culture, and maybe even a little bit about myself as well.