On Scale, Streets, and Story
What my trip to Italy reminded me about writing.
When I stood on the attic platform at the top of the Colosseum, alone except for my husband and one other couple, I had a moment I think all writers chase: a shudder of perspective. That sense of smallness in the face of something enormous—not just architecturally, but historically, culturally, imaginatively.
It happened again inside St. Peter’s Basilica. And again on the 414-step climb of the Duomo’s bell tower in Florence. By the time I reached the top—legs burning, lungs heaving, heart lit up—I wasn’t just looking over the red-tiled rooftops. I was looking outward with an almost dizzying sense of scale.
And as a writer, that’s everything.
Cities and the Creative Mind
I’m not a city person by default. Give me solitude over crowds, birdsong over horns. I’ve traveled to quite a few in the years before I had children (and Covid shut down the world), but this was my first jaunt off the Northern Continent since 2018, and it was a needed reminder.
I might not like cities, but wandering through Rome and Florence made me realize how vital it is to experience other arrangements of life—how different streets shape different paces, how other cultures move through space and time.
In Rome, ruins lean casually beside modern cafes. Literally. Our running joke as we walked our 25,000 steps every day was to point out each of the ruins that were just haphazardly there. In Florence, every alley seems to hold a centuries-old secret. And in every piazza, people gather like it’s the most natural thing in the world to pause, to talk, to be.
Writers are always asked to imagine places they haven’t been. But I think the real question is: have you been somewhere that changed how you imagine?
Writing and the Weight of Wonder
There’s something about scale—true, physical scale—that rewires how you think about your stories. It’s one thing to write a cathedral into a scene. It’s another to have stood beneath a dome that took 120 years to build. Or to climb one, knowing stone by stone what it feels like to earn the view.
Ideas flew at me on this trip—bits of dialogue, questions about characters, revisions to a fantasy setting that suddenly felt too small. I wrote notes frantically on trains, in courtyards, at the foot of fountains. Not because I had time, but because I couldn’t not.
Writers Need to Wander
I’m not saying you have to travel to Italy to write well (though I highly recommend it). I’m saying writers need to wander. Whether that’s across an ocean or into a neighborhood you’ve never explored, the point is to step into something new.
To feel small again. To notice. To imagine with fresh perspective.
Because at the heart of every good story is an understanding, however fleeting, of the world beyond ourselves. And sometimes, the best way to expand your fiction is to first expand your sense of scale.
Where’s the last place you went that changed your writing?
Or what’s a place you’re aching to see, just so you can write it into being?
I’d love to hear. Drop it in the comments.
With ink and a little magic,
Taylor
Editor | Author | Professional Word Witch
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