This week, I’m starting work on a travel story that you might call “vintage”, and no, it has nothing to do with wine!

It was almost exactly two years ago that I paid a visit to Cajun Country, in Lafayette, Louisiana. I took a tour of the small town of St. Martinville, and became intrigued with the story of Evangeline. She’s the heroine of a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1847.  Ever since the poem’s publication created a national sensation, she’s been a source of Cajun pride –I think of her as a Cajun Anne Frank– as well as a font of controversy –historians believe she was a composite character, several locals believe she was a real person.

Immediately, I knew that I would write about Evangeline. The writing has proven to be something less than immediate, however. It took me about two months to mull the idea over, do a few interviews, to decide on the shape of the story. I ended up going back to Lafayette on a different assignment, so I snuck in a little more research while I was there. Then I started pitching it, and it took a few tries to find the right home.

I got the assignment from the History Channel Magazine about a year ago, but they work very far in advance, so I had a long, long lead time.

And now it’s due pretty soon –and I’ve had many other things I’ve been excited about in the interim –and I have to figure out how to recapture my initial excitement for the Evangeline saga.

This is not uncommon in travel writing, or any kind of writing, really, publication cycles often don’t match up with your cycle of creativity. The way around it is to “bank” your inspiration when you’re first excited about an idea –even if you think you will never ever lose your passion for it –so you can return to it when it’s time to write and fall in love all over again.

What do I like to save in my bank?

• Photos: I use my camera as a note-taking device, and discipline myself to take more photos than I think I’ll ever need. I’ll print out the ones that excite  me the most, and prop them up around my computer when I’m writing.
• Maps and driving directions: seems like clutter, but remembering how I got someplace can help put me back into the moment of discovery.
• Audio recordings: I’ve started to fiddle with podcasting and sound slide shows, and so I’ve started to tote around a very good tape recorder.  Listening to the sound of the tour guide’s accent, hearing the sound of the water in the bayou, I rocket myself back into the moment.
• Fliers, business cards, brochures: It’s efficient to strip all of these things of their relevant information, enter it all into a computer program and toss into trash — but creativity isn’t always efficient. I keep all of these things and find that sorting through them again sparks my memory.
• Books: Yes, I know! Books are heavy, and you can buy anything from Amazon once you get home. But there’s something about being able to pick up a book I bought in the first blush of excitement that brings me right back to it.
• My notebook: the notes I find the most useful are the ones that capture sensory information: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste.  It’s also fun to see my initial excitement over an idea as I become quite indiscriminate with exclamation points and question marks. (From my notebook circa first Evangeline blush: “A controversy!!!!! Does it matter?!!!! Is there scholarship around this???)  I’ll also make rudimentary sketches in my notebook if there’s something I’m seeing that I can’t quite capture in words.

For more ideas on “banking”, I enjoy browsing the Moleskine blog. I’m not a scrapbooker, but I have a feeling that the tools of scrapbooking would also be very handy for creating an inspiration bank.– [Alison Stein Wellner]

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