They say that establishing a strong sense of place in your writing is important but I’ve started saving receipts pretty much every single place I go, whether it’s a walk in the park or a long-awaited trip. Because this is what happens: I end up writing about it.

I’ve always tended to know my north from my south (pro tip: a sunny day helps orient you), and we will be driving somewhere and I will just remember a certain fall of light, a crossroads, a gas station. Think of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, his sword directing him toward the secret opening in the tree where Westley is held captive. That’s what my inner compass has always been like.

I’m also someone for whom home is not simply about the people. I once bought a house because its garage smelled just like my great-grandparents’ house – apples and the slightest bit of wood rot. My great-grandparents’ house stands in as a set for me when I read and sometimes when I write. The details of the story change the scene, but behind it, I know the bones of the house. A lot of my writing is about homesickness, a longing for a particular place and a feeling.

But back to the receipts. Here’s how it tends to go. I go somewhere, and it could be a day trip for a hike, and afterwards I head home and go about my life. Then one day, as though I had picked up a tick on the hike, something about that place begins to worm its way into my imagination. It’s like the sprig of ivy the former owner of our house apparently pocketed while visiting a castle in England, a story I heard from a neighbor as I hacked away massive coils of vines smothering the house and blanketing the ground around it. Some things take root in you. It’s long been my habit to bring home Christmas ornaments while traveling – I flew the day the plane landed on the Hudson River and later managed to find a Canada Goose ornament—but I bring something else back with me, a sense of place.

Write what you know, they also say, and while I once wrote about a Middle Eastern desert based only on black and white photographs from a library book plus my own experience of summer, this sense of place usually starts with a trip.

When I begin writing, I realize how little I know of the place. And that’s when the fun begins. Because at some point I find a way to go back, and this time, it’s qualitatively different from that first innocent trip. The first time, I just fall in love, sometimes not realizing it until I return home. The second time, it’s as though I’m an antenna, a bat flying by echolocation, the all-seeing eye of Sauron.

One of my favorite stories is the play, Our Town, and one of my favorite scenes in it is the one where dead Emily is given the opportunity to return to her life just for an ordinary day. “All that was going on in life and we never noticed?” Emily says. She asks the Stage Manager whether anyone ever truly sees all the small glories of life. “Saints and poets maybe,” is his answer. Like everyone else, my day-to-day life gets lived with less attention than it likely deserves, but when I make that second trip to a place that has captured my imagination, well, the saints and the poets have a run for their money then.

In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to take a short solo trip to Florence, Italy. I had fallen in love with Florence after visiting there nine years before, and I had begun working on a novel set there when I realized I could easily go there during a work trip to Switzerland.

The Florence I returned to had changed and not changed. It was still a Renaissance city filled to bursting with art, but now it was the height of summer, instead of the cusp of spring. Then it had been sprinkled with tourists, while now I wondered if I was watching an evacuation in the core of the city. There were caricatures of Obama and Trump and thousands of Pinocchios where the last time there had been art prints on blankets in the streets. My heart sank a little because the city’s magic had been baked a little in the unrelenting sun, had been trampled by the hordes. But I turned on my powers of observation nonetheless.

There was a garden I wanted to use in my writing, because it has a tunnel of wisteria through which people can walk in the spring. It was past wisteria hysteria season, but I wanted to pace it out, to understand it. If I hadn’t gone back to Florence, I wouldn’t have known that its main entrance was a storefront that looked like a condo sales office. That in the countless stairs behind the storefront were cicadas that sang as though with different body parts from North American cicadas, as though these ones were made of metal whirring. I had forgotten the vague smell of sewers that pervaded the city, the outdoor market filled with the scent of tanned leather. I bought a small bag of apricots at the central market, and the vendor added a cluster of cherries to my bag, as though they required a garnish or a corsage.

It’s easy to travel as we live, taking in vague impressions of most things, remembering only the big events or occasions. But what I do when I travel for my writing is almost like compressing living in a city into a few days. What does that gelato taste like? How do tourists order it—in English or Italian? In what language do gelato vendors reply? I’m interested in observing daily life, how human beings can live so differently and yet so similarly.

I once watched a late-night crew in Las Vegas, the street sweepers who came out once the usual crowd had gone to bed, like mice after a feast to nibble up the crumbs. After the Vegas strip regulars—the “If I wince when you kick me in the balls, you get your money back” guy, the Chewbacca holding his head in one hand and a smoke in the other, the showgirl posing on the street, the men handing out cards of prostitutes being piloted around in the backs of delivery vans as though they were pizzas—had closed up shop, the cleaners emerged on the streets, making everything ready for the next day’s performance. I was watching, day and night.

Sometimes a place will seem to elude my imagination, but I still collect the receipts. After we dropped our kid off at college, we stayed overnight in a hotel just outside the city. I was sad because we had left him behind, and the garish black and and red décor, the ultra-cold air conditioning, the view of the liquor store and nail salon behind the hotel rather than the ocean in front of it, those didn’t really captivate me. And yet, an idea began to percolate in my brain, about what it would be like to live there in a place that had been known for rescuing survivors of shipwrecks. When we took our son back for his sophomore year, story in mind, we stayed in the same hotel. Early in the mornings, I prowled. One morning I walked the beach. The next I went to a service at the monastery I remembered driving past the year before. Afterwards, I walked the labyrinth at the top of the property in a clearing in the forest, following its stony path to the center. Only afterwards did I discover that somehow I had pressed record on the video function of my phone which was in my pocket. The video only recorded the faintest light coming through the fabric that concealed it, and the steady thump of my feet. But when I come to write the book, I will remember standing on the stump of wood in the path, the soughing of the breeze, the lace of the lichen on the New England rocks.

The saints and the poets pay attention. And that means both what you look at but also what you don’t. We’re warned against information dumping – showing all our clever research in one fell swoop as though we’re writing a report. Instead we select the one or two judicious details that make the reader say, yes, I can see it, even if I’m putting that detail in the general setting of my great-grandparents’ house. We can’t bombard our senses all the time either. In fact, when I write, I like to deprive my senses as much as possible – I really can’t listen to music while I write—so that I’m not distracted by stimulus I’m not writing about.

But if we want to write about place in a way that brings it to life, I’ve found no better way than to immerse myself in a place, to record in my mind (and later on paper) its sights, smells, tastes, textures and sounds, embedding it more fully in my memory than it would otherwise.

There’s also a need to take time to digest what we’ve taken in, to allow the impressions of a place to grow within us. One night on my European trip, I wanted to go home, but then I realized I wasn’t so much homesick as full. That day alone, I had watched teens flossing in a Roman amphitheater, had eaten hearty peasant food on a sultry night with a figure of a marionette looking down from the building across the street while an Uber Eats delivery truck drove up with McDonalds food. I didn’t spill the impressions away by sharing them on Instagram and I didn’t codify them into a quick tale I told the same way to every friend but like Mary, the saints and the poets, I pondered all these things in my heart. And then I turned them into story.