Oct 30, 2023
Do you write while you are traveling? How do you make it work?
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It’s What I Do
Writing is sort of like breathing to me. I write all the time. Maybe (probably) I don’t have my laptop with me in the shower, but I’m writing in my head. Same with traveling. If I can’t take my electronics with me, I take a notebook to scribble down notes. I am ALWAYS writing.
On a trip, I’ll take a ton of photos because they’ll later act as inspiration for my writing. Every conversation I have has the potential to show up in some adulterated form in a book. Writing is as integral part of my being as breathing.
How Do I Make It Work?
A lot of my traveling is remote because…Alaska. Often my electronics aren’t going to work very long out there. Which is why I always take a spiral notebook and a pen (or two) with me. Never miss an opportunity to write something down because it’s all fodder for your imagination.
A few years ago, I dropped my father-in-law in Florida to visit cousins. It involved six planes and four airports. On the way down, my hands and attention were largely taken up with him and making him follow Covid protocols so we didn’t get banned off Alaska Airlines. But I still paid attention, made a lot of mental notes, used my time on the planes to jot things down, and took photos with my phone. I visited with his cousins the one night I spent in Florida and I paid close attention to the drive in Florida because it was my first, and likely, my only time there. I used the plane wait at the Tampa Airport to make notes in my phone. When I got to Seattle, I headed to Montana to visit my sister. I took a lot of mental notes while I was driving, but I also spent breaks writing in my tablet. I was able to take my laptop with me, so I wrote whenever I wasn’t visiting my sister. Thanks to a blizzard, the sightseeing I planned to do in Great Falls wasn’t possible, but I made substantial progress on whichever novel I was getting ready to publish at the time.
That’s my writing process in general — grabbing little snippets of time to write and snagging everyday things from real life to use in my writing. So writing while traveling is really nothing special — especially if I’m alone. Now if I’m with others…that is sometimes a different story, but again, that’s why there’s a Notes app in my phone and that spiral notebook comes in so handy.
In June
In June I flew to Nome on business and got stuck in Anchorage for a few unexpected hours. I curled up with my laptop in a waiting area and spent a couple of hours banging out a scene from a book that might publish in the next few weeks (Depends on what my post-editor checks bring up). The person responsible for my travel texted me — “So sorry you’re trapped in the airport. Are you okay?” My work laptop wouldn’t connect to the wifi at the airport, so I should have been bored out of my mind, but of course, I’d planned for that, so I wasn’t bored or unproductive. And when that night we drove out the Council Road to inspect a storm repair, I could adjust my timesheet to show I wasn’t goofing off in the airport. I made up the extra time that evening during the drive.
But I also was writing while I was working. I was traveling with a bunch of engineers and the geologist among them invited me to lick rocks with him. I’m AM NOT kidding. You can find out a lot about rocks by licking them. Well, He could find out a lot about rocks by licking them. I found out I want to add a geologist somewhere in my books. They are very cool and unique people and I want one.
See, writing while traveling can open up a whole world of possibilities.
aurorawatcherak 