With all the planning, searching, experiencing and observing, travel is exhausting. Yet you’ll be kicking yourself once you arrive back home and sit at your desk, trying to recreate those moments without any notes, journal entries or bits of stories to guide you.
But how and when do you find the time to write?
5 tips for getting writing done
1. If you’re like me, a car journey makes you nauseous. But for some reason, I can write in a bus or a train. Write on those journeys in between destinations. Jot down those sensory details.
2. Put your notebook by your bedside. The moment you wake up, write for five minutes. Do the same thing before you go to sleep.
3. Whenever you take a break at a café or rest stop, take out your notebook and write down all the images around you. Make this a habit.
4. We all love reading. But before you give yourself over to the pleasure of someone else’s story, write your own for five minutes. Then open that book.
5. If you can’t physically write, take a walk and speak into your phone. If you speak slowly and clearly enough, it will translate what you’ve said into text that you can email yourself.
When do you find time to get your writing done? Head to the Facebook group and let us know your tips.
While on your trip, you may think that you have nothing to write about. It may all just seem like a blur of sights and sounds that don’t add to much, or anything at all. As counterintuitive as it sounds, that’s when you need to start writing, even fragments of notes. As you read through your notes on the page, something may click, such as the seed of a story, or a connection with something in your past, or even a pattern of similar experiences that could lead to a story.
5 Ideas For What to Write About
1.Write about what you expected before you arrived at this destination, even if that expectation is hazy. What did you know about this place? What sort of picture did you have in your mind? And what is the reality, now that you are there? How does the reality match or contrast with what you anticipated?
2. What’s the story of what brought you to this location? How did it start? Is this a dream trip that you’ve been planning for ages, or a spur of the moment occasion? Either way, it’s the beginning of your story.
3. Keep an image diary—write down all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures around you. Make it like a game and collect as many as you can. Push yourself to identify and describe with all of your senses, not just visual.
4. Interview someone—either a local or an expat or the person you’re traveling with. Get their perspective and contrast it with your own. What has their experience been? What have you learned about life in this place?
5. Start a travelogue, if only for a day or two. A travelogue is your observations about a new place and culture. It’s a narrative report on your impressions throughout the day. You could write about how the landscape struck you as different from the one you’re used to back home, or a cultural misunderstanding and what caused it, or a frustrating moment and the seed of that frustration, or a moment of joy and an analysis of why that emotion arrived at that moment. It is a deep dive into your own mind and observations.
Here’s a short excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir’s travelogue America Day by Day:
My presence is a borrowed presence. There is no place for me on these sidewalks, This strange world where I’ve landed by surprise was not waiting for me. It was full without me; it is full without me. It is a world where I am not: I grasp it in my perfect absence. This crowd I’m jostling, I’m not part of it; I feel invisible to every gaze. I am traveling incognito, like a phantom. Will I manage to reincarnate myself?
Here de Beauvoir describes her feelings as she walks the streets of New York City in 1947. The book is a record of her impressions, the good and the bad, as a cultural outsider from France. Slowly, she describes how her visit to America changes her, as travel does for us all.
Don’t sell your experiences short. Take a positive attitude about the noteworthiness of your observations. No one else but you has travelled to this place and had these exact set of thoughts and experiences, so share them. The more you do it, the more ideas and images will occur to you to write down. The more you write, the more you’ll have to write.
