Let’s talk tools #4: travel

There are times when you can retire to your writing nook with a fine steaming beverage of hot caffeinated writing fuel. You sit down in front of, grasp in your hand, or whatever you writing tool of preference is, and surrounded by the items that inspire you, proceed to write page after page that are both award-winning and completely marketable.

Other times you have to ponder drinking tap water vs. hotel coffee. Your choices are work laptop or hotel stationery. Surrounded by paintings or photographs that art students would be embarrassed to hand in, middle school art students.

Whether traveling for work or pleasure or what have you, stay productive is a bitch. The hotel TV is one of the biggest problems, there is something about turning it on, especially when you are traveling alone that makes it so difficult to turn off. Part of it is that anymore they are oversized flat panel TVs, so the floating heads on the TV screen are almost life-sized and give that illusion of other people around. This is especially true if you are like me and your normal house hold activity level is pretty high. Two dogs, a seven-year-old, my wife and myself make a for a pretty lively house. But, writing with that squawk box going filling the whole hotel room is a challenge few are up to.

I tend to travel a bit for work, and though my success rate is not terribly high, I have found some things that work for me to help keeping the words flowing.

1. Accept it won’t be the same as home. I usually write on a typewriter, but my preferred typewrite (named Typie by the aforementioned seven-year-old) is not easily portable. So, I take this is a time to try out other writing styles, e.g. directly into the computer, try out a new writing app maybe; pen and paper; something new and different.
2. Try to keep to the same sleep schedule. Most of (Shiri excepted) have a sleep schedule they keep, if you can try to keep it while you travel, and hopefully this will open up sometimes, in the beginning or ending of you day to write.
3. Keep it fun, if you are a longhand writer try writing only on the paper you find in your hotel room. I knew an artist who would use the back, empty pages of the Gideon’s Bible like a sketchbook and would leave drawings where ever she went, not for everyone sure, but you get the idea. I once wrote a letter on pages from a phone book.
4. Bring it with you. I love Dropbox. I keep all of my current drafts in a folder that Dropbox watches for two reasons. One, backup, you can never have too many. And accessibility, if I have a web browser, I have access to my work. Scrivener helps here, too. You can set up a sync folder for your scrivener project, and if you choose plain text as the format for your files, then you can edit them anywhere.

So, writing while traveling is not the same as writing from your carefully crafted writing nest at home, but you can still get some good pages cranked out.