How To Travel As A Writer

Travel is an awesome way to enrich your writing. But how to make the most of it?

In high school, I went on a trip knowing the experience would possibly make it into a book for the first time. I spent the whole trip with my nose in a notebook. Hard to say how much I missed. I came away with words on a page, none of them adequate or doing justice to what we’d seen and done.

Being so busy trying to capture everything in words on a page, I came away with very little that I will ever be able to use. At the time, I thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

I don’t know about you, but my brain takes time to synthesize new experiences. Sometimes days, sometimes weeks or months, or even years. Scribbling down words doesn’t hurry the process any.

And it’s not about the words. It’s about the sights, the sounds, the smells; what it makes you feel and think. To write that — to communicate that — you have to experience it. (Note: I am not saying you can only write things you’ve experienced! In this post, I am only speaking in context of experiences that inform writing.) Scribbling words ends up removing you from the experience.

A notebook goes with me everywhere, but it stays in my bag most of the time. It only comes out when a story element hits.

Everyone is different in what works and doesn’t, but I’m a fan of setting the notebook aside to be as present in the moment as possible. Whether or not I write them down, those thoughts and impressions and images stay with me. They will help build my fantasy worlds.

When I travel, I want to see, and touch, and smell, and explore all I can. At the end of the day, I’ll write it down.

This has made for some fantastic trips and some fantastic story inspiration.

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