Getting it onto the Page

[Bill]

How do you get from experiences to the written word? For me, it's mostly excruciating, meticulous, real-time note-taking. Bouncing around in the back seat, jotting down dubiously legible impressions, for example.

[Scotchneat]

Do you write as you go? Or get your thoughts down at the end of each day?

I keep a travel journal when I go, but usually make cryptic notes at the end of each day. Unless there's a really good anecdote that I don't want to forget.

[Bill]

Do you find you can remember what you meant by your little shorthand notes? Sometimes I can't.

For me, it's a little of both writing as I go and at the end of the day. I take both a Tops reporter's notebook and a narrow rule legal pad. Riding around in the backseat of cars I'll write general impressions in the reporter's notebook, then attempt to decipher my writing (which can be a contest, depending on where you are and what the roads are like) that night and copy the phrases to the legal pad in more complete sentences. Even though I'll have my laptop with me, because that has Photoshop for processing the photos I've shot, I still usually write to a legal pad. Somehow, getting words out of my head onto paper, and then from the paper into a computer later, helps me order my thoughts. It's a bulky process, but it works for me.

And I find it's just crucial to get my thoughts into more or less complete sentences as soon as possible. If there's a flight involved, and I'm consciously writing with the intent to produce an article or material for some specific use, I'll always spend as much of the flight as it takes catching up and getting everything that’s happened since the last time I wrote down on paper, more or less chronologically. Then I draw from the chronological notes when I’m writing the eventual piece. It’s time consuming and sometimes tedious, but I don’t know of any shortcuts. It’s just crucial for me to get as much detail on paper as soon after the experience as I can. That means catching everything up at least every night. If I do, I can feel confident writing from my notes months or years later. If I don’t I just don’t feel confident trying to flesh things out from memory.

For example, we’ve been to Vietnam maybe a half dozen times, from the Chinese border at Sa Pa in the north all the way down to the Mekong Delta, but because I only followed my strict routine on one of the trips, I haven’t felt good about writing more than short bits from those Vietnam.

[Nancy]

I definitely feel it's important to write at the end of each day, but taking notes along the way would be a distraction for me. I like to experience whatever it is, and then jot down anecdotes and impressions at the end of the day when I can fully focus on writing.

[Bill]

Different people, different techniques. I mostly have to do it that way because I don't trust my memory. There's a place in the book, in Sri Lanka, where I write,

"In monastery towns, monks climbed on and off the buses. There were branches of People's Bank - "The Bank with a Heart" - and here was Triple Star Services - "A New Meaning to Cleaning." Once we found ourselves trapped for a while by the Chirpy Chip truck - "From the House of Uswatte."

I'd never remember stuff like that several hours later.

[Scotchneat]

I need to adjust my notifications. I missed this conversation.

My cryptic notes often include sound bytes, for lack of a better phrase, that I know I want to use in my blog later or something. And like you, Bill, some of the writing becomes cryptic indeed if I'm on a mode of transport while trying to get my thoughts down.

I have to do it chronologically to make sense of it when I get home. Helps with sorting the pictures out as well.

Feels wonderfully Bohemian, scribbling out bons mots at a table in a square in Spain or something.