Writing on the Go
Keep Your Habits Up While You Travel
Greetings and salutations from Shelf Life; we are on an airplane right now. We are en route to the Mile-High City for business purposes. The flight is long. The “we” is royal. It’s just me. I am on an airplane.
Since I’ve been doing a good amount of travel this fall—with a good amount still ahead—I thought it was a good time for a Shelf Life on how to keep the writing habit up when you’re far away from your writing sanctuary with its familiar keyboard, adequate lighting, comfortable chair, scented candles, and whatever else you have going on that makes it possible to generate text and write it down for posterity.
I’m not always great about maintaining my habits when I travel. And I mean any of my habits. I get up and go to bed and eat meals at unusual times. I have no dogs to walk. I can’t bring my full skincare regimen with me so my routine suffers. If I’m traveling for business I have to bring my work laptop, which means I’m not bringing my personal laptop, which is the one I use for writing. Everything is all messed up.
But there are upsides, too. Quiet time in a hotel with no dogs bothering me for attention, no house chores to do, no partner to hang out with, no video games to play. It’s primo writing time. The trick is packing the tools to do it.
So today I’m briefly sharing five ways I keep my writing habit up when I’m out and about and away from home. I say briefly because I have to go get on a plane. If there’s a Shelf Life for you to read on Thursday, then that’s a testament to how well these strategies work.
Break Out Your Longhand
No laptop? No problem. Everyone can benefit from some longhand writing from time to time. Recent research published in Frontiers in Psychology has shown that handwriting affects the brain in a different way than typing. If typing is your usual method of writing, bring along a pen and notepad when you travel to give your writing brain a workout.
For me, personally, handwriting is a lot slower than typing. This is both a help and a hindrance, which is why I like to do longhand writing sometimes but not all the time. When I write slower, I think more about what I’m writing as I write. When I type, my writing keeps pace with my thinking. When I write longhand, my thinking outpaces the speed at which I capture text.
Writing longhand with pen and paper is a great way for me to work through new ideas, because my brain is always a sentence or two ahead and waiting for my writing hand to catch up. If you have a long voyage ahead by plane, train, or (as the passenger in an) automobile, think about bringing a notebook and pen so you can write while you ride.
Some other supplies you may wish to bring—a pen in another color (red, naturally); a highlighter; and sticky notes. I always run out of margin space when I’m writing longhand because going back and leaving notes in earlier text is not as simple as inserting the cursor and typing away.
Voice Notes Are Your Friend
What if you’re not the automobile passenger? What do you do if you’re the driver? Or if longhand writing just isn’t for you? Or if you brought your laptop but the place you’re stating just has no comfy place to sit and write? Voice notes.
Every smartphone, tablet, and laptop has the ability to record speech to text. Many have applications built in that can do this for you—you probably won’t need to download anything. For instance, Microsoft Word has speech to text built in that you can use by clicking the “Dictate” button on the Home ribbon:
You can do the same with Google Docs using the voice typing feature:
Didn’t bring a laptop? There are plenty of speech-to-text applications available for Android and iPhone if you want to get fancy, or you can just open an empty note and use the voice typing icon (on Android it looks like a microphone near the keyboard) and start speaking.
Dictating text is a skill. Most of us are naturals at speaking to another person, or even speaking to ourself, but few of us have the skill of giving dictation—not anymore, anyway.
I was just telling some colleagues the other day that at my first office job the executive director didn’t have a computer in his office. When he needed to send a memo, he would record it on a handheld tape recorder (the kind that used the little mini cassettes) and then he would drop the cassette in my inbox. I’d pop the cassette into my Dictaphone—a tape player that started and stopped playback via a foot pedal, kind of like a sewing machine—and transcribe his correspondence onto letterhead. Then I’d drop it in his inbox for him to review and sign.
I’m Dictaphone years old.
Anyway, the point is, Mr Statler had finely honed his dictation skills over what was a long and storied career (even in the 1990s) but if you’re new at it, you might find it difficult to swing into the “narrator” voice. Stick with it. You can edit your output later. This is a skill worth building and long car trips are a great time to work on it.
Enjoy Some Daydreaming Time
I can’t speak for anyone else but I have a really hard time doing anything on an airplane. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus enough to read. I can’t use my phone. I’m too ADHD to meditate.
Daydreaming is one of life’s great pleasures that I rarely have time for in day to day life but when I’m trapped on an airplane, train, or long car ride I can indulge. Daydreaming is also one of my favorite ways to cook up new plots, develop devastating character banter, and plan sweeping character arcs.
If you’re bored in transit from place to place but you can’t nod off, put yourself into the setting of whatever you’re working on—or would like to be working on—and spend a little time in your characters’ skins and skulls. You don’t have to stick with your main plot, either. Meander around in your story and see what you discover.
Listen to an Audiobook
Reading widely and a lot of an integral part of writing well. There are only two ways to get better at something: Study and experience. Experience comes from actually writing. Study comes in the form of reading—whether that’s books on the craft of writing and storytelling or whether it’s fiction by whose example you can learn from.
I devour fiction but have a hard time focusing on nonfiction. For me, audiobooks are the best way to absorb some nonfiction—mostly because I listen to audiobooks while I’m trapped in the car or on a plane. If you’re moving through a liminal space—that is, a transitional space between where you’re coming from and where you’re going—why not dig into an audiobook to pass the time and pick up some tips and tricks?
I’ve been listening to Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, who narrates her own audiobook. And good Lorde is she funny. I don’t necessarily choose audiobooks by the quality of the narrator but I always enjoy hearing an author narrate their own book.
Practice Cloud Computing
Bringing up the rear of the Shelf Life article: A practical tip. If you’re writing electronically, make sure you do so in the cloud. This is almost impossible to not do at this point, since most word processors back up your work to the cloud so that you can access your files from any computer at which you can log in. If you use Word or Google Docs as your main word processor, you’re gold.
If Scrivener is the poison you pick, you’ll need to use Dropbox to sync between different computers with Scrivener installed. If that’s your usual writing suite, you may want to consider using a web-based word processor while you’re traveling so you can access your work from any device you have handy—laptop, phone, or tablet.
One thing to consider, though, is that you might not always have internet access while traveling. Maybe your hotel doesn’t have wifi (hard to imagine) or maybe you’re on a plane and didn’t spring for access. If you know—or fear—you’re going to be without internet access, make sure you prepare by saving your documents in offline mode.
In Google Docs, you click the document status icon and then press the blue button to turn on offline mode:
You can also set your whole Google Drive to offline mode by clicking the gear in the upper right hand corner of your Drive window, navigating to settings, and checking the box by offline mode:
Working offline is even easier in Microsoft Word if you have it installed on your computer. Just use it as normal and save your files locally. Word will go back to backing up your files to the cloud once your internet connection is restored.
Listen: Am I saying you have to—or should—spend your vacation maintaining your writing habits? No. Everyone (except me) should take a break sometimes. However, the travel time between destinations, which might otherwise be lost to idleness, is a great time to exercise your brain’s creativity and get some writing done.
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