What can be more appealing than a career of a freelance travel writer? You see new places and meet new people every day, enrich your life experience with new impressions, and overall lead a fascinating lifestyle, while at the same time monetizing your writing genius. People like reading, and even the age of technology cannot stop us from getting involved in new captivating stories and articles – the only difference is that most of the reading is now done online.
Hence, if you have decided to unify the pleasurable lifestyle of traveling with a writing career, there are some things you should know about writing while traveling – experts from your essays writing service share their life stories and expertise to point out the major roadblocks and issues to consider to make that work out.
Select the Writing Type
Much depends on what type of writing you are planning to conduct during travel, since traveling to write a book and traveling to write trip reviews or a tourist journal may be quite different. The most common travel-related writing types include:
- Journal writing
- Composition of a book
- Blog writing
- Travel log/journal writing
- Travel reviews.
The main difference among these kinds of writing is that for some of them, you undertake the travel, while for others, you have to find spare time from travel to compose the writing pieces. Therefore, you should make it clear whether you are traveling for the sake of writing, or you are writing for the sake of earning money and financing your travel. Depending on these goals, you may organize your working schedule and adjust the travel to writing needs or vice versa.
Writing Hurdles in Travel
The majority of writing travelers point out that writing during travel is extremely hard, since you have to find time to concentrate and produce the writing piece. There are numerous barriers on the way to effective writing on the road:
- Travel itself. While you are moving from one location to another, you may face some issues such as choosing the mode of transport, buying tickets, booking a hotel or finding accommodation after arrival, and obviously, the actual travel takes much of the time and is highly exhausting. This is especially true about traveling in exotic countries where infrastructure leaves much to be desired, and you are mostly urged to cover long distances on slow transportation; it is surely an adventure worth writing about, but it may need some separate hours to sit, relax, take a convenient pose, and compose the valuable lines, which you may at times lack.
- Tiredness. Travel is exhausting, no matter how pleasurable and full of positive impressions it is. You are constantly on the move, seeing new places and people, taking photos, experiencing strong emotions – that may spend energy so much needed for writing creativity! Thus, it is highly recommended to stick to certain routines and reserve some days for disciplined writing only; otherwise, you will be distracted by the surrounding beauty and will not be able to produce anything intelligible for your audience.
- Internet connectivity. No matter how strange it may sound for a Westerner who is used to connectivity all around the world, some distant countries and locations may lack connectivity, so you should not expect the same level of Internet quality in all corners of countries to which you get. Thus, reserve your time and get ready to be offline for some time not to get into trouble with your publisher.
Writing Tips to Plan and Boost Your Writing During Travel
With the discussed issues in mind, travel bloggers and writers have developed some useful life hacks and tips for assisting traveling beginners in their uneasy writing process. Use these recommendations to organize the entire process effectively and to achieve all travel and writing targets on the move:
- Write something every day. Experienced travel writers advise their colleagues not to fall in despair even if writing does not go as smoothly as they initially suggested and planned. No matter what the reason is (be it travel fatigue, problems with transportation or accommodation, abundance of travel plans and emotions, or simple laziness), make sure you write at least a couple of lines every day. It may be 1,000 words or only 100 words – but they should be produced every day. Once you get accustomed to the travel rhythm, everything will get smoother.
- Get out of your comfort zone. Writers usually want to see some conditions for their effective, productive writing. Some of them need quietness and a working table for inspiration to come, while others need some time alone, and work only at nights. During travel, it is almost always necessary to step beyond the comfort zone and to learn writing in any conditions. You never know where the muse will reach you – get ready to embrace it and write some perfect lines!
- Include dialogues. For the stories to look livelier, you should let the readers get a sense of presence in the place you are talking about. Hence, it is highly recommendable to diversify the storyline with realistic, spacious characters and to bring your stories to life. Your travel may give much invaluable experience for doing so – you are most likely to meet new interesting people every day, to get acquainted with vivid representatives of their cultures and contexts.
- Don’t haste. Even if you have only a couple of minutes or hours for writing every day, do not sacrifice quality – your readers are most likely to be critical about negligent writing. Inability to bring a storyline to a logical conclusion, leaving a sense of confusion – all this may seriously affect your story, making you rewrite it from scratch. To avoid such nuisance, take your time for polishing the plot and bringing all storylines to closure; publish only fine-tuned, proofread versions even when you are on the move and time is critical.
- Keep a travel journal. No matter what the purpose of your travel is, if you are a writer – use your travel experiences to your benefit. Even if you are not planning to use your travel experiences as material for writing at present, don’t waste that precious data. Encapsulate your impressions and new knowledge in a travel journal – write about the most important and impressive meetings and highlights every night before going to sleep. Who knows, maybe after the haste and exhaustion of your trip, you will look at your travel notes and will decide to produce a full-scale book?
These are most important recommendations for combining travel and writing in a non-intrusive and non-stressful way. At any point of your travel, we recommend using the time you have to the most, and not yielding to laziness when the entire world is open for you.