Travel to write; Write to travel

We think of traveling as the window we jump through to give flight to our imagination. Getting out of the routine, into a different culture, where the stars in the night are strange and the trees stand funny. We find it exciting because we can use all of those details in our stories. We can add a dash of South African accent to our villain or describe the magnificence of Victoria Falls through our character.

But (and you knew there was a but coming) why doesn’t anyone talk about what a time sucker travel is? First, you spend time planning. Then, you spend time budgeting. Finally, there is all the packing, visa paperwork and general pre-travel jitters. You have spent the better part of six weeks getting ready to travel. Once you are at your destination, which in my case was the astoundingly blue-sky azure-ocean Cape Town, you don’t do much else but gape and sigh and think how lucky you are to be alive.

When you return from your two week holiday, it’s time to catch up at work, clean up the yard, and before you know it, it’s Holiday season and you haven’t met your daily writing quota (for weeks) or posted a blog for a couple of months.

So how do you guard your writing time? How do we take time off to recharge ourselves, and still keep up the productivity? Do we make a choice? What do we choose? In my travels I saw awesome whales, met the most generous people, discussed with great energy Nelson Mandela’s legacy and… didn’t write a word.  Because of the new things I learned and experienced I’m behind on everything else. If life was a race, I’m really very behind.

So yes, traveling is expensive. It’s a time sucker. It will make us fall back on our oh-so neat goals but there’s also just something about it, something we can’t quite pin our finger on that makes us keep taking these journeys. So how do we keep sane while still feeding our soul?

1. Be realistic. Clear out your schedule. Accept you are going to focus on honing your imagination. This is not the time to be focused on your writing goals. See the bigger picture. You need to nurture your soul in order to come back and write those stories.

2. Prioritize. When you return, and you have caught up with those pesky chores, be true to yourself. Cut out those dinners and Sunday brunches for a couple of weekends. Microwave some of your meals. Ignore the laundry. Write again. In a few weeks, you’ll get your mojo back and more secure in your routine (and have time again for Bowling Fridays).  

3. Talk to others who have traveled. Take time to seek out people with similar experiences. See how they viewed their journey. How did they see it differently? Gaining self-awareness is the best thing about travel. It gives you time to nurture yourself, continue to build our awareness of human nature, the world around us and how we interact with it.

These once in a lifetime experiences are what refreshes our imagination and gives us new energy to continue to move forward (especially, when we don’t see an end in sight or a publication offer or when our characters have got us in a real bind). Bon Voyage!

The J word

  There are many J words: feeling jealous (of friends’ success), being   jaded (of the publishing industry), constant jeering (of others). The J word that’s been on my mind has been judgment.  

 It usually begins with others’ judgments of you. Who you are, what you write, what you do. Then there are those moments of judgment – “Why do you laugh so much? It’s like you are trying to attract attention.” or “Why do you waste your evenings writing when you could be spending time with your mother? It’s not like you are published or anything.”

Judgment, when it comes from a trusted source, begins a chain reaction like no other. There’ the initial surprise: What! Really, do you mean that!? Followed by outright denial: No, I don’t do that. I don’t waste my time. And then anger: How dare she think of me like that? How dare she judge me? That leads to hurt: Does she not understand me? Is she right? Am I a horrible person who hides behind my writing? The most important effect of others’ judgment of you is how you start to see yourself. How it shapes your view of yourself. You begin to wonder who you really are and whether you’ve been deluding yourself all this time. Maybe you aren’t cut out to be a writer. Maybe the evenings you sit in front of your laptop are just an excuse to escape from the world and your real responsibilities.

But then you remember that you love those hours where it’s just you and your characters. That you’ve grown so much as a writer these past few years. That once you finish a couple more drafts you’ll be ready to query your polished manuscript.

Self-judgment is that hill we’ve got to climb over before we can accept someone else’s judgment. Judgment of who we are. What we write. What we wrote a few years ago. What we’ve not yet written. And this acceptance can take various forms. Acceptance can mean that we agree that we aren’t cut out to be writers. We accept we love to read but haven’t become better at our craft. That it will remain a hobby. Or acceptance can mean that we speak out that we’re not hiding behind our writing. That our friend was simply wrong. That writing is vital to who we are. It makes us who we are. Our acceptance can help us deal with the judgment and move on.  It can help us heal the dents to our self-esteem; move beyond self-judgment and continue to write, work on our craft and strive to become who we want to be.

When I remember (and nine out of ten times I don’t) I tell myself that judgment is an opinion. One person’s opinion. It can bring you down or you can use it propel yourself forward on that journey to become a better you and a better writer.

Why do we write

Firstly, I hope everyone out there is safe and warm and recovering from the after-effects of Superstorm Sandy. My power was out for five days, the roads around me were closed thanks to fallen trees and my town was deserted. Still, when friends and family asked me how I was doing I could honestly say I was doing well. I was prepared with enough food and water, flashlight and candles and I was in touch with friends. Yet, I didn’t write a single word during the storm. I doodle-ed, took walks, and in general wool-gathered.

Why do we write, I wondered. I always thought it’s because I have something to say. For someone who doesn’t talk much in person, the pen and paper are convenient tools. But why do I have something to say? Is it because I see things others don’t see? (How aggrandizing is that!?) Or do I ponder over things longer than others? Why do I, when I look at a person, try to give her a story so that I can justify her soulful brown eyes or her hurried gait? This curiosity and pondering slow me down, my writing output declines and I tend to revise these stories (instead of my WIP) in my head while waiting at traffic lights, grocery lines, and, of course, while waiting for my power to return.
So while we write because we want to say something we also write to connect with others, to connect, yes, to humanity, as a whole, but isn’t it a relief to know that at least one other person sees things the way we do and gets what we are trying to say?
I think we also write to make sense of life. Living through Sandy, when life as we knew it was suspended, where our lives were upended and where we didn’t know what to expect the next day or the day after that, writing helps us bring some kind of order to the unexplainable chaos. Why do things happen? Must they happen? Can we avoid them? Why do we meet the people we do? Would our lives have turned out differently if we hadn’t? Life, most times, doesn’t run predictably. We live it trying to make sense of it. We have routines, structures and habits to help us. Writing could be another habit of ours.
But then again maybe we write because we just can’t help it. For some of us, writing is an act of will. Are we underplaying the role of determinism? Some things like Superstorm Sandy are determined to happen –we can prepare for them and plan our actions, yes. But we just can’t stop them. Whatever we do, we have to dream up stories, create characters and plot lines and pen them down.
What do you think? Why do you write?