Travel Clinic for the Writer-on-the-Move

Travel can bring unexpected writing opportunities and unexpected writing challenges. There should be travel-season clinics for writers, the way there are ski season clinics for skiers, to help us build up those write-anywhere muscles.

It would include exercises such as the following:

1. To build focus: 15 minutes daily freewriting on your WIP, beginning in a distraction-free environment and moving on to coffee shops, park benches, and houses full of energetic children.


2. To build sensory awareness: 1 minute exercises for noticing and recording sensory input--information from the eyes, ears, nose, fingertips, from inside and outside the body. Then-practice choosing one sensory impression that strikes a chord and use it as a writing prompt.


3. To collect tools for travel: Assemble a tote bag with writing toys, such as colored pens, lovely lined notebooks, photographs, index cards, sticky flags, sketch pads. Take a 1 hour date with yourself to play with your newly collected writing supplies. Which inspire you? Based on your observations, hone the collection.


4. To find alone time: List 10 possible places and times when you can escape to a place of your own, to reflect and recharge and, if you wish, write.


5. To practice finding time together: Go out of your way to engage fully in a social event with family and friends. Notice your reactions. Notice the joys of connecting with other people (even if you, like many writers, are an off-the-chart introvert!) Remind yourself that great writing requires great living.


6. Internet Odds and Ends: The final session would cover everything you need to know about how to connect to the internet in hotels, restaurants, cafes and shopping malls--including a primer about when connection is a help versus when it's a distraction from your real work.

Ah. I'd like to go to a clinic like this. It'd help me prepare emotionally for the high-speed world I usually enter when traveling. Maybe I'll hold a class of one!

Cheryl