The creative self, from the one you left behind to the one you are looking to become, is an introspective look at the very basics of creativity. The heart of who we are, how we came to our craft, the preconceptions we bring along, and the tools to which we have access, this is the story of the steps we take to start a creative adventure.
You step off a plane or emerge from the car after a long drive and you’ve put yourself into a whole new world. It’s a cliché but travel really does expand the mind… and a journal is like back up storage.
I write constantly. I write every single day. There isn’t a day I don’t open up a computer, put my fingers over a keyboard and just start typing something. It would be easy for me to be overly judgemental about this and wag my finger at people who don’t write stuff down when they set off on adventure… and I’m not saying you MUST do it. I’m really saying you SHOULD try it.
Journalling while travelling is more than just muddling around with a pen and paper when you could be sitting on the beach with a book or a drink (or maybe both) in your hand. Writing things down isn’t extra work you need to do back at the hotel when you could be sleeping or catching up on your social media feeds. Keeping notes about your adventure doesn’t need to be complex or rigid or even grammatically correct.
I do believe it enhances the experience, though.
Assuming the experience is something you care to remember, a journal is a memory capsule for experience. We go about our lives every single day and don’t realize how much we overlook and forget. When everything is familiar at home your brain doesn’t need to remember anything but the handful of differences it encounters. But travelling? Everything is new. Everything is fresh. You step off the cruise ship into a brand new world and every set piece is novel. You blunder off the tour bus and you are met with a world you’ve likely never seen and may never see again. You pay the taxi driver and step out of the cab into a landscape that is filled with things your brain needs to work full time to keep up to understand, let alone remember.
And it seems like for those short term few days it will all stick, that you’ll never forget this moment… but you will. It may get filed away in your brain somewhere, but recalling that memory weeks or years later? Good luck.
…unless you take a few minutes each day—waiting for your coffee order, taking a break at the hotel, or just resting in a park for a spell—to write something down. Journal. Try it.
Okay, maybe I’m leaping to a conclusion about you and your interest in methodically logging adventure into a sheath of paper, but heck even my spouse who only writes business documents every other day of the year pulls out pen and paper back in the hotel room each night.
It’s taken me most of my life to settle into a format that I like, but I have written travel journals for as long as I can remember.
I have gone the old fashioned route, a crisp clean lined notebook full of rambling recollections of the adventure-filled days.
I have dabbled in sketchbook travel journalling, penning a simple bit of art, watercolour or ink drawings surrounded by notes and labels and bite-sized anecdotes.
I once took a novel on long vacation and wrote travel memories in the margins.
To this day I almost always bring along a keyboard and type posts into a personal blog with photos, and yes, I fully count this as a travel journal.
And lately I’ve taken to a form of travel-adapted bullet journalling where I record point form collections of experiences, travel modes, food notes and little hand-drawn maps.
But why do it? Well, I think it’s a key part of the experience: Writing can be many things—therapeutic, expressive, creative, and communicative to name a few—but travel writing can help us process a new place and remember when our brains can’t quite keep up with the adventure.
I started this writing project with a lot of rules, and I’ve broken pretty much all of them.
Yes, there are good rules. There are the laws of the country you live in, and provided they are fair and just then following them makes your home a better place for all. There are ethical rules, standards we’ve decided make us better humans for following them. And there is the social contract, a set of largely unwritten rules and social norms of which following ensure you are less of an asshole when you interact with other people. Good rules all round.
There are also a lot of dumb rules. These are rules I think of that often can be summarized by the idea of one person or group of people trying to control another person or group of people. These rules should be wriggled out of whenever possible.
The third set of rules is the personal kinds of rules we make for ourselves, often little more than mental traps and barriers, and I think it happens to all of us but I find to be especially distinctive personally around creative practice.
For example, I made a bunch of rules for this writing project: these include topics that I write on, posting frequency, length of posts, how many words I use in the titles of my posts, the colours of imagery I use, the placement of imagery, the time of day I share new writing on both the site and on social media… the list goes on, and frankly, they are all pretty dumb rules when it comes right down to it.
Now look, admittedly those rules have kept me focused. I am over two hundred posts into this project as I write this. I have not missed a single weekday post. And while I’m not flooded with traffic I can definitely tell that a few of you have discovered this site and are reading along… thanks.
But those rules have also left me privately agonizing over little tweaks and fine tuning efforts I’ve had to make as I go along. At the outset I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with all these words I was writing and—bluntly—that has evolved. Some of the new ideas about how I want to shape a project like this have run up against the original project plan.
…and that’s okay.
You’re allowed to break rules. In fact, I would almost encourage you to pause whatever creative activity you are doing (or even just thinking about doing) and visualize that list of rules you’ve made about it. Don’t pretend now: you’ve made rules. You’ve set up tripwires all over that idea you had and you’re following them. They may have come from your head, or they may have come from social expectations or they may just be something you figured would be a smart idea, but you have rules that you are following. I would bet on it.
We’re all allowed to strike stuff from that list that no longer moves things forward.
I’m allowed to toss plans out the window if they don’t suit the project anymore—and I’m not just thinking of the little formatting and posting rules, either but the big things, too. All of it. Heck, months ago I was writing navel-gazing posts about how this project was about fitting inside a two-hundred word box, and I’m already well over six hundred words on this piece… and the message is better for it, I think.
Rule breaking is not just allowed, it’s vital.
It’s adaptation from learning. I’m not tossing rules for the fun of it, I’m binning plans that after ten months of writing are no longer good plans to help the project. It’s not quitting or failing, it’s learning and adapting. That’s what rule breaking really is after all, understanding that we can change and get better and move past the walls, step out of the box, and navigate a maze of barriers that were originally there to guide us but which are now tripping us up.
In my continuing efforts to learn to properly make use of the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the year began, I have been playing.
Literally. Figuratively. Philosophically.
Playing.
Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music… and then we also use the same word to describe the act of having fun un-driven by specific goal or focused purpose? Play. I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs un-driven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves. It is both kinds of play because I am playing music but I am also just playing, dabbling, engrossed in a pointless, unfocused effort.
Kids play and we smile and say that’s just what kids are supposed to do.
Musicians play and we queue up to buy expensive tickets to listen.
Average people sitting in their basement play and we, all too often, ask why.
Or worse, we frame it up as part of something with a goal or attached to an effort to better ourselves. We try to justify it. We try to make it into personal growth or an abstraction set within the structure of a bigger learning plan. We rake ourselves across the coals with value-based evaluation of the time, log minutes, write articles on obscure websites about how “playing the piano for twenty minutes a day made me better at business-to-business marketing, blah, blah…”
At some point as we turned from children into adults play became a pejorative.
Real men don’t play, they strategize, practice, gamble, or hone their skills, right? I’ve heard that one before. There’s serious work to be done, money to be made, networks to build and projects to milestone.
Nearly every day, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder I just play, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections, and dive in without a plan. It usually takes me a few tries, but often I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper pedal, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not?
Look, my point isn’t some secret layer here. Playing doesn’t make you a better person any more than it makes you a worse one. It makes you just a person to flit and flounder through curiosity-driven noodling. It makes you simply human to dabble without structured goals.
I bought a dedicated MIDI controller. I capitulated to the lure, the artists yearning, the insatiable feeling deep down in one’s gut that nudges us all towards the black hole of equipment investment.
It was the itch.
Look, the keyboard was not an expensive purchase. But neither is it a toy. It is merely a very basic and simple twenty-five key plug-and-play input device that has piano ivories (instead of numbers and letters.) MIDI controllers make no sound of their own, rather sending electronic signals to another device like my laptop and act as if I was typing musical notes. It’s a musical instrument-shaped interface for a computer, and a kind of soft synthesizer.
Creativity is sometimes about logically unjustifiable exploration and investment.
I am far from an expert on keyboard technology.
If you had asked me a year ago what I knew about musical keyboards I would have told you there were, um, pianos …and electronic pianos …and—I am reluctantly admitting here that I hadn’t been paying much attention after that point.
Also, I quite enjoy synth music.
Growing up we didn’t have a real piano or a fancy digital one and we definitely did not have a synth. We had a bog standard department store brand electronic keyboard with a couple dozen built in digital instruments. In our house now, my wife has (because it is hers from before we were married) a pretty nice digital piano in her office, and then a little over a decade ago we acquired a small upright piano, too, which sits in our kitchen and serves little other purpose than to remind the family of a decade of The Kid doing her piano lessons. In other words, the concept of a bed of black and white keys that makes sounds? That was pretty clear in my head. But I’m no expert.
What I was, rather, was curious.
For myself, those pianos were never quite what I wanted… what I was craving, musically speaking. I would noodle and try to learn the basics, of course, but it the tools I had access to never scratched the itch that I was feeling in my musical soul.
Curiosity untethered to practicalities can lead to expensive places. It is the aforementioned equipment black hole. I have seen countless videos online where the recording studio is a room overflowing with more tools and toys than I could hope to accumulate if I were to work at it for the rest of my life as a full time job. These people are not wrong in chasing new investments in their hobby, of course. It is curiosity that brought most of them there. It is that itch to find the next thing that is going to satisfy the creative urge.
We all do it, too. Photographers buy lenses. Artists buy brushes. You should see my mother-in-law’s quilt fabric collection.
I recently came across the example of Trigger[1], Willie Nelson’s famous guitar. “There are instruments older than Trigger, but few guitars have logged as many playing hours in a lifetime, and Nelson plays hard.” That is to say, there are a lucky few who find their tool and cling to it without variation. I’m sure Mr. Nelson owns more curious equipment add-ons and eclectic musical do-dahs than most, but famously he is a one-instrument musician. But now the important question: Did he get there on the first try? Or did it take him experimentally buying and upgrading and testing and tossing?
I first went down the synthesizer rabbit hole in early 2025. A proper synth is more than a piano keyboard that makes funny sounds. And it is arguably better than a MIDI controller plugged into the software on my laptop. Rather it is a dedicated instrument engineered to generate and manipulate sounds with electrical hardware, and for which a piano-style keyboard is merely a comfortable and familiar user interface. The one I bought one rainy day that spring was my first synth, and I’d be lying if I told you that I’ll settle for it as my last…well for any other reason than budget. I’d love to buy a selection of them and dabble and poke and play and experiment. I’d love to fall into that equipment black hole until I find my Trigger.
The new MIDI controller is another step around that circle. I own a small keyboard controller to interface with the synth software on my computers, and I am learning more about how it all works with each visit to this world of music and sound …and most importantly, a new personal exploration of audio creativity. I am searching for something that I won’t know until I find it. It is a search for the scratch for that itch.