8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: writing

Chapter List

  • Travel Journal Branch · Part Two

    Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

    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.

  • Travel Journal Branched · Part One

    Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

    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.

  • Write Always

    Don’t stop.

    You want to be better at anything? Keep plugging away and don’t ever stop practicing, and that goes doubly so for writing. Why? It just does—filled as it is with nuance and expectation and alive right there in the heart of everything we do, say, hear, and make.

    Writers write.

    They just do. And you are almost certainly only a writer when you are writing: actively penning words onto the page, typing characters into a keyboard or brewing the thoughts in your brain for your next opportunity to do more writing. 

    Writing can be messy. It can be scattered. It can be long or short, formal or stylistically chaotic. Writing can be words strung together in a notepad app, or traced with a lusciously thick felt-tipped marker on a wall. Writing can be private scribbles in a journal or annoying daily posts in a public website launched into the universe with no clear destination or audience.

    Whatever it ultimately becomes, the writing itself is an action. To write is a verb. 

    Writing is the act of filling the gaps between words. Writing is temporary and temporal. 

    And you need to write always. Why?  If you need to ask then you are not one of us.

    Because writers write.

  • Start Writing

    At the heart of this website, the core of this little creative project I’ve been working on here, there is but a single message burning with the inner heat that drives the whole damn thing: it is one piece of advice. Start writing.

    Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

    That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

    But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

    Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

    Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

    Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

    It’s not difficult.

    Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

  • Show Tell

    The Kid is a natural performer. She comes to life when attention turns her way and she is at her creative best when she is in the spotlight.

    Me, not so much.

    I prefer the quiet toil of fingers on a keyboard in a dimly lit cafe or sketching a scene from a vantage where no one can peek over my shoulder and ask pesky questions.

    But for either of us, and all of us, there is vulnerability interlocked with the act of creative expression. We all need to turn on, activate, be our best selves and show up to tell the story we are trying to communicate through whatever form we choose.

    I would love to tell you that creativity is an easy or a comfortable thing, but I really do believe that the best of what we makes comes from opening our hearts, souls and selves to the universe.

    I type away in peace and quiet rarely seeing the people who read the words I write, but despite my shyness I still post them and send them out into the universe for anonymous adjudication. Just by reading these words you have transformed into the second half of a mysterious equation that I know exists when I write but I’ll never know much about. That is my personal vulnerability.

    Creativity comes from everything we are clashed against everything we are not.

    Under the category of Show & Tell I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.