When in Rome

People often ask me, how do you write when you’re on the road?  As you may know, I travel from November to April, doing what I can to sell my books.  Book promoting is a break-even business at best, that is, you don’t make any money on the tour, but you hope that there’s enough ripple effect so that enough books sell the rest of the year that you can spend May through October proofing, editing, revising, and publishing new work.  So you have to find a way to write on the road.  Well, writing on the road is no different than writing at home.  You have to structure your environment so that your writing tools are always right in front of you.  On the road, I carry a small 7” tablet outfitted with a keyboard.  I won’t mention the brand because everyone has preferences, but it’s easy for me to flip open first thing in the morning, or when I’m waiting at an airport, have a few hours at the hotel before a reading.  At the end of every day, I email what I’ve written to myself (so that if my tablet ever gets stolen or lost, I can still download my writing from any computer).   And while I do spend a fair amount of time exploring the cities I visit and having dinner with old friends, I find that most of my time on the road is spent writing.  In some ways, you have more time (to kill) on the road than you can find at home. 

The trick is, to keep the story thread going.  I’m lucky, in that most of my writing is poetry, which is a format better fitted for those 3-4 hour layovers, and evenings at hotels.  But I’ve been able to write longer short stories too, which often take several weeks to write.  Scarlet’s, for example was written in a 4 week time period during which I traveled from Detroit to Chicago to Seattle to Los Angeles.  

So, when in Rome, adapt.  While the 7 inch tablet with keyboard is not as comfortable as my full size keyboard at home, it is convenient and easy to travel with.  If not a keyboard, get a 5x8 writing tablet that easily fits in a knapsack or that you can tuck in your belt in the back under your shirt.  One trip, all I had was several packs of 3x5 cards I carried with me everywhere.  When I got back to the hotel each night, I would summarize my scrawling onto regular paper, or if the hotel had a business computer, I would type the notes and again, email them to myself.