How To Make Travel Writing Easier On The Go
Travel writing is a lot of fun. You get to go off an adventures and try out all kinds of exotic activities, and when you’re back in your hotel room in the middle of Madrid or overlooking a beautiful vista on a picnic blanket in the Tuscan hills, you can tap out a record of your time and share the experience with hundreds of thousands of others.
It’s what makes travel writing so enjoyable to both create and consume. You can take your readers along on the journey with you, and they can draw inspiration from your trip and use it to plan amazing vacations of their own. Write about your adventures enough and you may end up getting to live a life where you never stay in the same place for long!
But writing about your travels while you’re still traveling can end up impractical. It’s why a lot of writers wait until they’re safely back in their hotel rooms, but saving your craft for when you’re ready for bed might result in low quality posts that you don’t put your heart and soul into.
So, what can you do to find the perfect balance between great writing and stress-free travel? The tips below can help with that.
Take as Small A Laptop as You Can
You don’t want to be carrying around what feels like the heaviest laptop ever made. You want something lightweight and portable and capable of fitting inside a small backpack or purse. The laptop will feel less intrusive to carry around and won’t become a target for theft either, seeing as it fits snugly and safely inside your bag.
So make sure you shop around for a new laptop with this in mind; you can usually get ‘mini’ versions that are only around half the size. If you’re worried the battery life won’t last very long, the smaller size will also mean there’s room to take a portable charging station around with you as well.
And seeing as you’ll only be using the laptop to write and connect to your cloud server to ensure there’s a backup, the smaller screen size won’t have the chance to become a problem.
Do Away with Needing a Mouse
Having to take either a wireless or wired mouse on vacation with you is a bit finicky. It can take up a lot of room in your laptop bag or carry-on and there’s a chance it’ll get smashed, cracked, or lost.
So let’s do away with needing it at all! Instead, learn a few shortcuts that only require the attached keyboard. And don’t worry about what kind of computer you’re using to complete your travel writing - there’s shortcuts available for any and all of them!
For those using a macbook, one of the best shortcuts to learn is how to take a macbook screenshot. This will be very helpful when writing travel guides, as screenshotting the webpages you’re using to compare flight prices or book travel insurance will be a much better demonstration than just detailing the process through the written word.
Or if you’re writing an accommodation review, screenshotting other client testimonials and including them in your post will give you plenty more to talk about. For example, you can showcase what other patrons think about the hotel or hostel you’re staying in and then discuss whether you agree or disagree.
And never forget about the handiness of using the CTRL button. There are so many useful shortcuts that involve pressing this key at the same time as another, such as copying (v) and pasting (c), searching within documents (f), and reopening recently closed tabs if you accidentally hit the ‘X’ while tracking across the touchpad (t).
Of course, if you’re using a macbook, you may have to swap CTRL for the CMD key, but all the same shortcuts should still work.
Take Plenty of Notes Throughout the Day
This means you don’t have to find a spot to sit and type multiple times throughout the adventure. You just take a note of the way you’re feeling or something interesting you noticed and then come back to it later. If you can invest in a handy little notepad and a special pen for this, you’re also more likely to make a habit of it.
These notes don’t have to be precise or even cohesive in any way. They can just be a word that relates to how you felt or what you saw. For example, if you’ve just been kayaking off an island coast for the first time, the word ‘exhilarating’ might be the only thing you note down about it, but that’s a great context clue! So make your notes as short or long as you want, and don’t worry about them being a bit random.
Use Your Camera More Than Your Laptop
Your camera is there to grab snapshots of life as it happens. As scenes pass us by we can open up the lens and capture the moment perfectly in time. When you’re a travel writer, this is an invaluable tool.
You’re going to want to take as many photos as possible anyway, to make sure you’ve got plenty of images of the destination you’re in for your social media. But when you’re using a camera, think of it as a framing device as well.
The camera is capturing the things you want to talk about when you get round to it later on, and you don’t have to stop to get your notepad and pen (or the notepad on your phone) out to jot things down. Photos tend to be the strongest thing for evoking the memories attached to them as well, so don’t worry about forgetting what you wanted to say either!
Travel writing shouldn't be too difficult to get on with while you’re actually traveling. Make the changes above on your next trip and you might find it a lot easier to take your laptop wherever you go.
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