January Writing Sprint with Jon’s Adventure Writers’ Club

Writing Sprint

Fellow travel writer and self-published author, Jon Doolan, has just kicked off his January Writing Sprint on his Adventure Writers’ Club Facebook page. This is the 8th sprint he’s hosted, and earlier this week I committed to joining his January sprint to bang out the first draft of my Cambodia Travel Guide.

The goal of this group is to set up a accountability network with other travel writers to celebrate your writing wins and offer support and encouragement when you fail to hit your writing goals.

Even though this group primarily focuses on encouraging Adventure writers, it’s an inclusive group. It doesn’t matter what kind of book you’re writing, you can still join in the sprint. In fact, our host Jon isn’t even writing an adventure book draft this time around.

Sprinting my Cambodia Travel Guide

In this first sprint I decided I was going to focus on getting a workable first draft of my new Cambodia travel guide completed. I’m using Scrivener, and I set a daily target of 1,000 words, and a sprint target of 30,000 words, and each time I write this app with track and report my progress. (I know there are 31 days in January – but I decided to give myself one bonus day!)

I have been holding off from starting the first draft of this book because I was unclear about how to proceed.

Before our trip started, I was set on writing a traditional travel guide about Cambodia, aimed at a specific audience—backpacking baby boomers. But as I started to write the first few pages, I realized that I wanted to include a lot more narrative content than I’d originally intended, and this book is going to be a hybrid between a travel guide and a travel memoir. This is a new style of travel guide writing for me, so it’s going to be an adventure to see how I balance the narrative with the straight travel facts and information. The only other memoir related content I’ve written and published before are my poetic memoir collections. The first was my Turkey Tales, which focused on the cultural adventures and challenges of moving to Turkey, and the second was, A Turbulent Mind, my collection of poems about my Mum’s journey with Alzheimer’s.

I do have a travel memoir draft which I started about ten years ago, about us leaving our corporate jobs in our adopted home of Los Angeles, and buying a house in Turkey with the view of moving there full time. The working title of the book is Sugar Cubes under a Mavi Sky, and over the years I’ve added to this book each time we’re in Turkey, but I’ve never felt my memoir writing skills were strong enough to author a full-length memoir. It’s my favorite reading genre, and over the years I’ve read a lot of really badly written memoirs.

What makes a really readable and enjoyable memoir is one with a storyline/plot and story arc. But so many first time authors write journal/diary style memoirs that are flat because they’re missing those key storytelling elements.

So what is plot? That question, of course, is one we talk about a lot on this blog (most recently in this post: How to Choose Your Story’s Plot Points). But today I’m going to sum it up like this: plot is a well-structured story with a cohesive point. …. Quote from KM Weiland at Helping Writers become authors

I didn’t want to be one of those authors writing a memoir without a cohesive point, so have held off on working on my own memoir. One day the time will be right, to finish a first draft of Sugar Cubes, but for now I’m going to focus on my new hybrid travel guide/travel narrative and see how that turns out.

Blogging a Book

I’ve been blogging about my Cambodia trip on my personal travel blog, Roving Jay. I love this Blogging a Book approach, whereby you write articles on a blog, with the intention of compiling them into the first draft of your book.

Writing a full length book can be an overwhelming concept, but writing a collection of shorter blog posts is a great way to chunk a book into smaller, achievable goals.

More information about this Blog a Book approach.

The articles I’ve written have focused on sightseeing and getting around Cambodia. But it won’t be a straight cut and paste, because these articles have been written as standalone pieces of content, and my book will need to have more of a flow and continuity to it. But they’re a great first draft to work from.

One of the major benefits of blogging a book is attracting my target reader audience to my blog, and making them aware of my upcoming book, as well as seeing which content is the most popular. I’ve written about 30 articles about Cambodia so far, and each week, the two most popular articles have been:

These published travel articles will be an integral part of my Cambodia book, but I have an uphill climb to create my narrative content, so I’m looking forward to using this January writing sprint to start committing those words to the page, and then use the February writing sprint to do the first rewrite.

I wasn’t really in the mood to write today, it was a late night last night and I would have preferred to catch up on a Netflix episode instead. But I hunkered down to write at least a paragraph of two, and ended up shooting past my thousand words goal to reach over three thousand.