Breaking your Promise to Yourself

Each trip I promise myself I’m going to keep better travel notes, but don’t. So what happens when the trip ends? I return home, and have to wrack my brain to recall the memories from my trip. Some memories will be lost to the big black abyss, buried under a rotting pile of information overload. Others I’ll remember—vaguely. I stare at a blank page, and kick myself for not taking better notes, because I know that would made it easier to write my articles.

Do I hear a “welcome to my world!”? Isn’t it time we stopped doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Each of our travel days are going to be full of activities and new experiences, but they’re also going to be full of events that we don’t need to waste precious time writing about. Fast drafting is about developing an quick and effective way to capture the key elements from your day. Whether that’s sights, interactions with people, activities, or your thoughts and reactions to your surroundings.

The art of fast drafting is to focus on the memorable elements, while they’re fresh in your memory. Capture them straight away, and they’ll have the power to transport you back to a time a place, when it’s time to write about them more extensively. 

By the end of your trip you’ll have a travel notebook that is a treasure trove of reference materials. So that back home you have an endless supply of travel memories to recall, and snippets of information that can be used as prompts to  write your travel articles. 

These words and phrases will trigger your emotional connection to a person you met, a place you visited, or an event in your day. It’s a written scrap book of ideas that are going to get your creative juices flowing.

Reset your expectations

The main impediment to failing to create a consistent travel journaling habit is that we set too high an expectation for ourselves. We feel like we have to write lots of content. We’re travel writers after all. 

But when we’re traveling it’s better to immerse ourselves in the experience of a new destinations, rather than shutting ourselves away to write about our experiences in lengthy detail. It’s only natural that we’d rather have rich cultural experiences than doing battle with our spellchecker, or trying to wrestle a paragraph into shape.

Rather than trying, and consistently failing, to create an travel journaling habit to capture long-hand notes, develop a fast drafting habit that only takes 20 minutes per day. (You probably waste more than that each day scrolling mindlessly through social media, or playing candy crush).

What is Fast Drafting?

Fast drafting is the simple process of using a timed writing session to capture your daily highlights. Whether you call it free writing or speed writing, the concept is the same:

1. Set a time limit to outrun your inner critic.
2. Let go of perfection.
3. Write every damn day.

These guidelines are all you need to create an effective fast drafting habit. And in this post we’re going to look at how you can Let go of Perfection.

Embrace rough and let go of perfection

When you write quickly, certain elements like spelling and grammar will suffer, and your notes end up as a jumbled mess and an erratic mix of scribbles, reminders, and sensory elements.

As somebody who is structured and organized, it took a bit of effort to become comfortable with this lack of consistency. But I’ve realized the benefits of focusing on the quality of the content, not the quality of the spelling and grammar. That’s why using bullet point lists is an effective approach.

The goal is to focus on creating a memory jogger for article prompts. It doesn’t have to look pretty, it just has to be useful.

Just write, don’t edit

We all have an inner censor that makes us second guess or third guess what words we commit to paper, but her method is all about capturing your first thoughts, those unfiltered concepts and ideas that need to be written down, not pushed back into oblivion. Those first thoughts have the most heart, the most guts, the most truth. They’re what will make your travel writing come alive.

We continuously correct what we’re about to say before we put the words on the page. We let that inner critic define what we’re going to write. It’s hard to let go of that inner critic, but letting go of it is one of the key’s to writing faster.

Fast drafting relies on entering a flow-state. This is when words come out of you effortlessly, and you lose awareness of external stimuli. But as soon as you start to judge what you’re writing, it’ll bring you back down to the conscious world with a bang!

Isn’t it about time that you changed how your failed, and embrace a successful travel journaling technique instead?