(This post was suppose to go out last week, but life happens! 🙂 Hope you enjoy!)

When I was younger,  I would love to sit and watch people and wonder where they were going and what their stories were. Because everyone has a story. As I got older, that interest in stories grew and inspired a desire to travel and see new places. Both in my own country and abroad.

I had the great privilege to travel and visit the Holy Land this past summer for several weeks. Besides marking a huge item off my bucket list , I learned a lot about myself and surprisingly, some of it had to do with writing! 🙂 When I got back, I wrote up a list of what traveling as a writer taught me. There are so many advantages to traveling as a writer even if it is just to somewhere local!

•  As writers, we often find ourselves at home a lot (unless you write at coffee shops 🙂 It’s good to get out of our comfort zone and open our eyes to new places every once in a while.
• Experiencing new cultures. It makes it easier in the end to write about them if you chose.
• Research is at your fingertips!
• You can write about what you know. I have always heard that you should at least try to write about what you know and what better way to do that than to travel!
• It gives you new ideas for stories, plots and settings.
• Not only is the experience of traveling amazing, it gives you a broader sense of the world and the people in it and what makes them tick.
• People watching is the easiest when you sit in an airport waiting for your flight 🙂 Character inspiration is everywhere!
• It makes it easier to describe things when you have seen them with your own eyes.
• It’s fun! 🙂

The easiest way that I found to keep track of your new ideas and experiences as you travel, is with a good old-fashioned hard bound journal. I found that bullet journaling really works well. Often when you travel, some days can be pretty hectic and its easier to jot down a few impressions and ideas then to write out a whole three or four pages about your day.

Traveling, whether it is to a local park, another city in another state, or half way around the world to another country, tends to really open your eyes and show you how greatly we all are connected. How each of us has a story to tell.

So, how about you? Do you have any tips for writing while you travel? I would love to hear them!