Writing On The Run

Wilnona and Jade

We will be making our final descent. Please put your tray tables up and stow your large electronics. Keep your seat belt fastened until the seat belt light turns off.

Wilnona and I have memorized these instructions since we spend about 26 weeks a year in the air. The flights and cities vary, but there remains one constant—the deadline for our next book. Recently, we were asked how we finished writing 13 books on time. We had to stop and think. Upon deep meditation, we realized the answer was that we found a space to write, no matter where we were. These are a few of the ways we accomplished this.
1) Make Any Space Work for You
Physically or mentally, find your writing place.
Overhead, the crackly sounds from a speaker creates a diversion that pauses the flow of writing to relay mundane information, like a change of gate. High heels click on the bland tile floor.
Wilnona is distracted. She automatically wants to know where that person is going. I stay focused, unless the phone rings or Wilnona tells a silly story. Either way, we work to find peace in between the crackles or crying babies, because a deadline is always looming.
We’ve learned to find quiet writing spaces by memorizing the layout of certain airports. For example, the airport in Denver has a cubbyhole across from the McDonald’s at the gate we generally fly out from. If we desperately need silence, we go there to charge our phones and type with our earbuds in.
The Gatwick airport has second story seating next to the Weatherspoons that stays fairly quiet all day. (We finished half a book there once.) Just a word of warning, though, in Las Vegas there is no silent place to write, even at 3am. In airports like Las Vegas, solitude must be found in our mind so that creative flow can be obtained.

Read the entire article in the October 2020 issue of InD'Tale magazine.

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