A travel writing workshop and writing a book by hand

Kia ora,

I’m deep in editing mode this week, so I’m keeping it short and sweet.

First up: if you can get yourself to Queenstown, and you can get a ticket, you’ll want to attend this Travel Writing Workshop with Naomi Arnold, put on by the Queenstown Writers Festival.

Naomi wrote the wonderful Northbound: Four seasons of solitude on Te Araroa.

I’m working out if I can go too, so I might see you there!

Second: August Lamm isn’t a travel or adventure writer, but she is a wonderful artist and fascinating writer. Her most recent book is titled You don’t need a smartphone, and she wrote it by hand in her notebooks, then typed it up on library computers and a borrowed PC. She talks through the writing process in this article. The article is crammed with quotable lines, so I’ll just pick one to share:

But as I worked, I was pleasantly surprised at how polished the handwritten draft was, how “book-like” it already seemed. I had been unusually careful in the drafting process—handwriting being much slower than typing—and this care had paid off.

A lot of the writers I work with started their stories in scribbled notes written in tents, huts, boats, trains, fields – wherever they can. Getting those ideas down in the moment keeps that moment alive when you come to write about it afterwards. But maybe writing your whole book by hand is worth considering too?

Right, back to the edit!

Cheers,

Deborah

PS: Did you catch my blog post last week? How to make your dialogue realistic. I walk you through what I mean by grounding dialogue in the environment and how doing that makes your dialogue more realistic.