A guest post by Karol Gajda of Ridiculously Extraordinary

If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time breaking away from the fun of travel to actually sit down and write. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a 3 day holiday or living a nomadic lifestyle like I currently am, there never seems to be enough time to get all the writing done.

If you’ve already developed strict writing habits then this advice might not pertain to you. If you write no matter what, no matter where you are, then you’re on another level and you probably already use the tips I’ve learned.

Personally, I’ve set up my lifestyle to where I need to work 2-4 hours/day (in addition to writing for my blog) while I’m on the road or at home (which is currently nowhere since I sold all my belongings and rented out my house). Approximately half of that work time is devoted to writing and editing.

If you’re not traveling, just having trouble finding the time to write, these tips will work for you too.

1) Schedule Writing Time Like You Schedule Other Activities

You schedule time to visit the sites in whatever city you’re visiting, right? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do the same for your writing.

I’ve found it’s easier for me to schedule in 1-2 hour blocks. The best time for me has been after lunch and before bed.

Immediately after eating lunch I will head to a cafe, library, or park, and work for 1-2 hours on my laptop. If I haven’t scheduled anything for after that block of writing, I will take a short break, and then work some more.

If I have scheduled an activity after that 1-2 block of work time I will then schedule another 1-2 hour block of writing time before I go to bed. Sometimes that means less sleep, but the work gets done.

If you’re an early morning get-started-right-away type of worker, then scheduling your writing time immediately upon waking or after breakfast might work better for you.

2) Write During Dead Time

Even if you’re in the middle of a fantastic holiday you’ll find lots of dead time.

Examples of dead time:
- Waiting for a table at a restaurant.
- Waiting for your food at said restaurant.
- Taking a bus or train to your next stop.
- Waiting for said bus or train.

In an average day I probably have to wait 60 minutes for buses, trains, and food. During that time I pull out my small notepad or my netbook and write. If writing by hand I transfer it to my computer during my next scheduled writing session.

3) Schedule Full Work Days

This mostly pertains to you if you’re on a long, slow, trip. You don’t have to rush around seeing all the sites and packing it all in at once so you have some luxurious leeway. That’s my preferred way of living and traveling.

And because of that style of travel I schedule full days where my only goal is to work. I still enjoy the city I’m in because I schedule some of that work time in local parks, restaurants, or cafes, but I can relax and write without feeling rushed.

A friend I met in Sydney, Australia actually schedules full weekends in the Blue Mountains (~2 hours from Sydney) where he does nothing but write. He loves the mountains, and he loves to write, so it’s a double whammy.

I’m currently in Adelaide, South Australia for a few days longer than expected because I didn’t make a train. I’m using this “found time” to mostly work.

As a blogger I have myself on a set posting schedule. It’s one blog post per week, every Tuesday. I know that’s not as often as a lot of other bloggers, but it’s important that I meet that deadline. It allows me the time to craft well thought-out blog posts.

I don’t believe in “writing it in.” That is, I don’t believe in free-writing a blog post and then immediately posting it to the blog. That works for a lot of successful bloggers, but it doesn’t work for me.

I have to schedule a lot of time to write and edit my blog posts. I’m still learning and would love your tips for finding time to write when it might not be the most convenient. Leave them in the comments. With your help we can turn this simple blog post into WriteToDone’s Ultimate Writing While Traveling resource. :)

Karol Gajda writes about Freedom, Health, Travel, and Life at Ridiculously Extraordinary. To learn how to live a Ridiculously Extraordinary Life subscribe to the RSS feed here.

This is a guest post by Gilbert Ross

Blog writing can be fun and a rewarding hobby or business. Unlike traditional publishing, blogs give you the benefit of having immediate response and feedback from your community and an endorsement in the form of social bookmarks and Twitter or Facebook following.

These benefits, however, come at a price. You must pay the community back with frequent good quality content.

The point of having good quality articles is widely understood and agreed upon by the blogging community. The problem most bloggers have is to deliver good quality material frequently and consistently.

If you are a blogger who is nodding his head in approval right now, be prepared for some good news. There are ways of getting very efficient in finding new ideas for future articles and organizing those ideas in a way that will make them easy to pick up and write about whenever you want.

How to get new ideas:

• Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Delicious to leverage on othersí research. This is how I see it ñ instead of spending plenty of online hours trying to hop on from one site to another in search for something interesting, there are millions of people who like busy ants have done the job for you already! This is what social bookmarking is about. Say I want to find some ideas about fishing. I search for ëfishingí in Digg and articles, video and images about fishing will come up sorted out by their number of Diggs. In other words by the number of times people voted them as interesting. In this way the chances are that youíd come across interesting ideas hundred times faster than if you had to crawl the web yourself. You also get a good feel of what people are interested in reading about! Priceless.

• Carry a pen and notebook wherever you go. This sounds low tech I know but still works miracles. The reason behind it is that often a lot of ideas spark when we arenít really expecting them at our desks. You could be on a bus stop or in a cafÈ or anywhere when the idea bolts in. This is common because when we are trying to solve a problem or search for an idea, the answer may take some time to incubate then resurface when we are leisurely not thinking about it.

• Keep note of interesting discussions with friends. Remember the pen and notebook? Here it comes in handy. Very often I find really cool or interesting subjects to write about when discussing something with friends. An engaging conversation can have the equivalent effect on the brain as a 30 minute solid exercise on the body. It massages out ideas like no other thing. Use it to your advantage. Jot down those a-ha thoughts before they disappear in nothingness.

• Look for old popular posts in your blog or anyoneís blog. Who told you that you have to look into undiscovered territory to come up with something interesting? Ideas are there to be re-shaped and re-invented. Trust me, this has worked for millennia. Say you found an old post that had gathered quite some interest. Pick up the important points and redirect them and combine them with fresher and more updated perspectives on the subject. This is not recycling but building on momentum.

How to organize the ideas:

• Use applications such as Evernote to track and organize your note fragments and ideas. Evernote is fantastic. You can jot down ideas or clip text, images and videos from the web and it will store them in a digital notebook. You can tag the notes and any word in the notes is searchable ñ even text within images!! Letís say you saw an interesting advert at an airport. You take a picture on you mobile device and store it in Evernote. You can then search for a word you remember in the image and the image comes up in a second. It is also web based or installable in a pen drive to follow you wherever you go. Brilliant stuff!

• Jot down keywords and sentences that come to mind without stopping as soon as you have found a theme or subject to write about. Donít worry about writing stupid or irrelevant stuff. Clean later. Donít bother about sequence or order. Itís important not to stop the flow. You can use any text editor. I use pen and paper.

• Read through the keywords and phrases once or twice, delete the odd stuff and sort out the rest into structured concepts and sentences. Put them in sequence and tag them if needed. The latter means adding a short foot note to the concept that will later remind you what was the big idea behind it. Sometimes an idea seems perfectly ingenious in its birth but when we look at it a week later we canít remember what it was all about.

• Copy the result in a text file and save under a folder which bears the name of the theme/subject.

• You are ready! You have the core structure for an article ready in the drawer. All that remains is picking it up and weaving those ideas into an article.

Note: These steps can be performed in a relatively small amount of time. The great advantage of this method is that you can run these steps quickly and frequently. Hence you can store a number of these files beforehand and use them for future articles.

For more articles from Gilbert Ross be sure to check out his blog Soul Hiker. You can subscribe here or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

By Justin Dixon of A little Better

Every year it gets easier to start a blog, and as this ease brings more blogs into the picture it becomes more important to set yourself apart. But with so many blogs already out there, and so many ideas already being put in to action, aren’t all the good ideas taken? The answer is no. Each one of us has a unique experience, and angle to come at different problems, and each one of us have a different strength set. You have a message. You may even have multiple messages, the trick is to figure out what they are.

No matter why you are starting your blog if you want to bring people to it, and if you want it to be the best quality that you can produce you are going to need a message. So what is your message? Your message is the story that you tell people about your own life and theirs. It is a consistent message and it is your brand, and without a strong message your blog is going to just end up being a raindrop lost in the ocean.

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A guest by Everett Bogue of Far Beyond The Stars

There are millions of distractions that the modern day writer has to put up with in order to get their ideas out there. Twitter, Facebook, your feed reader, they’re all conspiring to distract you from getting your writing down on the page.

Did you know, when you’re multitasking between writing and doing something else, it can take up to thirty minutes to get your mind back on track? Flip-flopping between activities is not an option for a writer who’s trying to get some writing done.

This is why I subscribe to a method of pure writing flow. It’s one of the many ways that I use to counter the background noise bubbling up from every direction.

What is flow? It’s kind of like a river of writing, it’s an uninterrupted stream of consciousness directly from the source of your creativity through your brain, into your nervous system, out your hands, into your computer. I like to think of it as zen writing meditation.

There is some important prep work that needs to be done before you’re ready for some serious writing flow time:

1, Isolate yourself.
Shut the door to your study, turn off your cell phone, turn off your email program, shutdown your Twitter. Make note of any other things that I haven’t mentioned here that could possibly distract you from entering the flow. Make sure they can’t beep, howl, vibrate or demand anything from you.

2, Just you and computer.
I write with a program called WriteRoom, which turns my Mac into a tool for simply writing. A simple text editor will work as well. This way it’s just me and the words I type, nothing more. There’s no jumping dock icons grasping my attention, it’s just me and the writing. This is important, because it’s so easy to open Firefox and get lost in the internet. Sometimes if I find that WriteRoom isn’t enough isolation, I’ll turn off the internet altogether.

3, Don’t start writing, yet.
Take a moment and center yourself. I usually do around fifteen minutes of quiet contemplation before I even start touching keys. Focus on the idea that you have, but not too hard, just enough to see a vague outline of what you want to achieve. Why? Because this gives my mind a chance to let everything else in the world go, and just focus on the task at hand: writing.

And now it’s time to write, let the worlds spill out of you onto the page, and trust that they’re okay. There are moments in every creative’s life when they tap into the source of their creativity and they’re able to ride that creativity unto a finished project. With this writing philosophy I’m trying to get at that creative source.

Don’t edit yourself.
While you’re flowing, it’s important not to go back and edit things that you may have screwed up. Accept that you spelled miscellaneous wrong, and realize that you’ll be able to go back and fix that after you’re done. You’ll be able to rearrange paragraphs, after your flow is complete. If you stop and fix these things now, you’ve broken the stream of thought and you’ll have to start from scratch.

The time to edit yourself, to second guess what you did, is after your flow is over. When your copy has gone the full life-cycle from conception to being fully typed on the page.

Don’t second guess yourself.
You might be looking at the words coming out of you, and saying ‘wow, this absolutely crap.’ ignore that little voice. It’s trying to sabotage your writing, if you stop and delete what you’ve put out now, you’ll never get to the next sentence, which will inevitably be more brilliant than the one you’re writing now.

The important part is to bypass your inner critic and editor, as they’re conspiring to destroy your ability to get your ideas down on the page.

Keep the pace.
Imagine flowing like kayaking down stream a moving river, but you’re not the boater, you’re the kayak. No matter what happens, even if the person in control stops paddling for a bit, you’re going to keep going. The words will keep coming out of you and out onto the page, until you’ve reached the place where you pull the boat out of the water.

There are several other art forms that tap into spontaneous flow.
MCing is one of these art forms, rappers commonly tap into a stream of consciousness, a process that bypasses any second guessing. The words are moving so quickly out of a rapper’s mouth that they don’t really have time to pre-formulate those words.

Improv dance is another art form that involves tapping into flow. The dancer simply moves spontaneously to the music without any pre-choreographed movements. One of the goals in improv is to bypass the inner critic and just do the first physical action that drops into
your mind. This same philosophy can apply to writing.

Like any skill, flow takes practice to master.
Some people will be better at it initially than others. Don’t judge yourself if your inner critic is screaming at you to stop writing, just acknowledge that it’s there, and with time you can learn to ignore it and just write with the pure energy of your thoughts. Try flowing for short periods of time initially, maybe twenty minutes? And then gradually build on that time frame.

Eventually you might be able to do an hour of free flow writing, or imagine being able to flow for six hours straight? You’d be able to write tens of thousands of words, wouldn’t that be amazing?

Everett Bogue writes a blog on Minimalism called Far Beyond The Stars.

A guest post by Jules Clancy from stonesoup

This writing business can be a lonely endeavour. We’ve all been there. Self imprisoned in our lonely garrets – or more likely behind our laptops. Reaching out to the world with our writing but feeling helpless and alone.

Fear not fellow writers. There is hope. I’ve recently discovered a wonderful way to overcome the fear and feel connected with the rest of the world. Let me introduce you to the benefits of finding yourself a writing mentor.

Benefits of a writing mentor

1. Confidence boost
To give your confidence a well deserved boost, there’s nothing like having another writer who you respect and admire take an interest in you and your writing.

2. Inspiration
Talking (or emailing) someone who has already achieved some of your own goals can be incredibly inspirational – not to mention motivating. It’s all about bringing it to life and making the path to success a little clearer.

3. Contacts – opening doors
The world of publishing is notoriously tough and unfortunately it is still often all about who you know. Having a well connected mentor can be a way to gain some introductions. But you should never expect this as a given – it’s up to the generosity of your mentor. Nor should you forget that all the best contacts won’t overcome a lack of commitment or talent.

4. Help you achieve your dreams
Having access to someone who has already achieved similar goals can be invaluable. We all learn from our experiences so why not make the most of someone elses wisdom rather than re-inventing the wheel yourself.

A mentor may open you eyes to possibilities you haven’t even dared to dream.

5. Impartial constructive feedback
Hollow flattery can be easier to come by than genuine constructive feedback. No one is perfect and we all need to be reminded from time to time. If we aren’t made aware of our short comings and what we need to do to improve, we’ll never learn and grow as writers – or as people for that matter.

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