A travel diary update
What I learned from Romania to Hungary--and a new technique for keeping track of book ideas on the fly.
If I'm on a trip that's more than, say, a week, I'll dedicate an entire pocket-sized notebook to the trip. I'll fill it with tickets and clippings and scraps (I think some people would call this either a junk journal or a scrapbook). I’ll take notes in it and also draw in it.
Here’s the latest one, which I have been hoarding since APRIL to share more widely, because hello, zero bandwidth. Here’s a few things I learned about myself and my process through this particular notebook.
Sometimes, the actual beginning of a thing doesn’t come until later, and that’s okay.
I think I only came up with the cover design for this on like day 5, 6, 7 of a 13-day trip. And then it was just the blue line of the Danube. Over the ensuing few days, I added the green around it, which I liked a lot. And then, I added the start and end dots. And then I went overboard and added the two stupid arrows, which I now regret, but whatever!
At the end of day 3 or so, in Braşov? (Was it Day 3? I can’t remember) I finally found something of interest to my eye…it was Braşov’s coat of arms.
I loved the blue and the octopus-looking tree roots and the crown too. Something about the organic-ness of the design…
Sometimes you just have to start with what’s in front of you.
I really, really like the packaging design on our airline’s (KLM) snack and wet wipe wrappers. This kind of design is a thing I aspire to, so I tried to copy it. It reminded me of this drawing class I took from someone. We were meant to draw for twenty minutes each day. He didn’t care what we drew, he said, but we should start every session with five minutes of “making the marks you like to make.” I am obsessed with this concept. Yes, we should try new things. Because maybe then we’ll discover more marks we like to make. But sometimes making the marks we like to make just gives us more confidence to fill a blank page, and that’s enough.
I drew a lot more faces than I have in previous years. I chalk this up to traveling with a legit artist. Bill Pliske is an oil and acrylics artist, and it was really inspiring to watch him sketching people. I tried it myself. I was pleasantly surprised with the new memories these little faces unlocked. Like, I did jot down some verbal tics each of these people had—like, our tour guide Alex, below on the left, laughed this way: “Cheh, cheh, cheh,” and he would fill dead air by saying “Yuppa!” where we would say, “Yep”—but I also remembered more about them, like the way they walked and their facial expressions. It’s a neat thing, to access this other level of memory.
(Above, some on-board musicians.)
Also, Bill’s work is much larger scale than mine is, and this also loaned me bravery…instead of just drawing the mailbox here, which is something I would have done in previous years, I felt brave enough to also draw what was around the mailbox—the crack on the wall it was mounted on; the peeling paint.
4. Another significant thing that happened is that I came up with two ideas for potential new books. I know I won’t be working on these any time relatively soon, but I wanted to get them down somewhere before I forgot. I didn’t want them to be in the main notebook, though—that notebook is more for visual stuff, on-the-fly flotsam I picked up—so instead, I asked for a piece of photocopy paper and made myself a little zine. (These instructions are from Austin Kleon.)
Then I wrote down the gist of the idea in this little notebook. Later, I made another one, for another idea. I shut these two little zines into my main travelogue, so they were with me wherever I went and I could add more ideas if I had them, but they are also very much their own things. Separate from my running thoughts about the trip and what I learned about the places we visited, even though the stories were inspired by people we met and what I learned.
When I got home, I immediately transcribed these two ideas into my digital note-taking system, so I won’t lose them, and so they’re there when I’m ready to work on them.
I think in lots of ways these notebooks are for looking back. But this trip, between the new artistic techniques I picked up and new book ideas and the new ways I can keep track of them, my notebook also felt like an investment into the future.
I think that’s kind of cool.
