Creating When Traveling

What do you do with your creativity when you travel? Do you postpone it until you come back home? Do you try to create as much as possible before going away? Or perhaps do you continue to create when you travel?

One thing I wouldn’t do is to skip creating altogether. For me creativity is like a muscle and to build that muscle I need to practice every day. If my practice schedule has a gap of few days, I know that during that time my creativity muscle will decline.

So I would either create my art in advance and schedule the posting automatically or I would continue creating without interruption.

I few days ago Ausra and I returned from a concert trip to London where we played organ duet recital at St Paul’s Cathedral. We spent 3 nights away from home.

Before going to this trip I knew I wouldn’t be able to do everything I’m doing at home creatively because it would just exhaust me and I still wanted to have a lot of time to see the city.

So I looked at my day-to-day creative activities and asked myself what are the essentials here that I don’t want to miss?

Well, for me it was posting Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast episodes everyday because my audience depends on it. This could be scheduled in advance because it’s just too much work to record our conversation with Ausra, edit the recording, send it to our team of transcribers, add intro and outro to the mp3 file, post the recording online, wait for the transcription to be returned to me, polish it and post it on the blog along with the recording. Usually we do these things in batches and well in advance.

So a few days before going to London, Ausra and I recorded a few more podcast episodes and slowly got ready the material. However, I saw that my transcription team wouldn’t be able to transcribe them in time. 

Luckily I had a few more blog posts from my Create With Vidas blog that I wanted to share with my Secrets of Organ Playing subscribers. This was an interesting but not necessarily directly connected material with organ playing. Still I scheduled it for the days when we were away.

Then I could be free to explore London, prepare for our duet recital and know that our Secrets Of Organ Playing activities would still be running. Incidentally, every post that I shared was well received so thematic shift was actually refreshing to my audience.

But I also felt like I could still create something while waiting at airports or at the hotel or wherever. I wouldn’t take with me my 50 color pastel set that I normally use because it takes too much space in my luggage. What I did instead I took a couple of 1-3 mm black markers, a pen and my pocket notebook which I use to create my Pinky and Spiky comic strips. That’s all creative materials I needed. And a phone to scan the drawings and post them online. I didn’t even need my laptop!

The comic strips turned out to be black and white, of course. And you know what? People seemed to enjoy them. There is some magic of black and white which is missing when you add colors.

So that’s it! I still managed to create every day without interruption, had my Secrets of Organ Playing blog running and had plenty of time to see London and prepare for our organ duet recital at St Paul’s Cathedral.

So this is what I recommend if you travel - find some activity which you can automate but also do some creative work live too. Not too much but enough for you to feel like your creative juices are flowing.