TRAVEL WITH ME | Rome to Venice

With Spring Break almost upon us college students, I finally got around to editing the footage from my Easter Break trip last spring.  It only took me - what - a little over a year to edit?

All jokes aside, this is the fourth vlog I've released onto my Youtube channel from the analogs of footage I shot over my semester abroad.  I had pretty high hopes of producing a travel vlog series onto my channel when I originally signed up for the program.  I've always wanted to do something with my channel, and study abroad seemed like the perfect excuse to produce content without completely boring an audience.

A lot of things got in my way.  Bad WiFi.  Corrupted graphics cards.  Editing programs which I couldn't translate from Italian.  But for the first time since I've begun uploading these vlog segments onto my channel, I want to be upfront with you about the main reason why it took me a year to edit any of my trips.

I needed the distance.

It's difficult to own up to.  It was an incredible privilege to be able to study abroad, one that a lot of people don't get.  But after five months of living in Rome, and weeks of travelling across Europe on my own, I quickly began to realize that there is an enormous difference that arises from visiting a place versus living in a place.

And after returning to the States, facing the barrage of ecstatic questions about how my trip was, it was difficult to explain to people why I couldn't match their level of excitement.  But the truth was, and is, that I wasn't excited most of the time I spent abroad.  That fervor and thrill that overwhelms a traveler upon first arriving to a new place quickly reveals itself to be only a honeymoon phase after the first two weeks.  The truth is, most of the time I spent abroad I was uncomfortable.  I was stressed.  I was confused and fatigued.

I felt pretty bad about that - not just when I got back to the States - but while I was abroad too.  I knew that I should be enjoying myself more, and I felt irrepressibly guilty that I wasn't happier.  I bore that guilt for a while, really.  That didn't start to change until I came across this quote from Anthony Bourdain:

"Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind."

Now, I'm not a big Bourdain fan.  He's funny, though a bit of an asshole.  But when you've been wading through a flood of cutesy Pinterest quotes about travel with loopy fonts and faded pastel sunsets in the background for the past several months, the bluntness of this quote is incredibly appealing.  It's nice and all to motivate yourself with quotes about adventure, or how "you only live once" so you should get out there because you'll regret it later.  But that's only one side to travel.  And I suppose that's the fundamental difference between "travel" and "journey".

When you travel to a place - for the first time, or the millionth - you don't necessarily experience the set backs, pitfalls, or obstacles intrinsic to that place.  You don't have an arc.  There's no suffering, so there's no change.  It's just an experience.  When you live in a place - when you embark on a journey across a part of this world - your travels become life.  And life is messy.  It's stressful, uncomfortable, and often devastating and miserable.

It's those small, sparse moments, in between the struggles, that give life meaning.  The book you read on your train ride.  The smell of the sea as you sit on the edge of a cliff.  The children that stand around, watching you paint, calling out compliments in their native language.

Those memories wouldn't mean as much to me if I hadn't suffered through the miserable ones.

So, if you have to ask about how my time abroad went, this vlog is only a snapshot of that journey, and to be honest it better resembles a pastel Pinterest quote than an Anthony Bourdain snippet, because at the time I was filming it, I thought that was what people wanted to see.

But there is a whole journey laying beneath the visuals of this video diary, and in the interest of transparency, I'd like to share that with you now, bit by bit.

Stay tuned for next week, when I'll post the second part of the TRAVEL WITH ME vlog series, accompanied by a blog post telling the full story of my first solo trip: pastel sunsets, broken hearts and all.

What No One Ever Tells You About Writing a Novel

At the start of this year, I made a promise to myself.  Like ever other New Year's "resolutionist", I started making lists of my goals for 2016, and on that list - just like any other year - I wrote "get published".  This year however, I also started making a smaller list that I considered "actionable goals"; small tasks that I could do every day to break down my goal into something manageable.  This is what that task list looked like:

1. Blog every week
2. Submit to writing competitions
3. 15 minutes of networking a day
4. 15 minutes of drafting query letter a day
5. 15 minutes (minimum) of revising Ravage a day

Of these five goals, as you might have guessed, I've only (barely) adhered to the first two.  I've hardly ever checked on my social media, with the exception of maybe Pinterest and Youtube.  I gave up pretty quickly on the idea of drafting my query letter once I discovered that a third of said letter consisted of my "credentials" as a writer: degrees, awards, positions of significant employment, certifications of merit - aka, all things of which I do not possess.

But I simply cannot condone the fact that I have not even stuck to the minimum minutes of revision a day I set out for myself.  I had honestly thought that 15 minutes was an incredibly manageable expectation, something I could do to work around the screenplay drafts, reading assignments, and short essays that I have due for school.  I was so sure of this that I marked a date on my planner - February 29th - and circled the words, "Ravage content edit due".

That due date is now less than a week away, and I have not even revised past my third chapter.

The process of writing and revising is different for every writer, and I know a lot of the authors that I greatly admire look forward to the revision process.  John Green has been known to say "that all writing is rewriting", and while I tend to agree, I've heard from a lot of authors - established or just starting off - that they find the process of revising infinitely easier than completing their first draft.

I beg to differ.  Then again, this is coming from someone who hasn't completed a new first draft in the last three years.  That being said, I probably still have a lot to learn from authors like John Green about the process of revision, but in the odd chance that I'm in the minority here, I thought I'd share some insights into what it is that makes the writing process the easier one for me; the things no one ever really tells you.

1. It's never easy

Okay.  I know I just said that writing is the easy part.  But the truth is, nothing is easy, fun, and enjoyable %100 of the time.  Not even the thing you're passionate about.  But if I've learned anything from participating in NaNoWriMo it's that, that's okay.  In fact, I don't know I would have ever completed a novel if I hadn't been introduced to the process from that mindset.

When you're writing a novel in the context of NaNoWriMo, furiously pounding out words on a daily basis at an incredible pace, slugging your way through to 50k, you know what you're signing up for.  It's not going to be easy, and it wasn't going to be any easier, honestly, if I gave myself the permission to sleep in and only write 500 words a day - or not at all.  Trust me, I've done both.  What makes writing difficult isn't the work itself, it's the way you think of the work.  Not to be overusing John Green here, but like a lot of authors, I know he initially condoned the concept of writing a novel in 30 days.  He felt it was a fruitless task, because simply no one can be expected to write a good book in a month.  The fact of the matter is, no one can be expected to write a good first book: period.  The process of writing isn't about being "good".  If anything, it's about sucking.  If you're a practicing writer, writing on a daily basis, the ratio of great material to crap that you'll be writing is probably 1:3, and that's if you're lucky.

But you simply cannot sit around and hope to wait it out through the bad parts.  The only way out is through.  So give yourself permission to suck.  You won't enjoy yourself all of the time, but once you allow yourself to fail, you'll enjoy yourself a whole lot more.

2. Things change

It might seem like a no-brainer, but the truth is that a lot of people - myself included - walk into the writing process with very strong convictions.  That kinda motivation is to be admired, but at a certain point that ambition can go so far as to get in your own way.  A part of becoming a good writer is being flexible.  Your original vision for what this book was going to be may change.  You may have to make sacrifices in order to continue your story.  You're definitely going to have to make those sacrifices when you revise.  Besides, there is always the incredibly real chance that you may fall out of love with the story you first started writing.  Whatever the case, you do what is necessary.  You cut your favorite scene.  You trash the ending you've been planning since last year.  That character you were so sure everyone was going to love?  You kill them off.  Whatever it takes to get the story flowing, whatever it takes to reinvest yourself in what it is you are writing: that is what you do.

3.  You don't always win

I've said this a lot now, but this, to me, is what stands out as being the first big obstacle all writers have to overcome: and that's a fear of failure.  The truth of the matter is, your first draft is going to suck.  It doesn't matter if you take five months to write it, or if you take five years.  There is no such thing as a good first draft.  So don't try to make it perfect.  Just try to make it work.  And have fun!  The first novel I ever started writing, before I was ever introduced to National Novel Writing Month, was essentially a glorified rip-off of the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King storyline.  If I looked back at it now, I'm sure I would have myself a good laugh.  Honestly, the first novel I finished for NaNoWriMo wasn't much better.  But that's okay.  Writing a bad draft or even giving up on the first draft of your manuscript altogether isn't the end of the world.  It may feel like it at the time, but get comfortable with the idea that not everything you write is going to the next big American novel.  I might not have had the most original ideas when I was writing in middle school, but when you're writing in a mindset similar to a fan-fiction writer, the love you have for your story overrides any standards of success or other expectations you might be putting on the work you're doing.

So if you're thinking about writing a novel, or haven't been able to finish your first one yet, my advice to you is:

Don't wait.  And don't worry.  If you can tackle the story in your head with the same enthusiasm, flexibility, and imagination as any of the stories you are a big fan of, that passion will translate, and you'll have a finished manuscript within your hands in seemingly no time.

And then you'll be where I am.  Making resolution lists when you should be revising.

Have you got any tips on writing or revising?  Leave them in the comments below!  God knows I'm in need of some.