Melanie Bell

Author, Writer, Editor

Tag Archives: traveling


by Leave a comment

Working Away, or My Experience with Workaway

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many people to make decisions and try things that they wouldn’t have otherwise. With this summer’s travel restrictions, it led me to Workaway, a website that facilitates cultural exchanges where “workawayers” stay with hosts, trading labor for room and board. 

I spent two weeks on a workaway this summer on an estate in rural Wales. The hosts were a couple with a young child, along with the mother/grandmother who owned the estate. It was a working bed and breakfast that had a large garden and some livestock (pigs and various types of birds). It couldn’t have been a bigger change from the hustle and bustle of London! 

I grew up in the country, and being back in a rural setting felt certain ways like coming home. I knew the berries. I knew how to weed the garden. I also enjoyed the differences. I certainly didn’t grow up with beautiful stone houses and peacocks!    

Doing a Workaway is a fascinating way to get to know a new place because you’re integrated socially. You have a role, a job (while most stays are volunteer, some Workaways operate as businesses and pay for income-earning tasks), and a host family. I liked getting to know the people I stayed with while I got to know more about Wales. The family hosted relatives for much of my stay, and they often had friends over for large shared dinners, so there was always a rotating cast of people to talk to. They were all very welcoming, and with self-isolation such a recent memory, it was great to have a built-in social circle around. 

Workaway is intended as a cultural exchange. Many Workawayers take the opportunity to travel and experience daily life in different countries or regions. There were certainly differences between my life on the workaway and my daily life at home, as well as differences in social norms and attitudes. 

My advice for others interested in trying a workaway is to be open to these differences, to be open socially (even if you’re an awkward introvert like me), and to learn from others. Also, expect the unexpected! No matter how well you pack or how carefully you research the area you’re traveling to, you will likely encounter difficulties and joys during your stay that you haven’t prepared for. Be prepared to work hard, pitch in, and help out. Get ready, too, to have fun.

If you’re thinking of trying Workaway or something similar, go for it! It’s a good way to get out of your comfort zone, experience a different way of life, live in a different place for a time, and forge new connections. 


by Leave a comment

5 Ways to Use Travel as a Springboard for Writing

If you love to write and have the privilege of being able to travel, you might dream of doing both things in tandem. Maybe you’ve heard stories of digital nomads who hop from country to country and make a living from their laptops, or writers who travel in their camper vans. If that’s not a lifestyle you’re looking to commit to (at this point, anyway), here are 5 shorter-term ideas for combining the work of writing with the life experience of travel.

1. Write while in transit

J. K. Rowling famously got the idea for the first Harry Potter book while on a train. If you can write on a bus, train, subway, or plane without getting motion sick, those are great excellent places to do it. Time that might otherwise be spent watching Netflix or just sitting there can be surprisingly productive, with the motion bringing your mind into “the zone”. If you’re too sensitive to motion to look down at your paper or laptop, these forms of transport are still great places to people watch. Look around you and imagine the life stories of your fellow passengers. Ask yourself how they’d react if a wild situation were to suddenly occur. Amtrak recognized the unique inspiration-generating quality of time spent in motion when it offered train-based writing fellowships (a program that, sadly, no longer exists). Walking, a shorter and self-propelled form of transit, is also great for generating ideas.

2. Keep a travel journal

Many writers keep notebooks for their ideas. While traveling, if you want to capture stories from the road, bring a journal and try keeping track of what happens each day. Given the unpredictability that often accompanies travel, you never know when or how inspiration might strike. It might not be immediate, either. If you hold on to your travel journals, they might become sources for ideas in hindsight. Cheryl Strayed kept a journal of her time on the Pacific Coast Trail and came back to it 17 years later, reshaping the material into her beloved memoir Wild. 

3. Go on a writer’s retreat

There’s a reason for the popularity of writers’ retreats. Sometimes nothing gets the creative juices flowing like the fresh perspective provided by a new setting, with time and space away from your daily life. Getting out of your routine is one of the gifts of a writing retreat, and often the locales are inspiring in themselves. There are writing retreats for many different budgets and goals, from solitary cabins to vacation-like experiences that bring people together and incorporate exciting local activities.

4. Write about places you visit

Lots of good writing is born from journeying: the whole genres of travel writing and travel journalism, memoirs, poetry, and the list goes on. Writing about the places you visit is a great way to get involved and get to know people there, as I discovered while in the Northwest Territories where I made wonderful connections by writing about fashion shows and arts festivals for local newspapers and magazines. Visiting places can spark ideas for pitches to travel websites or magazines. If you write professionally, in many countries you can claim related travel costs as professional expenses for tax purposes. Some locales offer travel grants for writing and researching place-based projects. If you’re lucky, you might even break into travel writing that will send you somewhere to report from on the ground.  

5. Use the setting to fuel your imagination

Sometimes writers write about the places they visit, and sometimes they use travel to invent new places. If you’re writing speculative fiction, travel and worldbuilding can go hand in hand, as imaginary places are typically grounded in real ones. Would the Stillness of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy exist, or be as convincing, without the author’s research trip to visit volcanoes in Hawai’i? Ellen Goodlett, author of the YA fantasy Rule, spent a year traveling the world with the Remote Year program while completing her novel. One of her interviews details how bits and pieces the places she visited showed up in her book’s imaginary kingdom.

Do you dream of writing and traveling? What ways have you thought of to combine the two?