The Secret To Great Writing? Terrible WiFi And A Tiny Notebook
Or... How you can travel to exotic locations to write or plan your life.
Why Can't This Be Easy?
I'm sitting in my perfect writing sanctuary (My husband calls it my "Wee Hoose," my daughter calls it my "She Shed," I just call it Heaven). It's tucked into the back garden of our little cottage in Scotland (nestled amongst the out-of-control Buddleia that scrape their blossoms over the roof in a steady rhythm when the wind blows). One wall is covered in the leftovers of our luxury bedroom wallpaper, my books, and all those I have yet to collect surround me, and my glamorous Victorian travel desk sits waiting to be stocked for every trip. Everything in this perfect space is designed to support Deep Work, capital D, capital W. It's this "room of my own" that allows for the kind of focused, uninterrupted, two-hour creative sessions that productivity gurus promise will transform your output.
But a few weeks ago, I was sitting amongst all this perfection, staring at a blank page, and feeling like I was trying to squeeze creativity out of my brain like my husband when he manages to get toothpaste out of the tube that I swear was empty (I put it in the trash, he takes it out again.)
Meanwhile, there's a tiny brown notebook always sitting at my right hand on my desk. It's interchangeable with another that looks just like it, because they don't last long (they need to be small enough for me to stick in a pocket or a bag). They get pretty battered (sometimes wine-stained, sometimes dropped in puddles), but it doesn't hurt the ideas scribbled inside from airport lounges, ferry cabins, and café corners across multiple countries. My Type A handwriting gets messier as the inspiration (or the wine) gets stronger. It's in these tiny notebooks where some of my best work lives. It's proof that I don't always need my perfectly perfect Wee Hoose, I can just grab the spaces between destinations.
Why do I keep forgetting this?
Last week, I wrote about the coming wave of AGI and how the women who prepare for this shift will be the ones who thrive. One of my key realizations? We need to focus on becoming more human, not less. We need to lean into the experiences that can't be digitized. We need to wallow in touch, taste, presence, and the luxury of uninterrupted thoughts that belong entirely to us as a species.
Travel is one of the most fundamentally human experiences we have. It's evident in the way your body struggles to adapt to a new time zone, the way disorientation forces a fresh perspective, and in the conversations with strangers that wouldn't happen anywhere else. Travel forces your creativity into change mode. When you are responding to completely different stimuli, you can surprise yourself. AI will never step off a plane in a tropical location and smell that peculiar, but invigorating scent of musty humidity, while feeling that particular mix of anticipation and overwhelm. AI will never experience the satisfaction of working from "your seat" in a sidewalk café where the barista remembers your order after three days.
These are the very human experiences we need to protect and cultivate.
Every place has a doorway. Every midlife has a threshold.
There's something about a new environment that literally rewires your brain. Environmental psychology backs this up. A novel setting activates different (and maybe tragically disused) neural pathways, which then breaks you out of automatic thinking patterns, and enhances your creative flow. But come on, my heroine, you know this is true. You don't need research to tell you what you feel in your body when you step off a plane into a place you've never seen before. It's the same sense of expectation we got back when we were crazy romantic 15-year-olds stepping into a party or a dance, wondering if this place was where we would meet, "the one."
Every time I arrive in New York City, it's like I'm there for the first time. The energy of millions of people's ideas literally vibrates through the pavement. In this city of people trying to find themselves, make themselves, reinvent themselves, their collective ambition seeps into the ground. And as you pound those sidewalks (while you can't take your eyes off the theater of human lives, the beautiful chaos of eight million stories happening simultaneously), those ideas, that energy, leech back up through your feet and into your bloodstream. I swear this is why people arriving in Manhattan in their twenties can never bring themselves to leave. Who would want to give up the drug of inspiration?
The Bahamas offers me something entirely different. In the comfort of my very familiar ocean-front home, I sink into myself and my internal rhythms. The constant murmur of the waves supports my churning over of thoughts, experiences, and research. I write under the heat of the constant sun that feeds my realizations and ruminations. Watered by the waves and nurtured by the sun, they always grow. Water's Edge is a private, quiet sanctuary on what feels like the edge of the world (especially when you are standing on the patio under a full moon). Deep work always happens there, because the environment invites it, calls out for it.
Italy is another example. Italy is pure story-collecting territory. Unless you speak Italian (and I only speak restaurant and shopping Italian), just living immersed in the language sparks something creative inside you. It's conversations you can't quite understand, but (thanks to the Italian expressiveness) you can somehow feel. In Italy, your taste buds are simultaneously excited by the flavors and calmed by the tastes that have been passed down through generations and must be in your DNA somewhere. Italy is a culture so unlike our own that everything (including the sometimes frustrating leisurely approach to time) becomes epic. Italy brings you endless experiences to share and stories to tell.
My point is that every place you visit has something to offer. But you never know what that something is until you're there—until you live amongst it and let the place work its own particular magic.
My Ongoing Messy Middle
Over the past few weeks, while researching AI, revamping my own approach to work and life, and crafting my "Why Can't it be Easy" mantra, I've come to a realization. I often get more meaningful work done while traveling than in carefully orchestrated "productivity blocks" in my perfect "Wee Hoose."
It happens while writing fiction during my 7:00 am decaf americano hour in my favorite café in Borgotaro, watching Via Nazionale slowly wake up around me. It happens while crafting outlines for new essays during the pre-sailing hours in the cabin of a ferry, when the gentle rocking motion somehow always loosens thoughts that have been stubbornly stuck in my brain for weeks. And it happens during those luxury hours in airport lounges where I always get more reading done than anywhere else.
At home, I tell myself I need two uninterrupted hours to produce anything worthwhile. On the road, I carry my wee brown dog-eared journal and capture ideas in fifteen-minute increments throughout the day. The constraint creates the creativity. The "imperfect" conditions somehow become perfect.
This is my rebellion against a lifetime of fighting against my traitorous brain informing me calmly that good work can only be completed at home, as part of a routine, and requires optimal conditions. I am rebelling against the idea that creativity needs to be earned through elaborate ritual and perfect setup. My new "Why Can't it be Easy" mantra tells me that it's ridiculous to live as if productivity is something you perform rather than something you live.
So?
Let the place inspire the work.
Instead of dragging my content treadmill agenda from my "Wee Hoose" everywhere (packing it up into my lovely Victorian travel desk), I'm vowing to ask myself: What does this physical place want from me? What is it trying to teach me? What perspective is it offering that I can't get anywhere else?
This shift from trying to control my environment to collaborating with it feels like the most radical thing I've done in years. It is more radical than stepping off the content treadmill, more radical than choosing ease over achievement.
Perhaps that's because I have to ease up on one of my biggest beliefs, which is that hard work trumps inspiration. I still believe this to be true, but now realize I may have been telling inspiration, "You're not welcome here. I've got this." Believing that inspiration can't always be harnessed and making space for that requires trusting something I can't optimize or systematize. It means accepting that inspiration has its own schedule and geography. It means believing that the work that wants to emerge in a bustling Roman piazza might be completely different from what wants to emerge in a quiet Scottish garden, and that I don't need to control that work; both results are exactly what they should be.
This is why I've decided to start inviting other women to join me in all the magical places I have discovered and yet to discover. I want to share what I've discovered about letting place do its magic while giving you the structure, guidance, and "container" necessary to emerge with a result inspired by place.
I'm calling them retreats, but, in the spirit of my new approach to work in the face of AI, they're really experiments in being fully human together.
I have been wanting to launch retreats for years. I've held a few luxury versions in my home in The Bahamas, and they have been some of the most productive and worthwhile events I have ever participated in (for both myself and the retreat guests). But I've never managed to get them out into the world because I've always had these elaborate visions of luxury accommodations, massage therapists, gourmet private chefs, fire pits, post-retreat communities, and ongoing guidance programs. As usual, I got stuck inside these big ideas that kept getting bigger until they were so complex I couldn't move forward at all. Classic me, turning something simple into something impossible.
Then I remembered: Why can't it be easy?
The magic of a retreat is never in the bells and whistles. It's in the human connection. It's what happens when you put a small group of women in an inspiring place and give them permission to be themselves. The magic is in my superpower of helping you discover your magic even when you've forgotten you have it. You've got it in you; I can get it out.
AI might be able to plan your itinerary and suggest restaurants, but it can't sit across from you in a café in Borgotaro and reflect back the truth you're not quite ready to admit to yourself. It can't witness the moment when you stop performing productivity and start creating from joy. It can't hold space for the human version of the conversation that changes everything.
These retreats celebrate everything that makes us irreplaceably human, like the way humans read each other's energy. They celebrate the stories that emerge when we feel truly seen, the creative breakthroughs that I have witnessed at every single retreat I have ever been a part of, and the connections that form when you're brave enough to be yourself in a beautiful place with women who understand the journey.
I already know my "Wee Hoose" will be here in Scotland when I return, perfectly organized and waiting patiently. But I also know that the women who join me "on the road" will have collected something (perspective, stories, ideas, clarity) that no amount of Deep Work blocks could have produced.
The magic isn't in the physical luxury; it's in the luxury of connection, support, and creative guidance. The magic is in the willingness to let yourself be surprised by what emerges when you change your geography and share the experience with others who see your potential.
What does your creativity look like when it's free to roam? And who might you become when you're brave enough to find out...together?
The door's open. The journal's packed. The question is: where will you let your next idea find you?
You can find out more about this invitation and the retreats on offer here. I’m about to add a Scotland one, and there will be many more Brooklyn ones in the future. Since every retreat will be limited to 3-4 people in carefully curated groups, you can also hit reply and let me know you are interested, and I will make sure you get added to the early access list.
Know someone who might be interested in these retreats?