Why My Full-Time Job as a Writer Allows Me To Travel as a Source of Inspiration

You should always see things from a long-term perspective.

I’m almost there.

When I travel south, the aroma is completely different. I open the car windows and feel the heat running through my body. The smell of the typical flowers of Algarve invades my nose.

The south of Portugal is magical. Since I’ve known myself, I’ve been heading south during the summer season, but doing it mid-week on a working day gives me another pleasure.

Now my office fits in a backpack and my job works anywhere in the world. For more than 20 years, I had to be in one place, from 9 to 5, every single day of the week, but not now.

Now I’m free.

The blue sea is right in front of my eyes. I’ve just arrived in Tavira, Algarve. One of my favorite places to be. My second home.

It’s a small town with a beautiful historic center, a river passing close to the central plaza, a small castle on the top of the hill, and surrounded by typical fishing beaches.

I check-in in a small apartment in the center of the village, leave the few suitcases I bring, put on my slippers, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and walk through the peculiar streets of that particular place.

Meanwhile, my old friend Ricardo arrives, and we sit on a terrace drinking a fresh orange juice from the best orange in the country.

Ricardo lived in the same city where I live, Leiria, but fate took him south, and he is now a successful businessman, receiving foreign investors who want to move to our country and provide all the logistical support. He is a happy and successful man.

The day is getting hot, and although the conversation never ends, I still have to sit at the computer to finish my article for the day and publish it.

I explained to Ricardo I’m a writer and show him the platform where I proudly write. I tell him that I’m now a truly free man. My office works wherever I want to be. I get to know places in my beautiful country while I get inspired and write some more articles.

The work and requests do not stop growing; my website is almost ready, I’m preparing my first e-book, and I’m frequently contacted by companies to generate traffic to their websites.

Six months ago, I was in a job I didn’t like, unmotivated, and unhappy. So, how did it all happen? Why did I decide to go into writing full time?

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

I was finishing university and became a teacher when I published my first and only book. It was in 1999, and I was 23 years old.

In my hometown, I’m known as a sports icon, not an intellectual nerd. But yes, I wrote a novel at 23. At that time, everybody was astonished by this new skill I had.

Usually, people saw me in the newspapers, in the sports section, as a local basketball star. But at that time, many start to see me also as a writer.

The book’s title is “Talking with the sea,” but it’s only written in Portuguese. So recently, I reread it, and a bunch of incredible sensations invaded my soul.

The book’s story was about a professional surfer that falls in love with a beautiful girl on a paradise beach in Brazil. But this surfer had a surprising nightly encounter with the sea when he found the sea could talk to him.

The book was an incredible adventure spent between the sea’s philosophical conversations with the surfer and the surfer’s crushed passion with his beloved one.

Right now, I’m seriously thinking of translating the book to English and republishing it.

In 2020, I turned into a full-time writer, but in 1999 I finished my first and only book, so I guess the writer’s dream was always inside my mind from an early age.

I released the book in my university amphitheater, which was a super prestigious phenomenon for me. The local press spent a week interviewing me, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve had.

Readers all over the country sent me letters (at the time, email was still a mirage) with unique, super motivating messages, asking me to write more books.

But my first job ended up absorbing my attention, and maybe wrongly, I didn’t write again.

I think it would have been exciting to have four or five books written in my portfolio, but fate wanted me to return to writing seriously 20 years later, on an international digital platform.

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

After I finished my book, I was exhausted. At 23 years old, you want to live your life in full mode.

Girlfriends, beach volleyball, nightclubs, traveling the world, that was what a 23-year-old kid wanted to do. Again, I didn’t want to be closed in my bedroom in front of my desktop, typing words for hours.

I guess there’s a time for everything, and as I started to write more ideas in my notebook, I felt unmotivated to keep it going because I knew I had another 500 pages book waiting to be finished. I wanted to do other stuff young kids do.

So, my journey as a writer was frozen for 20 years. During that time, I read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Aristotle’s Politics, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and the Portuguese Noble Prize in Literature, José Saramago.

When I was hanging out with my friends on the beach, I was the only guy with a book in my hand. Many of my friends made jokes about my nerdy style, but I never give a sh*t about what people thought about my passions.

As I was growing up, I always had moments when I tried to start writing ideas, but then I found out that short stories could do more often than write an entire book. So I began to write little fiction and short stories just to keep my writing skills evolving.

Maybe that was why I thought Medium was the perfect place for me to write when I first saw it. A place where we can share our thoughts, in short stories, on a digital platform was perfect for me.

Yet, one last challenge was waiting for me- writing in English.

We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.

Maybe watching Back To the Future more than 100 times made me dominate the English language. My sister and I consumed thousands of hours watching Hollywood movies when we were young, and because of that, we write and speak considerably well in the English language.

My mother was an English teacher, so my background in the English language was always good. Because of that fact, when I started to write on Medium, I found it easier than I thought.

Yet, grammar was a struggle, as I tried to share my thoughts with the readers and get into more complex phrase structures. That was why I invested in an online course to remember details that made all the difference.

After that, writing every day and reading other writers’ work was the best strategy of all.

As we, indie writers, get to reach a pace of writing an article a day with ease, other skills begin to arouse our curiosity, namely our ability to reinvent ourselves to share new ideas and new thoughts.

If we don’t read the work of other writers, and if we don’t read books periodically, we lose the flexibility that a creator has to look for new themes and present them with the same principles and values ​​that characterize us.

Our readers love to read us, not just because we have funny ideas. Instead, they are faithful to our writing because they identify with our message, values, mission, and common sense.

And to look for new sources of inspiration, it is essential to talk to other people. But also to be able to find ourselves in places we’ve never been before, and to live that day-to-day, that different routine that makes us reflect on other ways of absorbing other cultures.

That’s why my purpose is to travel every three months to different places within my country. Places where I’ve never been before and where I can deeply absorb the region’s culture, meet new people and feel the pulse of those places.

Last month I was in the south, in Tavira, Algarve. Next month I’ll go north, this time with my daughters on vacation, near Douro river, the highest-flow river of the Iberian Peninsula, to a beautiful house with a pool and a gorgeous view of the Douro vineyards.

I’m going to wake up at 6 AM to write, and then I’ll go for long walks with the kids, do some water activities, explore river beaches, and taste one of the best wines in the world, the Port Wine.

Until the end of the year, I intend to make two more trips, one to the mountains and another to Alentejo, a beautiful area near the Atlantic Ocean, south to Lisbon.

Final Thoughts

Being a full-time writer made me realize I love to write since forever.

My mother is a teacher, and my father, being a book addicted, inspired me to have this endless inspiring creativity to write.

But you’ll never be a true indie writer if you don’t love to live a whole life.

The way I see it, if I wouldn’t be that kid that observed everything around me and had the power of contemplating simple things like a sunset, I think I wouldn’t have what it takes to be a true indie writer.

Indie writers have to have a spark in their soul, something that never goes out, even if it’s asleep.

Traveling is feeding this gift with more and different options. It’s leaving our comfort zone to walk new paths, which after being recognized, also become ours, and allow us to internalize and let the magic act so that we can see it, interpret it, and share it in our unique way of seeing the world.

My full-time job as a writer allows me to travel as a source of inspiration so that a piece of experience travels through my words into the eyes of those who read me.

Thus, a little bit of Portugal also becomes yours, as this is the power of sharing and writing. We all get pieces of each other, what we live, what we feel, and what we think.

Writing and travel are powerful enough to bring people from such diverse religions and cultures together in a kind of global family where everyone supports, understands, and loves each other.

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