A passionate writer never can be bored. Every location and situation offers an opportunity to write.

Writing is largely an internal, in-your-head activity, after all. It involves your imagination and creativity, which really are nothing more than combining your memories and thoughts in interesting ways to create new ideas or to better understand yourself and the world. No matter where you are, you can create and therefore write.

Whenever you a have a free moment, there are many writing activities you can engage in. You might outline your next story; if you already have an outline, go more in-depth with a beat-by-beat listing of what will occur in the next scene. You might continue working on your draft. If you have an Internet connection, you might research a process or facts that appear in your book.

Combine being present with your creativity, and your ability to write at any given moment will soar. By being present, you engage your setting through taking in its sights, sounds, smells, tastes and how it physically touches you. For example, if in a coffee shop, you might see a customer standing in line with arms folded, hear her tapping her foot as she waits for the busy barista to take her order, smell her expensive perfume indicating she is not a person accustomed to waiting for someone else, sense the growing heat of her anger as her foot tapping picks up its pace. In this instance, by simply being aware of your surroundings you’ve observed – and with your creativity can write a passage about – impatience.

By being present, even if not working on your current book, you can practice writing by penning passages that can be used in a later manuscript. Or you night simply do some journaling, in which you describe a scene or a person in that setting, or simply ponder an idea.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.