writing on planes

prompts + practices//work in process

Hello from the sky! I’m on a flight to Italy by way of Germany rn. We just took off, but already time has taken on strange dimensions. It’s 9 pm here and 4 am in munich. I’m in the back, sitting the Romanian blind soccer team. At least I think the man in the yellow jersey said “blind” but maybe it was blonde. My brain is in between places and times, so everything feels a little surreal, like a dream-state.

That’s why I love writing on planes. 

Writing on airplanes is one of my favorite practices. You’re neither here nor there, the ground has receded beneath you and the sky is wide, opening into space, infinity. A state of wonder. 

Untethered from the ground, you can feel the doors of your imagination blow open, too. Like the Zen expression of awakening: mind like sky. Anything story can be written in the air. 

I always choose at window seat so I can look outside + get ideas. You can notice patterns you can’t see up close: swirling arroyos carved like veins across the skin of the desert, steepled clouds like circus tents over the tropics. Gridded cities, waves puckering the ocean, the ice cap. Such a vast world, so many settings!

Planes are a window into time, too: you can see the nighttime roll away from the earth or the curve of the earth roll out from beneath the night. You can race sunset heading west, fly headlong into a new day going east. Your stories can unfold faster in the air than on the ground.

Planes are also a perfect place for people-watching and eavesdropping. Spying is never easier than in coach class, crammed in with bodies all around. Covert peeks left and right can become character studies if you’re paying attention. Once i wrote a whole short story between O’Hare’s terminal x the flight home to New Mexico about a character I met in Canada. 

Planes aren’t just fodder for fiction, of course. If you’re writing true stories, the altitude will give you necessary distance—30,000 feet more or less-between the dramas and sagas, the attachments and narratives that grip you at home. This physical gap is freeing. You have perspective you don’t on the ground. It can shake a stuck story loose. It’s like writing a 1st person piece in 2nd-person. 

I did that once on a plane. Try it!

Planes used to be more insulated than they are now, cocoons streaking through the sky. So good for daydreaming, reading, imagining. But like everywhere these days, there are SO many more distractions: inflight entertainment, free texting, WiFi, interactive flight maps. Sometimes a whole flight can go by without me opening my notebook. Sometimes—like right now—I write on my screen instead.  

If i weren’t writing this post about writing on planes I’d be writing on a plane-mind like sky, anything goes. 

It’s getting late and we’re north of Winnipeg, heading for Hudson Bay, it’s midafternoon + we’re descending over Germany, and i’m going to take my own advice + write on a plane.

Ciao til next week!
Katie