How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  This process should help you avoid one of the most common traps for travel writers: the fear of the known. Writers often feel paralyzed when trying to write about a familiar subject. How can I write about Paris, they may say, when a million stories have already been written on the subject? A million stories have been written about Paris, it’s true – but there could be a Paris you experienced that no one else has ever known. Let’s say you love puppets and you stumbled upon a dusty puppet-maker’s shop in an alley in the 14th arrondissement. You spent an hour talking about puppets and puppetry with the white-haired owner, who looked a little like a puppet himself. Here’s the perfect subject for your story, one nobody else could write about with as much authority, presence and passion as you.

  Ultimately, travel is all about connections – connections outside us and connections inside us. If you can bring those connections to life in your work, readers who may have never been to Paris or who may not care a whit about puppets will be brought in touch with similar connections they have made in other countries, in other places. They will connect with your sense of connection, and so the piece will in some metaphorical way build a powerful bridge and remind us all over again of one of the great and fundamental joys of travel: the stretching of personal boundaries, the flinging of bridges across cultures.

  Writer’s tip: Sidebars

  Most destination articles include a fact box or fact file (also called a sidebar or a break-out box) that presents essential travel information: how to get there, where to stay and eat, etc. An editor will tell you if they are planning to publish a fact box with your story, but if you are not working in advance with an editor, it is always a good idea to include one. Ask yourself what readers need to know in order to duplicate your experience. If you’re writing about food stalls in Singapore, you’ll want to tell them how to get to the stalls you mention, the days and times they are open, and particular specialties. If you’re writing about discovering the riches of Riga, your editor will most likely want to tell readers the best way to get there, and places to stay and eat.

  Exercise 3

  After your next trip, or thinking back to your most recent trip, finish these sentences: I’ve just returned from __________. My most memorable experience there was __________. It was memorable because __________. The experience taught me __________. Think about how you could expand on this to build a personal and compelling anecdotal bridge to that place.

  Interviewing and note-taking techniques

  Central to the success of your travel research and writing is the ability to take good notes and to carry out efficient, effective interviews.

  Taking notes

  Notes taken on the spot provide reliable and vivid building blocks for your story. They are also poignant keys that can unlock a flood of images and details from a particular place and experience – even when you’re writing your story half a year later. Fragments often do the job just fine. You might write ‘red poppies, white columns’ or ‘pine scent, silvery sea’ or ‘grandmother in blue fur, lilac perfume, Mozart from window’. You just need a few words that capture the essence of the thing you want to remember. At other times you’ll want to write a more complete portrait of a moment, as the words written on the spot are inevitably the most vivid depictions of all.

  One of the secrets to good note-taking is simply paying attention. Slow down and take the time to stop, absorb and reflect on your surroundings and on the things that have happened so far on your journey.

  Interviewing people

  Effective interviewing is an art of a different kind. Before you begin, you need to know what you want to get out of the interview. In many cases you will simply be trying to gather hard information, and so these interviews are not likely to be particularly controversial or confrontational. But since the interview will most likely be your only opportunity to talk with this particular individual, you need to make sure you have thought out in advance everything you want to learn from your meeting.

  Basically, your interviews will fall into one of two types: the official and the unofficial. The official, or expert, interview involves anyone who represents a place. This might be a museum curator or the director of an archaeological site; a tourism official or guide; a hotel owner or chef. In every case, your job is to glean as much relevant information from this expert as possible. You want to be friendly and non-threatening, but you also want to be sure to get the information you need. If you ask a question and don’t get a satisfactory answer, ask it again.

  In this kind of formal interview it’s vital to record the conversation. This will liberate you from note-taking so that you can focus on the answers and your questions. Whenever possible, get contact information so you can follow up if a question occurs to you long after your meeting.

  The unofficial interview is usually a conversation with a fellow traveler or a local, often used to provide a different perspective and voice for your story, or to fill in background information. Your interviewing technique can be more indirect and conversational. You may decide not to record it, so the person you’re talking to will feel at ease and converse freely. (Writers who are just starting out may feel that using an audio recorder or notebook will make them seem more ‘professional’. This isn’t necessarily the case, and if it makes your subject nervous or self-conscious, you may not get the free-flowing stories, information and quotes you’re hoping for.) Ask for anecdotes that illustrate a point. Ask for memories. If you are not recording or taking notes during the interview, write down all the important points from your conversation as soon as you possibly can.

  If you are planning to name and quote your interviewee you should let them know before you begin the interview. In an informal situation where you won’t be naming the speaker, you don’t necessarily need to say that you’re interviewing them for publication, but sometimes it’s easier to approach someone if you say you’re gathering information for a story. If you’re recording the conversation or taking notes, you’ll certainly want to explain why. And, of course, there are times when you will be interviewing people by phone or by email, as many travel pieces these days are researched and written from home. Finally, if you do quote someone (without naming them) in a story on a sensitive topic, be very sure that they cannot be recognized from your writing. You do not want to inadvertently imperil someone because they gave you important information or freely expressed their views to you.

  In all cases, it is absolutely essential for you to be accurate in quoting people you’ve interviewed, and it is important to have records from your interview – either audio or extensive notes – that you can give to an editorial fact-checker, if asked, to verify the authenticity of your quotes.

  To achieve this connection we move to the next stage: the writing. You’ve done your research, analyzed the market, studied yourself and found a subject that marries publishability with passion. Now you need to write to that passion. Explore it, savor it, draw it out in your prose – paint such a complete, compelling, sensually full description that your readers will experience it just as you did.

  Writer’s tip: Exploit serendipity

  Never underestimate the power of serendipity – and of being open to serendipity – to hand you a wonderful story. Early in my travel-writing career, I was talking with a Japanese friend in Tokyo about my upcoming visit to Kyoto. He casually mentioned that a friend of his had just visited Kyoto and had stayed in a temple rather than a hotel. A temple, I thought – what a great idea for a story! So I arranged to stay at Myokenji Temple in the heart of Kyoto and subsequently wrote an article about my stay for Signature magazine.

  Shaping your story

  As a writer, you are a sculptor working with words, molding the clay of experience. An essential part of your job is to give that experience a shape that makes it accessible and understandable to a reader who hasn’t shared it. The way you introduce and evoke your experience, the structure you give your story, is key.

  A good travel article is structured, or s
haped, like a good short story, with a clear beginning, middle and end. Broadly speaking, and of course varying according to the overall length of the story, the beginning is made up of approximately the first two to seven paragraphs. The aim of the beginning is to create a thematic or narrative lead (spelled ‘lede’ in the USA) that immediately interests and engages the reader, drawing them into the article. Often the beginning will set the story’s scene, and sometimes it will hint at why the writer is there, but the prime purpose of the beginning is to grab the reader’s attention. The middle is the long and winding road of the story, where the destination is brought alive for the reader, using your experience there as a filter. The end – and again, this is usually no more than the last two to seven paragraphs or so – wraps up the story and offers a kind of closure, tying the story back to its beginning but with a larger, enhanced sense of the whole.

  Writer’s tip: Getting the quote you need

  If you have a particularly intransigent interview subject, one trick is to turn off your recorder, put away your notes and prepare to leave. Then stop and say, ‘You know, one more question has just occurred to me.’ This may be the question you walked into the interview most wanting to ask, but if you had asked it directly during the formal part of the interview, you would not have received a useful response. Now, in that unguarded setting, you may get just the candid answer you need.

  Writer’s tip: The moment of connection

  If you can’t find your beginning, one strategy is to think of the moment when you first felt a connection with the place you are describing, when you were first drawn into that place. (But avoid: ‘My plane landed on the tarmac at _____.’ That lead was already stale in the time of the Wright brothers.)

  A compelling start

  How do you create a compelling hook to capture your readers’ attention and propel them into your story? A few writers I know refuse to write any other part of their piece until they find that attention-grabbing introduction. I’ve sometimes found that a beginning will occur to me as I’m shaping the piece in my mind. When that happens I write it down immediately, as it can be a key that unlocks the rest of the story.

  In most cases you’ll only find the beginning in the process of writing the story. So my advice is to move on, and not get stuck on the start. You can, as Douglas Adams said so memorably, ‘stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds’ but, if you’re waiting for the perfect beginning, you may never get your story written. So just start writing.

  You’ll find that as you write, all sorts of ways to start your article may pop into your mind. Write them down and leave them at the top of your screen or page until they become so compelling that you feel forced to stop writing the body of your article to start writing its beginning.

  Remember the serendipitous Kyoto temple stay I described here? To set up that story, I wanted to show the importance of temples in Kyoto – and then suggest the value of a temple stay. How to do that? Here’s the beginning I came up with:

  Perhaps more than any other place in the world, Kyoto is defined by its temples. There are 1650 temples in this city of 1,480,000: more than one for every 1000 residents. Imagine New York City with 7000 churches! The grand temples – Kiyomizudera, Kinkakuji, Sanjusangendo, Ryoanji, Kokedera – are known throughout the world, but if you wander the thoroughfares and back alleys, you will come away convinced that there is one temple – with its attendant scruffy dog and potted plants carefully tended by neighborhood women – for every block.

  On earlier visits to Kyoto, I had always done what most visitors do: toured the temples by day and retreated to a Western-style hotel at night. Then a Japanese friend told me that I had not really experienced Kyoto if I had not stayed overnight at a temple. Staying in a temple, he said, revealed an entirely different face of the city, a place of ancient rites and rhythms hidden from those who confined their explorations to day. It was only after the visitors left that the temples truly came to life, he said. I was instantly hooked.

  By the end of this 184-word lead, the reader should have a good idea where this story is going: we’re going to stay at a Kyoto temple and discover the riches of this off-the-typical-tourist-path experience – and gain new insights into the quintessential spirit and character of Kyoto along the way.

  In ‘The Wonderful Thing about Tigers’, published in Wanderlust magazine, William Gray describes a jungle expedition in India. To begin that description, he chooses to pull us immediately into an electric moment, and to keep us there:

  It was almost as if the tiger had flicked a switch in the forest. One moment it was quiet and calm – the trees swathed in webs of early morning mist – the next, the air was charged with tension. Gomati had heard the distant alarm calls – the shrill snort of a spotted deer, the indignant bark of a langur monkey – and her mood suddenly changed. She blasted a trunkful of dust up between her front legs, then shook her head so vigorously that I had to clutch the padded saddle to keep my balance. Gomati’s mahout, sitting astride her neck, issued a terse reprimand before urging the elephant into the tangled forest. There was no path; Gomati made her own. Soon the air was infused with the pungent aroma of crushed herbs and freshly bled sap. Spiders and beetles drizzled from shaken trees; our clothing became wet with dew and stained by moss and lichen. We sounded like a forest fire – crackling, snapping, trailblazing. But through all the noise came a single piercing cry. Gomati stopped and we heard it again – the tell-tale alarm call of a spotted deer.

  Manoj Sharma, my guide, leaned toward me. ‘When the tiger moves, the deer calls,’ he murmured. ‘We must be close.’ I nodded slowly, my eyes chasing around the shadows of the forest. Sunlight sparked through chinks in the canopy, but the understorey was still a diffuse patchwork of muted greens and shadows-within-shadows – the perfect foil for tiger stripes. Apart from an occasional rumble from Gomati’s stomach, the forest was silent. No one spoke or moved.

  Gray’s beginning offers an effective example of a literary technique called in medias res, which sets you right ‘in the middle of things’. This technique has a long and honorable literary pedigree – Milton employed it in Paradise Lost, beginning the epic in the middle of the story. Without warning, we readers are plucked from our easy chairs and set in the middle of the jungle, tensely wondering what will happen next.

  Former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass employs the same technique to riveting effect in his powerful story about Korea, ‘The Path to Sokkuram’, which originally appeared in Great Escapes magazine. Hass takes a couple of notable risks in his opening. He begins with a very long first sentence that propels the reader into the story with a stream-of-consciousness momentum, and he begins his narrative with a character in mid-speech:

  ‘The thing you need to understand about Korea,’ said the dissolute, cheerful-looking British shipping agent I had run into at six in the morning in the fish market in the harbor at Pusan – we were drinking coffee at an outdoor table in the reek of fish and the unbelievable choral din of the fish merchants, beside tanks of slack-bodied pale squid and writhing pink and purple octopus – ‘is that it’s Poland. I mean, as a metaphor it’s Poland. Caught between China and Japan for all those centuries like the Poles were stuck between the Russians and the Germans. The Japanese occupied the place from 1910 to the end of the war, and in the ’30s they simply tried to eradicate Korea as a nation. Outlawed the language. Everybody in the country over 40 went to school when the teaching of the Korean language was forbidden.’

  An old woman pushed past with a cart full of fist-sized reddish-green figs. McEwan, the shipping agent, called her over. ‘Try one of these,’ he said. ‘Damned good.’ They were, red-fleshed, packed with seeds. McEwan was waving down a waiter with one hand, clutching a torn-open fig with the other. ‘They demand soju, don’t they?’ Soju is a transparent, fiery, slightly sweet Korean brandy, perfect with figs, I was sure, but beyond me at that moment. I had been out the night before with a surprisingly hard-drinking lot of professors from Pusan
National University, and wandered afterward rather aimlessly through the night market. Just before leaving America I had come to the end of a long marriage, and I had spent my first few days in Korea, when I did not have to concentrate on a task, in a state of dazed grief. In the night market the families had fascinated me, at one in the morning shutting down their produce stalls, loading up their boxes of fennel and cabbage and bok choy, moving swiftly in and out of the arc of light thrown by a hanging propane lamp, husbands and wives and drowsy children, working easily side by side. I drank beer at a stall and watched the market close down, and then went back to my hotel and couldn’t sleep, and so got up again and walked down the hill in the pre-dawn coolness to the wharf.

  In just two paragraphs Hass imparts a wealth of information about Korean history and culture – and about himself, an essential context for understanding his subsequent perceptions of and experiences in Korea. We are immersed in the Pusan fish market, ready to explore.

  Not all travel stories need to begin so dramatically. Here’s a good example of a thematic beginning from an article that UK author Stanley Stewart wrote about rodeos in the American West for The Sunday Times:

  At the rodeo you notice that horses and cowboys are kind of alike. Horses stand around a lot, flicking their tails, breaking wind, doing nothing in particular. Cowboys are like that. They lean on fences, looking at horses. Sometimes they spit, sometimes they don’t. With their hats tipped down over their eyes, it is never easy to tell if they are asleep, like horses, on their feet. The similarity disguises a major difference of temperament. Cowboys are soft-spoken mild-mannered fellows. In the West it’s the horses that are the outlaws.