How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  I glanced past him, wondering if there were others, though he didn’t need any others. His brown arms, purpled with tattoos, were the size of my legs. His thighs were as thick as nail kegs. He out-weighed me by a hundred pounds, and it wasn’t fat. If he came at me, I was finished…

  That’s all we need in order to see the hulking fellow and to feel Houston’s fear. Happily, as it turns out, the gentle islander produces a coat hanger from his own car and proceeds to expertly unlock Houston’s rental car – and to unlock some truths about stereotypes and human goodwill as well.

  Writing detail and anecdotes

  Details hold the key to a good description and can be full of meaning, embodying the most important characteristics you want to convey. The more precise you can be in identifying and isolating the right details, and the more fully you can evoke those particular details in the reader’s mind, the more powerful, compelling and effective your description will be.

  You can never squeeze all the details of a place into a description. If you tried to do so, you could write a book as long as Ulysses about the room you are sitting in now. You have to edit reality. You have to isolate the most telling details, asking yourself which ones most powerfully and precisely convey whatever it is about the scene that is most directly relevant to your story, which details will best establish the points you want to make.

  In Simon Calder’s description of neon, he didn’t tell you everything he knows about neon, just the facts that pertain to his eventual point about Las Vegas. And in Robert Hass’ depiction of his Korean pilgrimage, he doesn’t add extraneous details about the country or his experience there – he focuses solely on the information the reader needs to know in order to relive his journey.

  Consider this portrait of a table-maker named Pierrot from Peter Mayle’s delightful A Year in Provence:

  We knocked and went in, and there was Pierrot. He was shaggy, with a wild black beard and formidable eyebrows. A piratical man. He made us welcome, beating the top layer of dust from two chairs with a battered trilby hat which he then placed carefully over the telephone on the table.

  With just these few key details, Mayle masterfully conveys a sense of this impetuous, larger-than-life eccentric.

  The same is true of places. You just need a few details, but the right details, to paint a persuasive scene. Here is how Kira Salak evokes the ruins of Leptis Magna in her Libya article:

  I’m not the kind of person who usually gets into Roman ruins, can only handle about a day of them. But here at Leptis Magna – Latin for the Great Leptis – the city is so well preserved that it allows you to dream. There are the marble-covered pools of the Hadriatic Baths, great Corinthian columns rising 30 feet. There is the nearly intact coliseum, three stories high, where you can crawl through lion chutes and explore the gladiators’ quarters. They don’t make cities like this anymore, every architectural detail attended to, no plan too lavish, no material too dear. Bearded gods gaze down from friezes. Maidens and warriors lounge among the carved porticos. Even the communal toilets remain nearly unscathed, the marble seats shined by thousands of ancient buttocks.

  How wonderfully those bethroned buttocks bridge the centuries!

  A few paragraphs later, Salak brings another scene – the remains of a caravan town – to equally poignant life:

  Ghadamis is less a town than a gigantic labyrinth of narrow passage-ways that cut around and beneath adobe homes. Living here is like living in a subterranean world, the sun and its heat cut off by the rise of centuries-old buildings, each built into the next and accessed by an interlocking tunnel system. Now deserted, the town has an eerie quality of being just unearthed. Feeling like an archaeologist, I explore the dark, empty passageways with my flashlight, coming upon dead ends and mysterious chambers built from Roman columns. I squeeze through an open palm-wood door, climbing dusty stairs to the highest floor. Part of the ceiling has fallen in, incongruous sunlight gleaming on white walls painted with cryptic red Berber designs.

  Maneuvering through crumbling piles of adobe bricks and debris, I reach the roof and gaze out on a scene out of Arabian Nights: countless white-washed terraces spreading toward the setting sun and the distant sand hills of Algeria. Nearby, palm gardens resound with birdsong and the burbling of aquifer water. The call to prayer wails from the squat mud minarets of a nearby adobe mosque, and I can only take it all in silently, reverentially, like a devotee.

  Anecdotes are simply a larger, expanded version of details. Just as a scene is composed of myriad details that need to be filtered, so a journey is composed of myriad anecdotes. Your job is to choose just those ones that capture, crystallize and convey the point of your piece.

  Exercise 11

  Describe one of the most memorable people you’ve ever met. Begin with this simple sentence: The most memorable encounter I’ve ever had was _______. Think of what the person looked like. What were they wearing? How did they act? What did they say? What made the encounter so memorable? What did you learn from it? Why does it live so vividly inside you still? Write a 250–400-word description of this encounter that focuses on the most telling, the most revealing, details and events. What does a reader need to know to understand the impact of this encounter on you?

  Writer’s tip: Capturing dialogue

  To help in capturing dialogue, I always carry a pocket notebook with me. Whenever I have a conversation I want to remember, I immediately jot down as much of the conversation as I can. It’s often awkward to start writing in front of the person I’m quoting, so if I’m talking to someone over a meal in a restaurant, for example, I’ll excuse myself and go to the restroom, then write feverishly. Paul Theroux once told me that he uses this same technique. Now, whenever I’m waiting interminably for someone to vacate a restroom, I imagine Paul Theroux is inside, scribbling.

  Exercise 12

  Situate yourself somewhere comfortable – a cafe, say, or an open-air market, a city square or a beach. Quietly and intently observe for 15 minutes or half an hour, then write as precise a description as you can in 300 words. What are the most important, defining elements of the scene – the points of the place? What are the things you need to convey to make someone else understand those points? Repeat the same exercise in the same place the following day. Refine your description, paring it to the essentials.

  Descriptive accuracy

  One especially critical element in recreating a travel experience is accuracy. Travel pieces must be accurate in two ways. First, they must be factually accurate in their reporting. This means getting the population of the African village right, precisely conveying the color of the church in Nova Scotia and getting the year that the Spaniards settled on the coast correct. There is simply no excuse for getting your facts wrong, and you should not expect sympathy (or future work) from an editor if you do.

  The second kind of accuracy is in perception and description. It is far more difficult to capture, but is equally critical to the depth and success of travel writing.

  Let’s say you are trying to describe a field in France. You write: ‘I saw a field in France.’ Does this bring any image of the field into the reader’s mind? No. So you think some more about the field and write: ‘In France I saw a field the size of a football pitch.’ This helps a little – at least we have a sense of size – but we still don’t see the field. So you dig back into your memory – and your notes – and write: ‘In France I saw a field the size of a football pitch, filled with red poppies.’ Suddenly the image blazes to life. We can see the field, the poppies extending toward the horizon. Now you’re back in the scene, remembering the morning, and you write: ‘In France I drove by a field the size of a football pitch, filled with red poppies and bordered on three sides by rows of lavender, whose sweet scent so filled the air that I had to stop.’ Now we’re right with you. Not only do we have a sense of size and color, we now also have another sense involved – the sense of smell – as well as the action of you stopping. You have successfully engaged your read
er.

  A good travel story is basically the accumulation of such details of perception and description. But you can’t put these descriptive details into your stories unless you experience them first. You have to observe the world with a fearless curiosity, and then render that curiosity and the discoveries it brings in clean, clear, compelling prose. Do that and you’ll get somewhere. And you’ll take the reader with you.

  Tim Cahill presents a compelling lesson in accuracy in this passage from his extraordinary tale ‘Among the Korowai: A Stone Age Idyll’, about a river journey deep into the wild heart of Papua New Guinea:

  William spent several hours teaching me to finally see the swamp. The tall trees? The ones over there that grow from a single white-barked trunk and have elephant-ear-size leaves? Those are called sukun, and the Karowai eat the fruit, which is a little like coconut.

  Stands of bamboo often grew on the banks of the river, in a green starburst pattern that arched out over the water. Banana trees also grew in a starburst pattern of wide flat leaves. They reached heights of seven or eight feet, and yielded small three- and four-inch-long bananas.

  Rattan, a long tough vine used to lash homes together, to string bows, or to tie off anything that needed tying – the local equivalent of duct tape – was identifiable as a slender leafless branch, generally towering up out of a mass of greenery like an antenna.

  Sago, the staple food, was a kind of palm tree that grew twenty to thirty feet high, in a series of multiple stems that erupted out of a central base in another starburst pattern. The leaves were shaped like the arching banana leaves but were arranged in fronds…

  So – sukun, rattan, bamboo, banana, sago – the forest was no longer a mass of unvariegated green. Naming things allowed me to see them, to differentiate one area of the swamp from another. I found myself confirming my newfound knowledge at every bend of the river.

  ‘Banana, banana,’ I informed everyone. ‘Sukun, sago, sago, rattan, sago, bamboo…’

  The more accurately we apprehend the world, the more deeply we can penetrate it – and it can penetrate us.

  Exercise 13

  On your next trip, keep a record of your journey. At the end of each day, list the main events of that day – try for at least three different ones each day. At the end of the journey, choose the six most important events of the entire trip. These are your prime anecdote candidates. Can you see connections between them? A thematic or emotional development from one to the next and the next? Focus on this development. Where does it lead? What characteristics or lessons does it reveal? Recreate these anecdotes for the reader, striving to faithfully and precisely duplicate your experience, so that the reader learns what you learned, as you learned it.

  Using all your senses

  Most travel articles include good visual descriptions of the places in which the stories are set, but writers far too frequently ignore their other senses in their depictions. Think of it: when you walk into an Italian restaurant, what are the first senses that are accosted by the environment? Not sight, but probably sound and smell. There’s the raucous ruckus of the patrons, the waiters pushing through the crowd, the garlicky snap and sizzle of food being flipped in frying pans in the steamy kitchens. The aromas may be the first sensory impression of all: the garlic that insinuated itself into the preceding sentence’s sizzle, the mozzarella and tomatoes wafting from the kitchen, the heady mingled smells of veal piccata and pasta al pesto. So if you are going to describe this Italian restaurant in your article, you could begin with its smells and sounds – not forgetting, of course, the tastes.

  When we travel we experience the world with all of our senses – so why do we focus so exclusively on sight in our articles? Cultivate the fine – and rewarding – art of paying attention to all the senses. Let your ears and nose and taste buds and fingers do as much work as your eyes.

  Exercise 14

  Return to the scene-setting you did for Exercise 12. Rewrite the description, in no more than 350 words, using as many of the five senses as you can. What did the place smell like? What could you hear? What was the texture of the sand beneath you or the stone pillar by your side? Could you taste the sea salt in the air? Now read both pieces of writing aloud. See how using all the senses in your description brings the place to life? It’s more satisfying for you and for your reader.

  Show, don’t tell

  If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you will have had this maxim drilled into your head. Don’t tell what your characters are feeling – show it. Reveal their inner selves through what they do and say. Let the reader draw the conclusions. The same is true for travel writing. Your piece will be much more powerful and successful if you engage the reader in the creative process of figuring out how the people in your tale are being affected. By the same token, don’t spell out the fact that you were moved by an experience – make the reader feel moved by the way you describe it. Recreate the experience so that the reader is in your shoes – and is moved just the way you were.

  Avoiding clichés

  Clichés have a way of creeping into our writing – it’s difficult to come up with something fresh every time. Sometimes, without our even realizing it, a well-worn phrase that we’ve picked up from who-knows-where slips surreptitiously into our prose. Reread your writing with your cliché-meter on high, and avoid those tired descriptions – land of contrasts, tropical paradise, bustling thoroughfare… Whenever you come to a phrase that sounds wooden, stop and ask yourself if there might be a better way of expressing what you want to say, one that more truly reflects your take on it.

  One of the culprits editors most frequently cite when they talk about bad travel writing is the use of clichés. So be a vigilant self-editor. Always make your words and descriptions your own.

  Finding your style

  The following critical elements help to determine the success – or failure – of a travel story.

  Your own voice

  Travel stories need a warm human voice. Don’t try to write like a fact-checker or reporter who is simply recording their surroundings, without any sense of engagement. You are undertaking a fundamentally human adventure – encountering new people and a new culture, whether it’s in a different region of your own country or somewhere halfway around the world. Your humanity should be one of the fundamental strengths of your story.

  Your voice should be a reflection of your personality and style, whether romantic, reflective, funny, sarcastic or informative. Over time you will come to be identified with the voice you project in your stories, so it’s imperative to write in a way that feels natural to you and to the story.

  Another aspect of voice is its use to express opinion and judgment. Readers – and editors – are relying on your expertise and discernment to steer them away from scams and disappointments, and to point them in the direction of the best on-the-road experiences. Informing your voice with opinion when appropriate is an essential part of your job.

  Set your pace

  What kind of pace do you want your story to have? It can be headlong and breathless or slow and measured. Make sure the pace fits your piece, and that you’re in control of it. It’s absolutely fine to speed up and slow down – it can make the reading a richer experience – just don’t let the story careen out of control like a South American mountain bus crossing a snow-patched pass and then heading downhill when suddenly the brakes give out and the driver can’t stop and the landscape is whizzing dizzyingly by and before you know it the reader is gone – pfff! – like the bus into the South American sky.

  Play the language like music

  Think of English as a musical instrument. You are using that instrument to create great music. Read your writing out loud, and listen to the music of your writing. What kind of mood are you creating? Are you keeping the pace lively or is it wooden? Are you varying the tempo in your writing? Are you using devices such as internal rhyme and alliteration?

  Take any book by Jan Morris, open it at random and
begin to read aloud. Listen to the way she modulates your journey through the story. Revel in her masterful use of the intrinsic music of our language.

  Here’s a luminous example of Morris’ art from her essay ‘Chaunrikharka’, about a Sherpa home where she was nursed back to health when she fell sick in Nepal:

  Outside the house everything steamed. The monsoon was upon us. The rains fell heavily for several hours each day, and the gardens that surrounded Chaunrikharka’s six or seven houses were all lush and vaporous. My room had no window, but the open door looked out upon the Sonam family plot, and from it there came a fragrance so profoundly blended of the fertile and the rotten, the sweet and the bitter, the emanations of riotous growth and the intimations of inevitable decay, that still, if ever my mind wanders to more sententious subjects, I tend to smell the vegetable gardens of Chaunrikharka.

  The taste of the potatoes, too, roasted at the family hearth, seemed to me almost philosophically nourishing, while the comfort of the powerful white liquor, rakshi, with which the Sonams now and then dosed me, and the merry voices of the children, frequently hushed lest they disturb my convalescence, and the kind wondering faces of the neighbors who occasionally looked through the open door, and the clatter of the rain on the roof and the hiss of it in the leaves outside, and the enigmatic smiles of those small golden figures in their half light at the end of the room – all built up in my mind an impression not just of peace and piquancy, but of holiness.