How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  Thanks to the physical properties of neon, a trip to Las Vegas can have much the same effect as expensive designer drugs.

  The hometown of indulgence looks and feels like Toytown for tycoons. But beware staying here too long. On my last evening I got so lost trying to find a way out of Binion’s Horseshoe Casino that I had to ask for directions back to real life.

  In the Aitutaki article mentioned earlier (Click here), I began by describing the dance invitation, then went on to explain the reason I had come to Aitutaki:

  I longed for quietude, simplicity and a sense of things as they used to be. I was pining for qualities I associated with islands and with the South Pacific: a lush, slow, wild beauty, a barefoot tranquility, a balmy, palmy, sea-scented sensuality.

  To end that piece, I returned to the dance and the quest:

  After we had feasted, a half-dozen musicians trooped in bearing ukuleles and wooden drums, then young dancers stepped onto the floor in pandanus skirts and coconut bras. Their passion and energy were infectious, and with the warm, caressing air, the delicious food, the music mingling with the stars, and the dancers’ supple limbs and exuberant smiles, it was easy to get lulled into the spirit. I found myself on the floor, hips swaying.

  Time slowed, and the discoveries of my five-day stay coursed through me: the island’s slow, stately pace, the warmth of the people, the soul- soaring beauty of the place, the bountiful humor I had encountered, the sense of plenty in mango and pawpaw, the sense of peace in palm tree, lagoon and beach. The leg-thumping and heart-pumping rhythms reached my deepest core like a key, turning and turning, unlocking mysteries that seemed even older than me.

  Suddenly I found myself in a place I’d never been but knew instinctively. Drums pounded, hips swayed, gardenia perfumed the scene. In an instant I recognized this South Seas culmination: I had found the island of Salvation.

  In the article about my Kyoto temple sojourn (pages 37 and 39), I described the highlights of my stay – first impressions of the temple and my room; meeting the master of the temple, and discussing the temple’s history and his own hopes; and then wandering around the grounds late at night, when that history seemed to come magically to life.

  To conclude the piece, I wanted to find and describe one all-embracing moment that would embody the effect the temple had had on me and at the same time would allow me to prepare readers for re-entry into the world outside the article – just as I was preparing for re-entry into the city beyond the temple. In evoking this threshold moment, I wanted to be sure that the temple impression lingered – like a pebble dropped in a pool – in the reader’s mind. Here are the two final paragraphs that comprise the end:

  The next day I arose at five to join the monks’ morning service.

  The garden was obscured in a rice-paper mist, and the floor chilled my stockinged feet.

  I followed the six resident monks and nun in their rustling robes to the main hall, and sat as they did on the tatami mats. Yamada-sensei, sitting in front, began to chant – a low, deep, long wail – and the monks took up the prayer, breathing in, bellowing out, filling the hall with sound. One monk slowly tolled a huge gong; all around gold and red lacquer and deeply polished wood gleamed, incense spiraled into the air, and the chants and gongs surged and subsided, rose and fell, rose again – until the temple seemed one huge vibrating voice, and we its chords. Ahead was the Kyoto of day, of trolleys and tourist buses, but for me, just then, there was only this Kyoto of incense and chant and gong, of stone lantern and paper screen, of priest and monk and nun, this place of waking dream.

  A similar effect informs the Delos story. The extract reproduced earlier in this chapter (pages 45–6) ended with the introduction of an old man and a young boy, both of whom offered a tour of the island. The story goes on to describe how I spontaneously decided to miss the boat back to Mykonos in order to spend the night on the island, and depicts a raucous dinner with a Hungarian physicist who is also spending the night there, concluding with this description of the following morning:

  Streaming sunlight awakened me. I turned to look at my watch and disturbed a black kitten that had bundled itself at my feet. In so doing, I also disturbed the ouzo and retsina that had bundled itself in my head, and I crawled as close as I could to the shadow of the wall – 6:45. I pulled my towel over my head and tried to imagine the windy dark, but to no avail. The kitten mewed its way under my towel, where it took to lapping at my cheek as if it had discovered a bowl of milk.

  I stumbled down the stairs and soaked my head in tepid tap water until at last I felt stable enough to survey the surroundings. Behind the pavilion a clothesline led to the rusting generator. Chickens strutted inside a coop at the curator’s house. Rhenea stirred in the rising mist.

  Again I wandered through the ruins, different ruins now, bright with day and the reality of returns: the tourists would return to Delos, and I would return to Mykonos. I ate a solemn breakfast on the terrace with the physicist, then walked past the sacred lake and the marketplace to the Terrace of the Lions. Standing among the five lions of Delos, erected in the seventh century BC to defend the island from invaders, I looked over the crumbling walls and stunted pillars to the temples on the hill. Like priests they presided over the procession of tourists who would surge onto the island, bearing their oblation in cameras and guidebooks. As the trawler approached, a bent figure in a navy blue beret hurried to the dock, and a boy in shorts raced out of the curator’s house past the physicist, past me, and into the ruins.

  You can see how the story circles back to its beginning – the old man and the young boy rushing to meet the new day’s potential clients – but everything else has changed. The reader has spent 24 hours on Delos with me, and so now has an entirely different impression of the island. At the end of the story, readers are led back to the world outside Delos and outside the article – but with an enhanced understanding of Delos and, ideally, with a renewed appreciation of the planet.

  Finally, it’s critical that you pay special attention to the last word of your story. This is where you leave the reader, literally and figuratively. It is your – and your story’s – last point of connection with the reader, and the reader’s threshold to the world outside the story. Where do you want to leave the reader? What do you want their last – and lasting – impression of your story to be?

  Exercise 7

  Think about a travel experience or destination that you passionately want to write about. What is it about the experience or destination that you want to convey to your reader? What is the fundamental point of your piece? Try to reduce that point to one sentence. For example: ‘Spending a night on the Greek island of Delos offered life-changing lessons in the history and character of that sacred island.’ Write that sentence at the beginning of your story. As you write your story, this sentence will be your compass and map; refer back to it continually. Is every building block in your story leading toward conveying this point to your reader?

  The accordion theory of time

  Students often ask me how to craft a description of an entire trip in a few words. Say you have between 1500 and 2500 words to write about a five-day journey. If you tried to write about everything that happened on that journey, you would have the travel equivalent of War and Peace. (You would also end up with a piece that was more suited to your personal travel diary than the very public pages of a newspaper or magazine.) So what you have to do is edit your reality. You have to think about all the pertinent experiences in your trip and then you have to choose those very few – three or four – that embody and illuminate the main points you want to make about your journey.

  In order to do this well, you are going to end up focusing very precisely on those four experiences, and skimming over all the other experiences of your trip. This is where the accordion theory of time comes in. Your narrative focus moves in and out, in and out. You expand the accordion to full arm’s length in order to focus closely on a moment in time, then you push it in to skim over
whole days; then you draw it out again to focus on the next significant experience, then push it in to jump over more days.

  Study almost any travel narrative, and you’ll see that the author is playing the accordion of time. The writer isolates the cardinal events in their experience, analyzes how they fit into the pattern of meaning they are trying to evoke, and focuses on the details of those events to render them in a way that will enable the reader to live them just as they did. They may lavish three pages on an incident that happened in five minutes, then summarize the next five days in five sentences. The narrative proceeds in this way – in and out, in and out – singling out for scrutiny and expanded description the events that form the building blocks of the story. The full meaning and impact of the story is created through the accumulation, organization and integration of these event blocks.

  Exercise 8

  Re-read the beginning you wrote in Exercise 4 and the descriptions you wrote in Exercise 6. Now describe in 250–300 words what happened right after that moment you wrote about in your lead, and what you learned as a result. Is this the climax of your story, the place where all the pieces of the puzzle come together? If so, you have a natural ending to your account. And by combining Exercises 4, 6 and 8, you have a first draft of your story. Well done!

  Bringing your story to life

  How do you bring your story to life with the kind of lively prose that editors want? Here are some of the most important tools and principles.

  Writing dialogue

  Dialogue helps to enliven a piece aurally, varying its rhythm. On another level it can be used to humanize a story, injecting characters into your article in a way that creates warmth and resonance for the reader. It can also help to illuminate a place. Remember how Robert Hass began ‘The Path to Sokkuram’? He employed dialogue to push the story thematically along. His account ends at another cafe with dialogue of a different kind:

  The waitress returned with a little paper packet of roast silkworms.

  On the house. She pointed at a shy boy at the next table and bit her lip before proceeding very deliberately. ‘My friend is so exciting only to have this opportunity to speak practical English and having sharing Korean culture.’ I understood. He was treating me to the silkworms. We were going to argue about politics. I ordered another bottle of wine and gestured him over. He sat down opposite me. Two of the waitresses joined us. The silkworms tasted vile, and I smiled gratefully trying to get one down. The girls laughed and the wine came. ‘Korea,’ the young man began, and shook his head. He said the word as if it were a synonym for life. Then he sighed happily and said it again. ‘Korea, Korea, Korea.’

  Dialogue gives a piece human context and contact. It can also help supply critical information in a non-textbook way. For example, a local resident or museum docent can enter the story to reveal the history of the town or the special qualities of the painting on display. And dialogue can introduce human quirks – turns of phrase, colloquialisms, patterns of speech – that help warm a story as well. The key is to use dialogue sparingly, keeping it crisp and authentic.

  An editor’s view: Lyn Hughes

  Based in the UK, Lyn Hughes is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Wanderlust magazine and website. She tweets at @Wanderlust_Lyn.

  Be as professional as possible, sending editors well-thought-out proposals that demonstrate that you understand their publication and what makes their readers tick. This might sound basic, but it’s surprising how many people fall down at this first hurdle.

  Know the market: which magazines and newspapers run travel articles, what style of article they go for and who they are aimed at.

  Think laterally: about where to send your idea or article, and about the angle.

  Read. Read travel articles of all types. Understand what makes a good piece.

  Does your idea pass the ‘so what?’ test? You say you could write an article on Thailand. So what? So could thousands of other people. Why should we go for you?

  What are editors going to be looking for? What’s in the news? What is going to be a hot destination and why?

  Don’t claim to be ‘funnier than Bill Bryson’. People who claim that invariably aren’t.

  Think ahead to what the trends and newsworthy topics will be in six to 12 months’ time. Magazines like to think of themselves as setting the trends and influencing their readers. It is absolutely key that you understand who those readers are and what makes them tick.

  Photographs are important to a magazine – they use more of them and usually in colour. So, even if you can’t supply the photos, they are more likely to go for a story if it’s going to be visually interesting.

  If you want to make travel writing pay, you have to very much treat it as a job, cramming extraordinary trips into just a few days. Your idea of a dream trip might not involve inspecting every hotel in town or having a very boring dinner with the local head of tourism.

  Once you’re a travel writer, you might find it impossible to ever take a proper holiday again – the temptation to just knock up a piece in your notebook or on your laptop will be too much.

  Dialogue should never be invented or embellished to suit your purpose. If you are altering reality in any way – compressing sentences spoken by three different people at three different times into one cocktail party dialogue, for example – then you have to make it clear that you are doing so. It’s perfectly acceptable to clean up dialogue by removing repetitious pauses such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’, but you must adhere scrupulously to the truth of what the person is saying. You must not distort their words or misrepresent their meaning.

  Paul Theroux is a master at dialogue. Open any of his travel books and you’ll quickly find economical, illuminating conversations, as in this excerpt from his wonderful book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. Here, Theroux recounts a conversation with a woman in Hanoi who had been a teen at the time of the infamous US Christmas bombing of that city:

  ‘Do you remember the Christmas bombing?’

  ‘I remember everything. I remember the day the bombs fell on Kham Thien Street,’ she said, drawing her silk scarf close with her slender fingers. ‘It was the nineteenth of December. A thousand people died there that day, and most of them were women and children. Every home was destroyed. It was very terrible to see.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘Yes. My aunt and my mother took me to see the damage,’ she said.

  ‘We saw many cratères – yes, craters – big holes in the road. And the dead, and the fires. I was so frightened. But my aunt and my mother said, “We must see this. What has been done to us.” There’s a monument on that street now.’

  ‘Were you living near there?’

  ‘We were just outside Hanoi.’ She hesitated, then, seeming to remember, said, ‘We didn’t have much to eat. In fact, we had very little food all through the war. We were always hungry. Even after the war was over we had so little rice. And it was stale rice – old rice.’

  ‘Because of the destruction?’

  ‘No. Because of the American embargo, and the Chinese invasion…’

  ‘We were told that the targets were military bases.’

  She smiled sadly at this and said, ‘Everything was targeted. The whole city. Especially roads and bridges. Our bridge was bombed by the B-52s’ – this was the Chuong Duong Bridge, across the Red River to Haiphong. ‘But we repaired it. Factories were especially targeted, no matter what they made. The bombings continued for years. Everything was bombed.’

  Here Theroux conveys not just essential historical information but equally essential emotional information – without having to do any analyzing or explaining himself. The dialogue says it all. This emotional context and connection is critical for the reader to understand how deeply Theroux will be moved by his experience in Vietnam – by the country’s current prosperity and by its extraordinarily warm and open-hearted welcoming of him, an American.

  Exercise 9

  Re-read the beginning you wrote
in Exercise 5. Now that you can look back on your finished journey, consider if there is another moment later in your trip that recalls this same experience and theme. Are you able to find a thematic circularity? Does the second moment complement and complete the first? Describe the second experience in 250 words. These may be the ‘bookends’ of your piece.

  Exercise 10

  On your next trip, near or far, engage someone you encounter in conversation. It might be a fisherman or a flower seller, museum guide or metro conductor. Afterward, in no more than 250 words, reproduce your dialogue as closely as you can, so that someone who wasn’t there is able to ‘hear’ the content and flavor of your conversation. What essential information did they convey? Can you picture the person from their words?

  Creating characters

  The introduction of characters is often critical to the success of a travel piece. Characters can illuminate places, and often help to propel and enliven a story. The human connection is arguably the most powerful element of travel, spanning cultures and backgrounds. Conveying a sense of human connection through the effective introduction of character is a great and powerful art. So pay attention to characters and don’t shy away from bringing local people – or fellow travelers – into your story. Their presence in a story creates a human bridge between the story and the reader, just as they themselves are a human bridge between their home and you.

  A character can be memorably painted using just a few brushstrokes. Consider this figure from James D. Houston’s heart-touching Hawaiian tale, ‘Everything Come Round’, published in the anthology The Kindness of Strangers. Houston is locked out of his car on an isolated island road:

  I turned and saw a huge Polynesian fellow, Hawaiian or, perhaps, from the size of him, Samoan. His dark features were etched and fierce. Black hair was drawn back into a stubby knot. His mouth arced in what seemed a permanent scowl, as he regarded me in the twilight of this otherwise empty parking lot…