How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  Study the musicality and modulation here. Those last two sentences go on and on – and yet you never lose your place in them. Morris builds them – and conducts us through them – phrase by phrase, detail by detail, until a sturdy, sensual and spiritual edifice is complete.

  Writer’s tip: Change things up

  One of my first assignments for Travel + Leisure was a description of great places to go in Northern California, including famed Muir Woods. The most striking aspect of that sacred place – and an aspect featured in every article I’d read – was how the sunlight filters through the high branches of the trees, creating an effect like stained glass in a cathedral. As I approached the place, I wondered: how can I avoid writing the same description as everyone else? Then I came up with a solution – I walked around Muir Woods blindfolded. Suddenly an entirely different place – of rough-textured bark, crackling pine needles and crisp evergreen scent – came to life.

  Make your words work hard

  One of the biggest traps for novice writers is the urge to make prose powerful by overwriting, using high-flown adjectives and adverbs. You can feel the sentences collapsing under the weight of such words. Use active verbs, and don’t use three words when you can use one. Rather than writing ‘He walked as quickly as he could up the crater’, write ‘He raced up the crater’ or, even better, ‘He scrambled up the crater’. Reread your work slowly, and ask yourself if you really need each word. Remember that less is more.

  Exercise 15

  Choose a few paragraphs from your favorite travel writer and type them into your computer. Now edit those paragraphs. Analyze their choice of words, especially the verbs they use. Does every word do as much ‘work’ as possible? Are there any words you can delete or improve upon? Now type a few of your own paragraphs. Read those sentences with the same critical eye. Can you delete or strengthen any of your word choices?

  Pay attention to verb tense

  You would be amazed how many writers, even very established ones, mix up their verb tenses in their stories. Unless you’re doing this on purpose and with a sure sense of control, you shouldn’t begin your story in the present tense and then flip into the past tense, and then into the present tense and then back into the past tense again. You might think this is an obvious point, but just watch yourself the next time you write a travel piece. Reread it very carefully and see if at some point you too don’t fall prey to inconsistencies of tense.

  Writing in the present tense has become something of a vogue recently, largely due to more immediate prose style the internet has encouraged and cultivated. Somehow, online feels like a present-tense medium. But writing in the present tense can have its pitfalls. As a narrator you can have no more sense of what’s coming than your reader. You cannot possibly know what happened two days after the day you’re describing, and you need to take particular care not to let that knowledge color your narrative in any way. You have to recreate the ignorance you had at the moment you are describing, and never divulge more about your trip than you knew at that time. Writing in the past tense, on the other hand, liberates you. You already know what happened at the end of the trip, so in that sense writing in the past tense is a much more natural choice. But it’s up to you – just be sure to be consistent and in control of your choice. If you’re not, the reader will get lost – and your piece won’t get published.

  Writer’s tip: Check your tenses

  When I was starting out, I wrote a commissioned piece for a magazine. I was pretty naive about the business of travel writing, and fashioned myself an artist – a poet of the road. And so I purposefully crafted my work in the present tense. The editor asked me to rewrite it in the past tense. After initially exploding with righteous anger (note: this is not recommended as a way to impress an editor), I recast the piece and discovered that in fact it made hardly any difference at all. I had written it in the present tense because I wanted to convey a sense of immediacy; I wanted the reader to feel they were right there with me. But the truth is that the reader will still feel that way when the piece is written in the past tense – if it’s written well.

  Exercise 16

  Choose a particularly compelling encounter, event or activity from a recent trip and describe it in 200–300 words in the present tense. Then write the same account in the past tense. Which one works better? Which is more powerful? Does one feel more restricting or liberating than the other? Keep these differences in mind as you craft your stories. The tense you choose can help or hinder your ability to tell your tale.

  Rewriting and self-editing

  Different writers have different strategies for rewriting and self-editing. Some rewrite as they go along; others wait to rewrite until they’ve completed a first draft of the entire piece.

  A good practice is to write three drafts of an article. In the first draft, try to get down everything that’s in your mind about the story – all the important incidents, impressions and lessons. In this phase it’s best to write as quickly as possible, rather than pausing to rewrite.

  The second draft of your article is where you undertake the macro- editing phase. Read the story for flow and logical development, possibly looking to move sections in order to clarify and refine the movement and development of the piece. Also look to remove any sections that do not add to the story and identify any gaps that still need to be filled. Ask yourself if you’ve supplied all the information a reader needs to know in order to recreate that experience. Does the story build up coherently to its main point?

  The third draft is the micro-editing phase, where you read very slowly and precisely, paying close attention to the style of the prose. Have you made every word count? Are you re-creating your experience as vividly and truly as possible? Are all the transitions there? How about the music of the piece?

  After you have finalized the third draft you should be ready to send the story to an editor. At this stage, many experienced writers show their work to a ‘trusted reader’, whether that be their spouse, a good friend or their agent, before they send it off to be published – sometimes even the most capable writers are too close to their work to see something that an objective eye can pick up. Of course, after the editor has read it, you may be asked to rework the piece further, but that is an essential part of the process, too.

  An editor’s view: Jim Benning

  Jim Benning (www.jimbenning.net) is the co-founder and co-editor of online travel magazine World Hum (www.worldhum.com). He was deputy travel editor at BBC.com and editor in chief of SKYE on AOL. His writing has appeared in many publications, including National Geographic Adventure, Outside and the Washington Post. Find him on Twitter at @jimbenning.

  I launched World Hum with fellow writer and editor Michael Yessis. Our goal was simply to publish great travel writing, and we worked on it in our spare time for six years. It was a labor of love – we didn’t make more than a few pennies from the site until the Travel Channel acquired it in 2007 and hired us to be the editors.

  Travel is easy. Writing great stories takes a lot of skill and hard work. So work on improving your writing. Get critical feedback. It’s hard to get that from friends and family, so reach out to others. Join a writers’ group. Write multiple drafts. Revise, revise, revise. Narrow the focus of your stories. Rather than writing a general story about Paris, write about an aspect that’s often overlooked. Or better yet, venture to places few others are writing about.

  Anything you can do to hone your writing will benefit your travel writing. Beyond that, learn a foreign language or two. Take classes in history, literature, architecture – any topic that interests you. That’s the beauty of travel writing: you can indulge your quirks and passions, and doing so can make for great stories.

  Often, writers don’t read the site carefully and they pitch stories we’d never publish. Or they send a generic pitch to us and dozens of other editors, hoping one might bite. That approach never works for us. We want to work with writers who are familiar with our site and have a spec
ific idea about how and where their story might fit.

  I love that travel writing requires action in the world – getting out beyond your backyard – and then retreating to your desk for reflection. They’re two very different ways of being, and yet I think both are necessary for a rich life, as well as to make great travel writing.

  More newspaper travel sections will shrink or disappear, sadly. Magazine stories will continue to get shorter. Travel websites and blogs will evolve. One thing, thankfully, won’t change: a good travel story will always be a good travel story.

  The editor will have their own view of the piece, and of where and how it fits into the puzzle of their publication. It is the writer’s job to work with the editor to come up with a story that satisfies both parties. If you feel very strongly that you do not want to make an editorial change, you should state your case and discuss that point with the editor by all means, but you should be careful not to alienate them. Just as finding a great story entails a marriage of passion and practicality, so too publishing a story entails marrying the editor’s and the writer’s views of the story.

  Writer’s tip: Less is more

  One of my most memorable writing mentors is the great John McPhee, longtime staff writer at the New Yorker. I was one of the lucky students in his first groundbreaking non-fiction writing workshop at Princeton, called The Literature of Fact. One of his favorite assignments was to pass out 250-word pieces from the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of the New Yorker. Though these had been meticulously edited and re-edited by the magazine’s staff, until they had been pared to the editorial bone, he would delightedly tell us to cut 10 words from each piece. We would groan, but the value of this exercise was immeasurable. It taught me to read each sentence word by word and to ask: is this word really necessary? Is this one? When I read my own pieces with that same mindset, any superfluous words stood out.

  We’ve talked about knowing your goals and about the riches and requisites of the travel writer’s life. Now let’s focus on the different markets that publish travel writing, and on how to begin to get published in those markets.

  Whether you are writing for newspapers, magazines or online, you will follow one of two approaches: you can pitch an idea or proposal to an editor before you write the actual piece, or you can write the piece in its entirety and then submit it. Generally speaking, if you are a beginner writer, it’s unlikely that a publication will commit to publishing a piece by you based on the idea alone, without reading the finished piece. So if you are starting out, the best advice is to write your story first, with a particular publication (and so story angle) in mind, and then submit it. The key to success in this process – and it merits repeating, because it is so important – is to know your market intimately and thoroughly.

  Given the generally low rates for online publication (see here), this chapter focuses mostly on print publishing. For advice on starting your own blog, see chapter 4. For listings of publications and websites that offer opportunities for publication, see chapter 7.

  Breaking into print media

  The three main print outlets for travel stories are newspaper travel sections, travel magazines and lifestyle magazines with a travel component. Become a regular reader of the publications you want to target, and understand the types of stories they publish.

  Are the destinations mostly short-haul, long-haul or a mix of the two? Is family travel an important element, or do most stories target the adventurous, independent traveler? Are articles tailored to bare-bones, mainstream or luxury budgets, or do they cover a spectrum of destinations and options? What is the tone, the approach and the length of the stories? Are most of the articles service pieces, round-ups or destination based? Are there any regular formats that appear each week?

  In many publications you’ll find, for example, features such as the stopover destination piece called ‘48 Hours in…’, and the short mini-guide to a destination called something like ‘A Complete Guide to…’ All print publications run regular features each edition – you need to get to know the features in the publications you want to target. If you have good ideas that could fit these formats, you’ll be offering copy that you know the travel editor needs each week or month. Conversely, if you offer a city-break piece that is not in the right format, it is not likely to be considered.

  Detailed research will pay off. Keep brief notes about the stories your targeted publication has printed. Also, make use of the publication’s online archives – you can search by topic and destination to find any stories similar to the one you’re planning to pitch. Such research will enable you to begin a proposal for a piece on Swiss chocolatiers, for example, by saying, ‘I’m aware that you published a story on Belgian chocolates a year ago, but…’ At the very least, this research will help you tailor your articles to a particular publication. In addition, you’ll never commit the cardinal sin of offering a travel editor a story that they have just run, and so risk taking a giant step backward in this tricky relationship.

  Whether you’re targeting a newspaper or a magazine, your first step should be to look on the publication’s website for contributor guidelines or a style guide. If this information isn’t available online, ring or email and request a copy be sent to you. These guidelines will usually spell out what the editors are looking for in an article and how they prefer to deal with freelance writers. They should also advise on how your submission should be presented, and whether they require accompanying photographs (this is less likely in the UK). Having these contributor guidelines will help to maximize your chances of giving the editors what they want. To give you some examples, we’ve reproduced the contributor guidelines for three publications at the back of this book (see pages 248–58).

  There are broad differences in the ways writers need to approach and work with newspapers and magazines. There are also significant differences in practice between the UK and the USA, while Australian and UK working methods are generally similar.

  Writer’s tip: How to get there

  There are a number of different strategies you can follow to get started in your travel writing career but in essence, they come down to this progression of points: know your goals; know your markets; start local and start small; build up your clips, your confidence and your contacts; hone your craft and your expertise; keep your eyes – and your door – open for opportunities; and keep your focus on your goals.

  Writing for newspapers

  It’s worth saying up front that worldwide, the newspaper industry has been well and truly disrupted by digital media, resulting in changing business models, downsizing and even closures. Some newspapers have folded, others have become purely online business. While most papers still carry a (usually weekend) travel section, times are tough, and budgets are small. This is not to say you shouldn’t set your sights on print publication in your local broadsheet – but do your research to understand how they’re putting their travel section together. Is it mostly syndicated content? Have they combined operations with another paper under the same ownership? If you want to work for travel media, it’s worth keeping your finger on the pulse of the media landscape.

  Newspapers in the UK

  At the base of the UK’s complex newspaper pyramid are the ‘freesheets’ – local newspapers distributed to every home in a particular area, or distributed on the street and at Underground stations. These rarely carry travel editorial (or, indeed, much editorial copy at all).

  At the next level are more than 70 local and regional newspapers, which are more likely to carry travel stories. Often these papers will be syndicated, but they are always interested in local people doing interesting things, so travel writing opportunities shouldn’t be discounted.

  The highest circulation newspapers, and therefore those with the highest profile and (usually) rates of pay, are the ‘nationals’. These are split into three categories:

  The ‘red-top’ tabloids: the Daily Mirror, the Star and the Sun, and their Sunday counterparts, the Sunday Mirror
, the People and the Sun on Sunday. Distinguished by their traditionally red mastheads and comparatively downmarket sensibilities, these papers offer relatively slim travel coverage, and that coverage is most commonly handled in-house or by regular freelancers.

  Middle-market tabloids: the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Express and the Sunday Express. These have larger travel sections, but are usually written in-house or by regular freelancers – or by celebrities.

  ‘Quality’ newspapers (previously more commonly called ‘broadsheets’ because of their larger format, until they began downsizing in 2003): the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times, as well as the Financial Times. (The Independent, once a broadsheet, then a tabloid, moved to an online-only model in 2016; it still publishes lots of travel content.) These papers publish their main travel issue on Saturday, sometimes adding a minor travel section during the week. Their Sunday equivalents – the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times – also have substantial travel sections (except for the Financial Times, which has just one weekend edition).

  A daily paper and its Sunday equivalent are usually compiled by totally different staff; this means that The Times and The Sunday Times, for example, have separate travel teams and travel editors for you to target. The size of these travel sections or supplements ranges from four to 40 pages. Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland also have national newspapers that publish travel stories tailored to their readers’ interests.

  Newspapers in Australia

  Australia has 20 national and metropolitan newspapers, and more than 120 regional and community papers. The major capital city papers publish the best travel content – The Australian, The Advertiser, the Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Brisbane Courier Mail and The West Australian – and there are travel features in Sunday editions of these papers too. However, many of these papers are actually separate arms of the same large media company, and they combine their resources – for example, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times, all owned by Fairfax Media, share their travel content. What may seem to be a proliferation of opportunities is actually merely two outlets.