World Travels and Travel Writing: Where Two Passions Merge, by Laurie Gough
Have you always wanted to write about your travels but don’t know how to begin? The idea of travel writing may seem daunting, but in many ways, it’s much easier than writing fiction.
Unlike fiction, where the story and characters all have to come out of your head, when you’re traveling, so many elements of your story are already there: the setting, the characters, even the plot. Finding the ‘plot’ or the story can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t find it until you’re back home when you begin to reflect on your journey and come to see it more clearly.
I find that my two passions, traveling and writing, feed off and enrich each other. How? When’re you’re on the road, everything around you takes on a vibrancy you may not have experienced since childhood. When you’re in a new place, you absorb fresh life around every corner, you see everything from a crooked angle. Time stretches out and your senses sharpen. In other words, you’re paying attention. And paying attention is a travel writer’s job. If you intend to write about your travels, you’ll be even more aware of the details of the moment. You’ll look more closely, listen more clearly, taste more carefully, and continually reflect on what you’re experiencing. As a result, your travels, and your writing, will be deeper and richer.
Here’s a little test: think back to what you did today. Can you remember any visual specifics of your day? It’s common to develop tunnel vision—jostling through the world without really seeing it. As a writer, you must fight this human default and constantly observe, note situations and details that evoke emotions and imagination.
A common mistake aspiring travel writers make is going on a trip and writing about it and assuming everyone will be interested in what you’ve written just because you’ve been to some place exotic. You have to assume the opposite: nobody is interested. It’s like showing someone your travel slides. Simply writing what you did each day of your trip is rarely interesting. You have to tell a story.
What makes a good story? Sometimes you stumble upon a great adventure or have a chance encounter or a series of misadventures. But more often, the narrator—you—want something, some inner or outer quest you have in mind, something specific you’re seeking. You go through all kinds of hardship looking for it. Obstacles get in your way. In the end, you either get it or they don’t. Either is fine. Sometimes you discover what you thought you wanted wasn’t what you wanted at all, and like the Rolling Stones song, you may find something else in the end. You can’t know what it is beforehand, but you know it when you see it. Here again, traveling and writing go hand-in-hand—having a quest in mind not only makes for a good story, but for rich travels.
The quest can be external or internal of a combination of the two. When it’s internal, it’s something you’re looking for in yourself: to get over a death; to find inner strength after a car accident; to learn something new; to conquer a fear; to look for your younger more free-spirited self—which is the quest in my latest book. And that’s the amazing thing about traveling, it brings out so many parts within ourselves that we didn’t even know were there, or we’d forgotten about, or had never seen before in our lives. These parts of ourselves aren’t normally called upon in our everyday lives in our daily routine. When we travel we come up against all kinds of hardships and mostly, we come up against ourselves and our own belief system. Everything gets shaken up when we travel. All this makes for good writing. It adds layers of depth to a travel story when there’s internal conflict and reflection going on.
How to set up your travel story? Think about the way you’d tell the story around a campfire, so people will hang off your every word. Engage your reader with every sentence. You can start in the middle of the action—the climax—and go backwards from there to fill in the background, or you can start chronologically. I was once drugged and hypnotized into buying carpets in Morocco. I chose to write this story chronologically, but I made sure to give a hint of the danger to come in the first paragraph. The number one reason a reader turns a page is to find out what happens next.
Lead the reader into the wonder and terror of the place you’re describing, remembering that your experience can only be conveyed through concrete details. Details bring your story to life. 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 and you shouldn’t. You have to edit reality. You have to isolate the most telling details, asking yourself which ones most powerfully convey whatever it is about the scene that’s most relevant to your story, which details best establish the points you want to make.
Details add color to your story and bring it alive. Rather than saying, “We had fun that day,” show, don’t tell. This is the number one rule of writing. What made it fun? Give your readers something concrete. “We built a big leaf pile full of crunchy brown leaves that smelled musty and we charged headfirst into that leaf pile over and over again for hours until we smelled just like the leaves ourselves.”
Keep your senses open for the small things that evoke atmosphere—aromas of food cooking, oil burning lamps, pungent fruit, briny salt air, bird calls, fog horns, sirens, babies crying. Atmosphere is all around you; you just have to recognize it. Pepper your story with atmosphere, but don’t overdo it.
Bring people into your writing whenever possible. How humans are acting on this planet never fails to enliven a story. Try to find some good in a place or situation, even if it’s hard to see at the time. You don’t want your readers to be as exhausted as you were on that nightmarish bus ride through Sumatra. If you look hard enough, there’s always an upside to every journey (even if it sometimes feels as if the only upside on a disastrous trip is that it’ll make a great story some day.) Often, it’s humor—the sheer absurdity of a situation—that saves you. The hefty woman squeezed next to you on the stifling train has just puked into the lap of her sari and now wants to borrow your purse…why? Most often, it’s the humanity of people that saves your trip, some small act of kindness when you need it most.
When you’re traveling, new sights spark thoughts that otherwise would never have entered your mind. Traveling generates whole constellations of ideas about how people live in this world, how they work and raise their kids, worship their gods, live and die, have fun in life. So when you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it, but also let it draw the best out of you.
Happy writing!
Have you always wanted to write about your travels but don’t know how to begin? The idea of travel writing may seem daunting, but in many ways, it’s much easier than writing fiction.
Unlike fiction, where the story and characters all have to come out of your head, when you’re traveling, so many elements of your story are already there: the setting, the characters, even the plot. Finding the ‘plot’ or the story can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t find it until you’re back home when you begin to reflect on your journey and come to see it more clearly.
I find that my two passions, traveling and writing, feed off and enrich each other. How? When’re you’re on the road, everything around you takes on a vibrancy you may not have experienced since childhood. When you’re in a new place, you absorb fresh life around every corner, you see everything from a crooked angle. Time stretches out and your senses sharpen. In other words, you’re paying attention. And paying attention is a travel writer’s job. If you intend to write about your travels, you’ll be even more aware of the details of the moment. You’ll look more closely, listen more clearly, taste more carefully, and continually reflect on what you’re experiencing. As a result, your travels, and your writing, will be deeper and richer.
Here’s a little test: think back to what you did today. Can you remember any visual specifics of your day? It’s common to develop tunnel vision—jostling through the world without really seeing it. As a writer, you must fight this human default and constantly observe, note situations and details that evoke emotions and imagination.
A common mistake aspiring travel writers make is going on a trip and writing about it and assuming everyone will be interested in what you’ve written just because you’ve been to some place exotic. You have to assume the opposite: nobody is interested. It’s like showing someone your travel slides. Simply writing what you did each day of your trip is rarely interesting. You have to tell a story.
What makes a good story? Sometimes you stumble upon a great adventure or have a chance encounter or a series of misadventures. But more often, the narrator—you—want something, some inner or outer quest you have in mind, something specific you’re seeking. You go through all kinds of hardship looking for it. Obstacles get in your way. In the end, you either get it or they don’t. Either is fine. Sometimes you discover what you thought you wanted wasn’t what you wanted at all, and like the Rolling Stones song, you may find something else in the end. You can’t know what it is beforehand, but you know it when you see it. Here again, traveling and writing go hand-in-hand—having a quest in mind not only makes for a good story, but for rich travels.
The quest can be external or internal of a combination of the two. When it’s internal, it’s something you’re looking for in yourself: to get over a death; to find inner strength after a car accident; to learn something new; to conquer a fear; to look for your younger more free-spirited self—which is the quest in my latest book. And that’s the amazing thing about traveling, it brings out so many parts within ourselves that we didn’t even know were there, or we’d forgotten about, or had never seen before in our lives. These parts of ourselves aren’t normally called upon in our everyday lives in our daily routine. When we travel we come up against all kinds of hardships and mostly, we come up against ourselves and our own belief system. Everything gets shaken up when we travel. All this makes for good writing. It adds layers of depth to a travel story when there’s internal conflict and reflection going on.
How to set up your travel story? Think about the way you’d tell the story around a campfire, so people will hang off your every word. Engage your reader with every sentence. You can start in the middle of the action—the climax—and go backwards from there to fill in the background, or you can start chronologically. I was once drugged and hypnotized into buying carpets in Morocco. I chose to write this story chronologically, but I made sure to give a hint of the danger to come in the first paragraph. The number one reason a reader turns a page is to find out what happens next.
Lead the reader into the wonder and terror of the place you’re describing, remembering that your experience can only be conveyed through concrete details. Details bring your story to life. 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 and you shouldn’t. You have to edit reality. You have to isolate the most telling details, asking yourself which ones most powerfully convey whatever it is about the scene that’s most relevant to your story, which details best establish the points you want to make.
Details add color to your story and bring it alive. Rather than saying, “We had fun that day,” show, don’t tell. This is the number one rule of writing. What made it fun? Give your readers something concrete. “We built a big leaf pile full of crunchy brown leaves that smelled musty and we charged headfirst into that leaf pile over and over again for hours until we smelled just like the leaves ourselves.”
Keep your senses open for the small things that evoke atmosphere—aromas of food cooking, oil burning lamps, pungent fruit, briny salt air, bird calls, fog horns, sirens, babies crying. Atmosphere is all around you; you just have to recognize it. Pepper your story with atmosphere, but don’t overdo it.
Bring people into your writing whenever possible. How humans are acting on this planet never fails to enliven a story. Try to find some good in a place or situation, even if it’s hard to see at the time. You don’t want your readers to be as exhausted as you were on that nightmarish bus ride through Sumatra. If you look hard enough, there’s always an upside to every journey (even if it sometimes feels as if the only upside on a disastrous trip is that it’ll make a great story some day.) Often, it’s humor—the sheer absurdity of a situation—that saves you. The hefty woman squeezed next to you on the stifling train has just puked into the lap of her sari and now wants to borrow your purse…why? Most often, it’s the humanity of people that saves your trip, some small act of kindness when you need it most.
When you’re traveling, new sights spark thoughts that otherwise would never have entered your mind. Traveling generates whole constellations of ideas about how people live in this world, how they work and raise their kids, worship their gods, live and die, have fun in life. So when you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it, but also let it draw the best out of you.
Happy writing!
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