John's Writing Tips.
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TRAVEL WRITING
Not everybody can be a professional travel writer, but writing about your travels allows you to recapture the essence of the town / country / region in a later article or story. It puts the dust back in your nose and the grit under your toes.
But remember:
Travel writing has to be entertaining, interesting and informative.
Travel writing has to be geared to the market.
It has to be the right length and be subtly different from anything written
about the same region in earlier editions of…
Of what?
First lesson. Don’t write until you know your market. The age of the reader and their economic status may – in fact, will – affect the style and content of what you write. Don’t harp on about all-night discos and lager louts in Spain, then try to sell the article to a magazine specialising in grannies on the ballroom dancing circuit.
Read lots of travel articles in as many different papers and magazines as you can. Make a note of the differences in length and style of the articles, even in the same paper. The featured holiday is usually big, glossy and expensive. The articles in the inner pages are more in the line of city breaks or family holidays. That is very much a generalisation, but remember. The front page featured holiday in a national paper almost certainly started life as a commissioned piece so it’s not going to be for you.
You are probably wasting your time as an unproven writer sending a ‘pitch’ to
a busy editor. To be honest, forget it. Editors don’t want the one-off
writer, they want people who are going to be there for the long haul, and
they are going to be loyal to the regular contributor over an unknown.
So send in the pitch if you like. It gets your name seen (and quickly forgotten)
if nothing else. Then write the piece, gear it to that particular paper or
magazine and send it in cold turkey as if you never had received your latest
copy of ‘the editor regrets’. Make sure it’s your best
writing, absolutely the best thing you have ever done to date.
So far I haven’t said much about the actual writing process itself,
which is almost irrelevant. To put it simply. Go off, have a smashing time.
Join in everything, talk to everyone.
THEN when you have ten spare minutes, and make room for several ‘spares’ during
the day, sit down in peace and write about what interested you during the
past couple of hours. Who you talked to, what they said. If something bored
you leave it out because the writing will be bored as well. Unless of course
being bored was in itself interesting. Then put it in with knobs on.
That, apparently, is how Dervla Murphy goes about writing her travel books.
If you want to see how it’s done, with a high standard of writing thrown
in, check her out.
Also, rather than re-invent the wheel (so to speak), why don’t you
take the advice of the experts? Check out Travel Writing Guide by Gordon
Burgett or The Travel Writing Handbook by Louise Purwin Zobel for handy hints
on how to go about things.
When you get home select your theme, decide your market and cut out the
irrelevant bits. At that point you’re not writing, you’re editing,
and editing is much more fun than writing.
As for a title, try and get a good one, one that sums up the holiday in one
pithy sentence.
Do your homework about the area and its facilities and places of interest
before you go. The internet can be useful here for interrogating the local
Tourist Information sites. Then you have the travel books. The Dorling Kindersley
Travel Guides are absolutely fantastic. They give you a lot more detailed
information than your are ever likely to use, but at least you know what
to expect and what exactly what you are looking at when you see it.
Remember a travel article is not about facilities and scenic spots, it is
about the soul of the area, and the soul of the area is its people. Write
about the people. And while you’re at it, keep your tickets, dockets
and receipts. Travel writing is a business and business expenses are tax
deductible, but you had better be able to prove them if the Tax Inspector
comes calling. (See my article, The Tax Man and Writers).
The final ingredient. Once I sent a travel article to a national newspaper.
It was picked up and published. The following year I sent in a pitch for
a holiday in Crete. This was rejected. One of their staff was going there
and had got in first. The following year the editor changed and I was out.
And the final ingredient? As in everything else, you need luck in the travel
writing game.
© John McAllister, 2005
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