First, you enjoy the flexibility of being able to work when, where and how you like with freelance writing job. There is not commute, no dressing up for board meetings (at least seldom) and no nine-to-five grind. Some freelance writers, it is true, do visit their employer’s offices on occasions to take part in brainstorming sessions or client input meetings, but those events are not regular and far from common. This sort of flexibility is bound to appeal to anyone with a creative personality.

Secondly, you can work on any sort of writing you enjoy. If you like writing travel articles, you can find a publication or other buyer who’ll snap up your work. If you prefer fiction, you can contribute freelance to publications or submit works for anthologies. Maybe it’s poetry, gardening how-to essays or any other sort of writing genre. Entities that publish in any of these areas will need good freelance writers to keep their reader’s happy.

So, don’t take that full-time job and face rush hour commutes. Kick back with your PC and kick start a career as a freelance writer. It could be the smartest move of your writing career.

The travel reader is usually an intelligent person who either plans to travel extensively or may already have done so, or they are not in a position to travel and so use their reading as a substitute. Either way, knowing your material is essential to sell well in any travel writing market. Many guidebooks, travel web pages and other sources who utilize travel writing, require their writers to actually have visited and have first-hand knowledge of the area about which they write, in addition to having done extensive research.

While travel writing is essentially factual, it can be stretched and pampered a little with the use of colorful descriptive wording and allusions to activities that might be undertaken in the destination. This allows a writer room to stretch their vocabulary as long as they keep it within the limitations of fact obtained from an honest perspective. It’s no different to the academic approaches to critical essays at online universities or on-campus colleges – you’re writing for an audience that want to gain knowledge, but don’t necessarily want it delivered to them in a haughty, over-factual manner. Thus, it behooves the travel writer with less experience to refrain from using excessive first person statements and stick closer to their research.

Carry a camera with you as you travel. Make a plan to photograph every part of your town or village, in every season. Begin with an ‘aim and shoot’ camera, but as you get paid for your articles, invest a part of your income on buying a reasonably good digital camera. Make this purchase only from the income specifically earned from the hobby .This will help you to focus clearly on making the writing and photography a serious occupation. Once you have finished photographing your village /town, arrange the prints in a logical series like” Sunset at…. “,“the bridges in….” etc. Find out if there is a stock photographs dealer in your place or some where close by. You can negotiate for sale of the organized collection of photos, and get a good offer. In these days of Internet, you can explore the World wide market too.

File the photographs in ready to search files, so that you can access them at short notice. Every time you start an article, search for a related picture and keep it in front of you till you finish the article. This is one sure way to make your writing vivid. If you do not have one ready, try getting one from the ‘Net.

The next important factor that makes a Travel Article memorable is to use word Pictures. Use words that paint pictures of what is described. Colours, shapes, flavours, sounds and smells, are to be described and not just alluded to. A ‘Golden red sky’, better paints the Sun about to set over the horizon, than ’red sky’. The early dawn is better described by the sound of the Cocks heralding the day, the cows mooing in the barns, the little birds merrily chirping in welcome, and so on. A busy market is best described by the cacophony of the vendors, the babble of the customers and so on.

The eerie silence of the grave yard is well painted through the absence of several usual sounds at such a place, that of the bats, the owls, a stray jackal, etc. Here we are actually playing a double game: we are arousing images of the sounds in the minds of the reader, and then referring to the absence of those images in the place under narration.

The first requirement for becoming a Travel Writer is that one should have a keen pair of inquisitive eyes, always on the look out for things that offer a unique perspective. How do people at the new place live? What are their eating and dressing habits? How is the climate at the place? Is it generally uniform as happens to be at many of the World’s Resort Stations? How are the lodging facilities? Are these expensive, or “Value for money”? Are there any special Tourist Seasons for this destination?

Begin by keeping a diary of all the observations. Don’t be in any hurry to write your article in jiffy. First, collect more information about the place than you might care to put in a Report.Thereafter, arrange the points in some logically meaningful sequence.After your first draft is ready, sleep over it for a day and then attempt to cut into half the present length. Do not exceed 500 words in an article, unless it is an entire Report for the whole expedition. Interest is best sustained with articles of three hundred words or another fifty. Longer pieces tend to bore the readers.

You will open a new way of life for that person, by giving a purpose for his /her communication. But you will be the first to benefit. A person you thought of as an incompetent communicator will be showing you that given a purpose, all of us are good communicators. In other words, no one is useless in the world, and no place in the world is uninteresting. It is the communication that can become faulty or boring.

We are happy to introduce this new series of articles on Travel Writing for the benefit of those who are as yet undecided on the right genre of writing to pick for a career, and also for those who are ready to launch themselves into Travel writing as a vocation The first article in the series deals with the tools of the trade. Enjoy!