Travel Writing

Travel writing is fast becoming one of the most popular fields of modern research writing, both for short work (articles, etc.) and for novelists. Since travel is a subject that fascinates most readers, the writer endeavoring to enter the travel writing market, needs to be aware of their market audience.

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.

Opportunities in Travel Writing for Beginners

A beginner in the field of writing is faced with the question: why am I writing? To be simple, it is because I need to say something. Grannies used to tell the kids in the olden days: ‘don’t open your mouth unless you are really hungry or you have something urgent to tell.’ The threat that if you open your mouth unnecessarily, insects will get into it, was sufficient enough to stop blabbering kids from disturbing the peace of the house. But how do we stop the grown up persons who ramble on about nothing? Get them to do a small errand: visit a corner of their own village and give a two hundred words description. Demand that factual data should not be missing, any colourful aspect of the place should not be left out and no meaningless words to find a place in the report.

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!