Eight year old guidelines for travel writers

Going through a few old folders on my computer earlier, I came across something I must have written eight or nine years ago. This was back in another life when I was editing a backpacker magazine in Australia. We’d have a pretty high turnover of staff working for three month blocks before going off travelling. To save having to explain the same things over and over again, I wrote up a brief guide to making a travel piece more effective. Reading through, I still stand by just about every word of it. Let’s see if you agree…

TRAVEL WRITING GUIDE

WORD COUNTS: Travel pieces are generally between 450 and 700 words long. You will be given a word count to work to. Please stick to it. If we need 500 words, we need 500 words (give or take twenty). An 900 word essay full of bits that you’re really proud of and couldn’t bear to cut out will not be appreciated. In fact, I may be forced to kill you.

DIARIES: Nobody wants to read your travel diary. It may be fascinating to you, but it’s boring to everyone else. Imagine having to sit through reels and reels of someone else’s travel photos. Not much fun, is it? Well, avoid crap like this at all costs – it’s the literary equivalent:

“We woke up at 7am in our comfy hostel beds. We were staying at Koala Backpackers  in Adelaide. We then went for breakfast, and had sausages and eggs…” blah, blah, blah.

I bored myself writing that, so God knows how tedious the readers will find it. Concentrate on the things that you’ve done that other people don’t do every day. Shimmying up a mountain face = interesting. A blow by blow account of devouring the meat pie you had for lunch = rubbish.

SHOW YOU WERE THERE: Anyone can write a travel piece by reading a brochure, looking at pictures of a place and quoting a load of facts about the place. By all mean put some facts in – they help give a better picture of the place – but the interesting things are what you have done and noticed.

For example, it would be easy to do a pretty good piece on Uluru by talking about the history of the place, how the Aboriginal owners don’t like people climbing it, how cool the sunset looks over it etc.

To do a really good piece, you need to show you were there, so point out the things you couldn’t have just nabbed off a brochure. Mention the fat American puffing and panting his way up there, mention the gang of flies constantly buzzing in your face, for example. Instead of saying that the sunset looks cool, explain why it looks cool. What is it similar too? How does it make you feel?

FIRST PERSON: We’re looking for personalised accounts, but don’t go overboard on the use of “I” and “me.” For example:

“Accelerating, the boat ploughs towards the rocks. Bizarrely enough, panic is beginning to set in.”

reads better than:

“I’m now on the boat, and it’s accelerating towards the rocks. Bizarrely enough, I’m beginning to panic.”

TENSE: There’s no ‘correct’ tense to use, but it often helps to keep things active – as if you are currently there, rather than you are telling the tale of what you did a couple of weeks ago. With action stuff (like whitewater rafting, bungy jumping etc), it makes the action seem more exciting if it’s happening now, rather than if it happened.

“Accelerating, the boat ploughs towards the rocks. Bizarrely enough, panic is beginning to set in.”

Sounds better then…

“The boat accelerated and ploughed towards the rocks. Bizarrely enough, panic was beginning to set in.”

INTRO: The first paragraph is the most important one in the whole article – it needs to grab the attention and make people read on. There are no hard and fast rules about what makes an interesting intro, but there are two pretty useful techniques.

1. Start at the most interesting part of the story. If you’re doing a skydive, the most interesting part is your reaction as you jump out of the plane. If you start the story there, and then give the backstory (decision to do the skydive, going in the plane up there etc) later on, it tends to be more interesting than doing it in chronological order.

2. Start with something completely unrelated to the story and then link it back in. As long as the thing you waffle about first is interesting, people will read the rest of it. Doesn’t matter if you’re blathering about a childhood phobia of Rolf Harris, as long as the link doesn’t seem too tenuous, people should read the whole thing if you’ve hooked them.

SENTENCE LENGTH: Interminable sentences with loads of subclauses are really awkward to read, so try and avoid this. Also try and avoid a string of sentences of roughly the same length. Vary the pace by varying the sentence length. Don’t be afraid of one or two word sentences, and ignore what your English teacher told you about never starting a sentence with “and” or “but”. They are perfectly acceptable words to start a sentence with and sometimes have more impact than just stringing a long sentence along.

I reckon that:

“He’s fat. He’s American. And he’s holding the whole queue up. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have probably realised that climbing big rocks is not a suitable past-time for a whale of approximately 22 stone. But, hey, try telling him that.”

reads better than…

“The fat American is holding the whole queue up. You would have thought that he would realise that this isn’t for him. After all, you don’t tend to see too many 22-stone whales climbing big rocks. There’s no point in trying to tell him that, though.”

EXCLAMATION MARKS: Don’t use them. Ever (unless it’s a genuine exclamation, like “wow!” or “Crikey!”) If a joke is funny, it’s funny. If you need to put an exclamation mark at the end to show people that you’ve made a joke, it’s probably not funny enough, so you may as well just cut it out. Oh, and putting three exclamation marks instead of one makes it three times less funny, rather than three times funnier.

GRAMMAR: Please check your spelling and grammar before sending the finished piece. In particular, pay attention to apostrophes and capital letters.

(Irrelevent plug: My guide to Barbados flights is now online.)

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