What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Writing About My Travels

I started writing about travel because I wanted to make sense of it. I kept notebooks on every trip — messy, half-formed, full of sentences that started strong and then trailed off into grocery lists and train times. When I finally started publishing, I learned quickly that the gap between "I went somewhere" and "I have something to say about it" is much wider than it looks from the outside.

These are the lessons that took me the longest to learn, and that I now pass on to every writer who asks me how to begin.

Your Trip Is Not the Story

The first mistake most new travel writers make — and I made it for years — is assuming that the itinerary is the narrative. It isn't. Nobody cares that you took the 7:15 bus and then had a croissant. They care about what the bus ride revealed, who you sat next to, what you noticed, what changed in you. The trip is just raw material. The story is the meaning you make from it.

This means you need to write in two stages. First, capture everything: sensory details, overheard phrases, small annoyances, unexpected kindnesses. Then, much later, when you've had time to think, go back and ask what any of it was actually about. The second stage is where the writing happens. The first stage is just note-taking.

Another thing: specificity is your only real advantage. Everyone has been to Paris. Almost no one has written about the specific smell of the bakery on the corner of your particular street at 6 a.m. in November. Generic descriptions — "charming," "breathtaking," "hidden gem" — are the writer's way of saying "I didn't pay attention." Pay attention. Then use the details.

Write for One Reader, Not Everyone

When I first started, I tried to write for an imaginary audience of "travelers." The result was bland, forgettable prose. The turning point came when I started writing letters — actual letters — to a friend back home who had never left our hometown and probably never would. Suddenly I had to explain things. I had to choose which details mattered. I had to be interesting, because I knew she would stop reading if I wasn't.

You don't need to literally write letters, but you do need a specific reader in your head. Someone real. Someone whose attention you can't take for granted. That constraint will do more for your writing than any workshop.

Two more things, quickly. First, read outside the genre. The best travel writing I know borrows from fiction, from essays, from poetry. Read it all. Second, accept that most of what you write will be bad. That's not failure — that's the process. The writers you admire have simply written more bad pages than you have. Get the bad pages out of the way. The good ones are behind them.