Five Tips for Writing a Travel Series

Five Tips for Writing a Travel Series Travel writing is considered one of the more glamorous writing gigs. After all, what could be better than getting paid to travel? While the reality is a bit more mundane (generally low pay, tight deadlines, viciously competitive markets) it’s still a load of fun. With the advent of travel blogs, more and more writers are expanding their experiences from single features to longer series. This allows you to focus on various aspects of a destination in different posts and tell a longer story arc. Here are five tips to writing an online travel series. These also work well for print features. 1. You don’t have to start at the beginning: While your journey has a beginning, middle, and end, you aren’t writing a novel. You don’t have to open your series with your arrival. This is usually your worst part of the trip anyway, so why inflict it on your reader? Instead, draw them in with a scene that brings the destination to life, such as when Rolf Potts started his series about going on a Star Trek cruise with the moment everyone discovered he wasn’t a fan of the show. Very rarely are the beginnings of a journey exciting, although my ten-hour drive across the desert to Somaliland made for a good opener. That time, and that time only, the start had excitement, color, vivid experiences, and a bit of danger. The rest of my trips have opened with me jetlagged and grumpy at some foreign airport. 2. Don’t forget that what’s normal to you is new to your reader: As we get accustomed to a new place, we begin to forget the little details that make for a great story. The best photo I never took in Iraq was of my driver eating hummus at a roadside restaurant as a sheep watched him from just outside the window. When I saw this I smiled and thought, â€Å"Appetizer and main course!† What I should have done was take a picture. That juxtaposition wasn’t unusual for me anymore, but I bet my readers would have gotten a good laugh out of it. Well, maybe not the vegetarians. 3. You don’t have to be a good photographer: I’m a mediocre photographer, and yet I’ve sold hundreds of photographs to print and online publications. How? I go to interesting places and take lots of pictures. It’s that simple. 4. Mix short and long pieces: Short, punchy pieces accompanied 5. The story is rarely about you: There are two types of traveler- those who describe the places they’ve been, and those who talk about how they went to a bunch of places. The first person is informative and interesting; the other is a boring braggart. While it’s your journey, you aren’t the most interesting thing about it. The people you meet and the things you see are. Leave yourself out of the picture unless it’s really, truly part of the story. There is very little about me in my series on  living in Harar, Ethiopia. When I visited the little-known Argobba tribe, or interviewed a traditional healer, I let them speak for themselves. In my post about meeting a nine-year-old refugee from Syria, however, my reactions were an important part of the story. A monk examines a medieval illustrated manuscript at his monastery on Lake Tana, Ethiopia. (copyright Sean McLachlan) Marsh Arab children in southern Iraq. (copyright Sean McLachlan)