Capture your Travel Writing Prompts

I needed a break from writing the final draft of my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide series, so I wrote and designed this blank Five Senses travel journal to help travel bloggers and travel writers improve their travel writing by showing instead of telling. This journal is an invaluable tool for using your five senses to capture your travel encounters and experiences, and use as reference when you write your blog article, free travel giveaway, social media content, or self-published book.

I love blank travel journals, and can never resist buying a new one (I’ve already bought two this week!) – but I have a tendency to capture too much information that doesn’t help when it comes time to write your travel content. So I created this Five Senses Travel Journal, which includes space to capture what you see, smell, hear, touch, and taste for every scene you see while traveling.

How to use your Five Senses Travel Journal

• Use the Scene box to capture the when and where of your experience, and capture the date in the date box provided.
• Then use the sense boxes to paint a word picture to describe your sensory experience.

Travel Writing to Show don’t Tell

This travel journal also includes an explanation of how to show instead of tell, and how to use each sense to capture your sensory experience to turn what you see, smell, touch, feel, and hear into compelling travel writing that connects with your readers.

As travel writers, we need to create content that is descriptive enough to transport our readers to a location or helping them imagine encountering the people you’ve met, to experience the scene you’re sharing with them. Make them feel like they’re a fly on the wall, and they’re part of the experience.

Using your Five Senses

Each of your five senses plays a unique role by receiving information from the environment and relaying it to our brain for interpretation. Sensory words are powerful tools for recreating an image in another person’s mind. That’s a big responsibility, but also a lot of fun. Your readers will visualize their specific scene based on their past observations and personal experiences.

The more senses you rely on, and the more specific your word choice, the better you can convey your experience and improve your travel writing. So I designed this travel journal page with enough space to capture the essential notes and trigger words to incorporate into your travel writing.

One of my most vivid memories from our recent backpacking trip to Cambodia, is the damp dog smell of our freshly laundered clothes. It’s a difficult smell to explain, but who hasn’t smelt that damp dog aroma at one point in their lives? By using my sense of smell to convey the experience, my readers are automatically transported back to a similar sensory experience in their own lives, and when then do that, I have them hooked because they’ve made a personal connection to my writing.

Over the coming weeks I’ll share my thoughts on how to use each of your senses to improve your travel writing:

• Improve your travel writing with your sense of sight
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of smell
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of hearing
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of taste
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of touch