IWSG Writing Prompt: Have you ever written a piece that became a form, or even a genre, you hadn’t planned on writing in? Or do you choose a form/genre in advance?

I traveled to Cambodia for three month doing a mix of travel and volunteering at a bakery. (You can read about it on my personal travel blog Roving Jay).

Before I go on a trip I always do a lot of research, so I was able to incorporate some of this content into my first draft, and get my book off to a flying start. It’s always good to overcome those first few blank pages, and I felt good with the direction my book was taking.

I’d decided that I wanted to write a traditional destination travel guide. The plan was to only include destinations we’ve visited, and to include how we got from A to B. When it comes to travel guides, it’s important to narrow your theme and angle to define to content niche before you get too far into your first draft. There are plenty of generic guide books on the market that cover Cambodia, but none are aimed at backpacking baby boomers, so I decided to narrow the target audience to travelers just like me—who want a mature backpacking experience, but also want a few creature comforts.

I took notes copious notes during our trip and thousands of photographs, and worked on my travel guide for a few months before realizing that I found it a bit dry and lacking depth.

Cambodia was my first backpacking trip in over 20 years, and the first extended trip I’d taken with my husband since abandoning our corporate careers and becoming digital nomads. So I started peppering my travel guide with travel anecdotes about being mature backpackers, and also a married couple going on our first backpacking adventure.

By their very nature anecdotes are short, and are usually capped off at the two paragraph mark, but some of my travel recollections were becoming detailed dives into our experiences and reactions to them, and couldn’t really be called anecdotes any more.

For a brief period I contemplated creating two separate books: a Cambodia travel guide, and a Cambodia travel memoir. But instead I settled on creating a hybrid travel guide and travel memoir. By this times I’d created all of my travel guide content, and now I’m working on the anecdote and memoir sections, and working out how to combine these two different genres seamlessly together.

For all of my other nonfiction books I chose my genre, theme, and angle before I started writing, and I usually fine-tune adjustments to the theme and angle as I write so the direction becomes clearer, but this Cambodia travel guide is the only book where I’ve changed the book’s genre, and because it wasn’t a complete about-turn I think the decision is sound.

UPDATE: It’s November 1st and I’m using this month to participate in a 30 day writing sprint to write the Cambodia Memoir sections of my Cambodia Travel Guide.

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