Travel Writing Tips

Being an prolific and effective travel writer can be overwhelming, so I’ve put together this series of A-Z Travel Writing Tips.

Each article provides a concise list of prompts from A to Z, which provides your travel writing the TLC it needs. We cycle through all letters in the alphabet in turn, and provide links to additional resources and examples of how to implements each tip.

See the grid at the bottom of this post to view other letters in the series.

In this edition of our A-Z travel writing tips we’re looking at Journaling, Journalism, and XX.

is for Journaling

A travel journal is a record of your trip, sometimes in diary form, written during the course of your journey. So what should you capture in your travel journal? It’s entirely up to you! A journal is a personal document and there’s no hard and fast rules about what you should include. Here’s some ideas and inspiration.

Use your travel journal to:

1. Capture the experiences and encounters that gave you cause to question you perspectives.
2. Capture events that gave you with a different understanding of your surroundings.
3. Capture interactions and events that triggered an emotional reaction.
4. Document your reactions to new discoveries about yourself or your surroundings.
5. Write about your expectations before you reach a destination, and then do a compare and contrast when you actually get there.
6. Capture interactions or quotes from people that you don’t want to rely on your memory to recall.

You can use your journal to capture your thoughts and ideas during the planning stages of your trip, and continue the journal throughout your trip, and wrap it up with a reflective look back about how the trip changed you and your perceptions.

I’ve written two traditional travel journals during my lifetime.

1990 – Delivering Cars across the States with my best friend and two cats

I used a lined journal and wrote a daily account of our adventures, which was very much like a personal diary that just happened to capture our trip. As I was writing it, I left spaces for photographs to be pasted in. As well as documenting the destinations we visited, I included our reactions to the cultural experiences we had along the way, and how the cats were behaving during the trip.

1996 – 6 month solo backpacking trip through South East Asia

I used a page-a-day diary where I captured where I traveled, and details about accommodation and transport arrangements and costs. I pasted in receipts and the focus was very much about capturing the facts and figures as opposed to my impressions of the destinations. This trip was during the pre-cell phone era, and I commented with my Mum back in the UK via fax, and wrote her long letters that I faxed. So between the travel journal and the faxes, my trip was robustly documented.

Since these journals I’ve failed to keep a consistent travel journal. My travel style is now about taking extended trips (we had 12 weeks in Cambodia and 10 weeks in France doing Workaway), and I wish I’d kept a journal during those times. But I just don’t have the time or patience to capture all that detail on a daily basis. But what I have started doing is to leverage a Fast Drafting method, to capture key sensory elements, so that when it comes time to write my blog posts or books, I have a gold-mine of descriptions and memories to use.

Here’s more posts about fast drafting:

• Podcast Episode: Introduction to the art of Fast Drafting for Travel Writers
• Podcast Episode: What to Fast Draft

If you’re continually failing and maintaining a travel journal, but know it’d help you with your post-trip content creation – read this article: Why Travel Bloggers Fail at Journaling, and how Fast Drafting can help

Journaling supplies – paper and pen

I may not keep a detailed travel journal, but there’s something about a pen and paper that adds to the sensory experience or writing. So although I always take my phone and laptop with me with I travel, I always take a travel notebook with me. There are times when only a hand-written record of an experience or encounter will do, and for that I need a nice little book and pen.

is for Journalism

Travel blogger. Travel writer. Travel journalist. What’s in a  name? Are they just different sides of the same coin?

Travel bloggers and travel writers generally write about places (e.g. which ranges from a restaurant, an historical site, a village, town, city, or country etc.). This content lets a reader imagine that place via another person’s perspective. These writers share what to see, what to do, how to get there, what it costs etc., and share all the information a reader needs to determine whether they want to visit the place for themselves. This content is intended to encourage travel and tourism.

Travel journalists generally tells a story that involves people, which is unique to a specific destination, and is intended to increase reader’s awareness of the culture. Journalism should strive to be un-biased writing, based on facts. The cornerstone of journalism includes answering the: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the topic. The content should encourage a deeper understanding and appreciation of the world around us.

Whereas anyone can become a travel blogger or travel writer, it’s going to take more work and effort to become a travel journalist, and if you don’t want to complete a four-years journalism degree you may need to take a journalism course to understand how to effectively craft a story that will be accepted by the main-stream media outlets.

I’ve read a lot of travel blogs that seem to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. Their content only focuses on the positive aspects of a destination, and brushes the unsavory elements under the carpet.

When I first started blogging this is the approach I took. I followed the advise my mother instilled in me as a kid – if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all. So when I wrote about destinations I’d focus on the good, and ignore the bad.

My blog posts became a positive review of my travel adventures, but over time I realized that my Roving Jay personal travel blog was becoming one of the ones I didn’t like reading, because it didn’t provide an honest and realistic view of a destination. So now my travel blog includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. I present my first hand experience, and leave it up to the reader to make up their own mind.

Does this make me a travel journalist? No! It makes me a travel blogger with an appreciation for content that centres around journalistic integrity, but because I’m a blogger I get to include my own personal bias and perspective within my articles and books.

Discover an alphabet’s worth of Travel Writing Tips

Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast
Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast	Read the Article Listen to the Podcast
K	L	M	N	O
P	Q	R	S	T
U	W	X	X	Y
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