On Travel Writing

The bike selfie–a specialist's art.

My mum was right. Every time she gave me a notebook before we went on a trip, every time she sighed when I wrote in that notebook for two days and shoved it into a suitcase, she was right. Because she wanted me to save the memories I was making.


If you've been reading my other posts on Floodmark, you'll know that I'm not a fan of the belief that you absolutely have to write every day. It's especially difficult to do when traveling because you're often too busy seeing and doing stuff to worry about your travel journal. But, like my mother did for me, I encourage you to make an effort. Make more of an effort than you do in your day-to-day life. Because you're seeing so much that you will thank yourself for preserving.


For me, that's really what travel writing is about–preserving memories for yourself and, if you choose, a wider audience.


So, here are my top tips for writing about your journeys:

1. Keep a travel diary. And/or take lots of pictures. Don't be that annoying person at the Louvre threatening to poke someone's eye out with a selfie stick in front of the Mona Lisa. But preserve the little details of your trip in some way. You're going to remember seeing the Mona Lisa. You might not remember Giuseppe Arcimboldo's paintings personifying the seasons. Whether you choose to preserve the details in writing, in pictures or in a combination of the two, preserve them. Don't worry about beautiful descriptions and similes and metaphors. Don't even worry about complete sentences. When I go through my journals from my study abroad trips to Amsterdam and Paris, I see that there are times when I wrote in bullet points because that's all the time I had.
2. If you only write for yourself, your travel diary and photo album might be all you need. But, if you're interested in sharing your travel experiences with a wider range of people (for instance, here on Floodmark), your travel diary and pictures will be invaluable. You'll have to craft a poem or narrative out of that raw material, but remember, it's all in the details. Since you're helping your reader experience a place they've (probably) never been to before, you need to tell them as much as you can about what that place is like. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors–as much imagery as you can. I spent an entire paragraph in my diary describing the process of eating pickled herring in The Hague. I haven't written any essays about pickled herring, but if I do, I'll have far more to rely on than a memory from a few years ago.

   
   

   I didn't remember how big a bite the herring actually was...

3. But maybe I won't write about pickled herring after all, because the most compelling travel writing deals with what you won't find in tourist guides. And pickled herring? It's all over every tourist guide and blog about the Netherlands that you'll find. Don't get me wrong. It's still possible for you to write a great piece about, say, the canals of Amsterdam, which have been written about for centuries. But I'd be much more interested in hearing the story of the cat you saw fall into a canal in the Red Light District instead of hearing about the sex shops (yes, I did see a cat fall into a canal, and I also saw half the street rush to rescue it) or the man you shared a car with on the way to Darjeeling.
4. In writing about the smaller details, you'll manage to convey why you are writing about what you're writing about. It's easy to get carried away by natural beauty, internationally famous landmarks and everything that's cool about the place you're seeing. But part of why we read about other people's travels is because we want to learn what they learned from their experiences. Don't forget that you are your readers' guide to the place that you're showing us. Show us what matters to you and tell us why.
5. And what matters to you doesn't have to be in Amsterdam, Paris, Darjeeling or New Orleans. If you've never traveled out of of your state, you can still apply the principles of travel writing to something about your own backyard. After all, in the age of Google, most people can live vicariously in whatever part of the world they choose. So, it's all the more important that you write about places that matter to you. If that place is your back porch, so be it.

Read more of Rukmini's lovely writing on Floodmark.