Travel writing: What’s the point?

by Ann Sihler

You just came back from your first trip to the Grand Canyon, Venice, or Outer Mongolia and are bursting to write about it. So many details flood your mind—about the people, sights, food, culture, logistics, traveling companions … Where to start?

If you’re writing a journal entry or a short piece to share just with family and friends, it probably doesn’t matter where you start. But for anything more than that, you should begin by asking, “Why am I writing? What do I want to say?”

Most readers already know a lot about foreign places and people, and if for some reason they don’t, information is readily at hand. That puts pressure on travel writers to say something truly new, beyond that the Grand Canyon was big, the desert hot, and Las Vegas full of casinos. Fortunately, each of us has our own perspectives, values, and interests; combining those with our travel experiences can yield a piece of writing that is truly unique and surprising—and that says something important to readers.

In my long travel essay on Costa Rica, for example, I wrote not just about the amazing plants and animals we saw there, but also about the potentially harmful impact of “ecotourism" on those same plants and animals (how ironic!), and how what people do here in Oregon affects Costa Rica. Fellow Kickstart student Mark Robben wrote a humorous, self-deprecating travel piece on the challenges of finding lodging in Warsaw, Poland, but underscored his point with references to the Holocaust. On a more mundane level, a poem I wrote about Yellowstone National Park conveyed the excitement and wonder of travel, even amid mishaps. Each of those pieces had a particular point it was trying to convey, beyond the travel details.

So what do YOU bring to your travel topic? And what’s your point? Your answers to those questions will help you develop a storyline for your piece, determine what material to include (and what to leave out!), and pick compelling sensory details that enhance your message. If you don’t bother to figure why you’re writing, your piece could come across like, well, someone else’s vacation photos. Yes, there’s some beautiful scenery, but there are also too many shots of the boring hotel, the mountain of luggage, and your friend/sister/partner asleep on the train with baguette crumbs falling out of her mouth. If those images don’t enhance your point, they’ve got to go. But first you have to figure out what your point actually is.

Specific suggestions for travel writing:

* Prepare. Research your destination beforehand. You’ll be more confident while you’re traveling and writing, you’ll know what to look for or ask about, and you’ll recognize the truly unusual when you run across it.

* Take notes. You don’t have to write lengthy journal entries, but jotting down a few notes about the most striking part of each day will pay off when you’re back home trying to remember details. If taking notes seems onerous, do it together with your traveling companion and make it a fun, shared part of your travel day. Photos also can jog your memory later on.

* Be an expert. Everyone is an expert in something. Use your expert’s eye while traveling to unearth unusual and interesting information. How do people keep bees in Berlin? Weave in Bolivia? Provide health care in Haiti? If you zero in on your expert subject matter while you’re traveling, you’ll see things no one else does and be able to write a truly unique travel piece, authoritatively.

* Reflect. Once you’re home, reflect on what you experienced. What stands out for you? What thoughts or images keep coming back to you? Those are clues about what’s important to you, and what might make a good angle for your writing.

* Include sensory details. People read travel writing partly because they want to know what it feels like to be there, and nothing puts a reader in a scene like sensory details. Pick details that help communicate your bigger message.

* Travel at home. If work, money, or family responsibilities keep you from traveling far, try visiting an unfamiliar corner of your hometown and writing about your experiences. That's what Charles Dickens did: He “traveled” to London’s slums, prisons, and asylums and, through his fiction, reported back to middleclass readers on what he found. What part of your own city or neighborhood is foreign to you? Go and visit it, with a traveler’s eyes.

Bon voyage, and happy scribbling!

Nerdy Words:

Indicating foreign terms

by Ann Sihler

Decades ago a friend’s husband asked me to edit the first draft of his novel. Set in Japan, the novel was populated with yakuza, Japanese gangsters, who alternated between fighting each other and chasing foreigners who were visiting Buddhist temples of the ancient city of Kyoto, searching for satori, enlightenment. Of course the novel had many more Japanese terms, from konnichiwa, good afternoon, to unagi, barbecued river eel.

Both the author and I were stumped about how best to indicate and define all these foreign words. Put them in quotation marks? Enclose a definition in parentheses? Use the English term first and then the Japanese word? Our hard-copy style manuals were no help. Neither was the Internet, which at that point was still a vague rumor about computers connected for mysterious purposes. (Who would want that?) So the author and I fumbled along as best we could.

Since then I’ve learned a simple method for indicating Fremdwoerter, foreign words, in type. (For those of you who aren’t polyglots, we’ve just switched from Japanese to German.) Write the foreign word in italics and then follow it with a comma and the English equivalent, as I did at the beginning of this paragraph and throughout the first paragraph of this article.

Of course this technique may not work well for foreign terms that don’t have a short English equivalent, like Schadenfreude, which means pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortunate. But for everything else, the results are Spitze, great!