Are you ready to become a Travel Writer? There is a rustic tale of an innocent villager who was told to get ready to go to the city the next morning. Come next morning, and every one was searching for him, but to no avail. By evening the poor chap was back, exhausted from walking back all the way from the city. When confronted as to why he went alone, he replied that he did not know the way and wanted to find it before actually going to the city! We know this is no way to find information we do not have. But there is a valuable message in the story; never venture into unknown expeditions without proper preparations.
The first requirement for becoming a Travel Writer is that one should have a keen pair of inquisitive eyes, always on the look out for things that offer a unique perspective. How do people at the new place live? What are their eating and dressing habits? How is the climate at the place? Is it generally uniform as happens to be at many of the World’s Resort Stations? How are the lodging facilities? Are these expensive, or “Value for money”? Are there any special Tourist Seasons for this destination?
Begin by keeping a diary of all the observations. Don’t be in any hurry to write your article in jiffy. First, collect more information about the place than you might care to put in a Report.Thereafter, arrange the points in some logically meaningful sequence.After your first draft is ready, sleep over it for a day and then attempt to cut into half the present length. Do not exceed couple of pages in an article, unless it is an entire Report for the whole expedition. Interest is best sustained with articles of three hundred words or another fifty. Longer pieces tend to bore the readers.
A beginner in the field of writing is faced with the question: why am I writing? To be simple, it is because I need to say something. Grannies used to tell the kids in the olden days: ‘don’t open your mouth unless you are really hungry or you have something urgent to tell.’ The threat that if you open your mouth unnecessarily, insects will get into it, was sufficient enough to stop blabbering kids from disturbing the peace of the house. But how do we stop the grown up persons who ramble on about nothing? Get them to do a small errand: visit a corner of their own village and give a two hundred words description. Demand that factual data should not be missing, any colourful aspect of the place should not be left out and no meaningless words to find a place in the report.
You will open a new way of life for that person, by giving a purpose for his /her communication. But you will be the first to benefit. A person you thought of as an incompetent communicator will be showing you that given a purpose, all of us are good communicators. In other words, no one is useless in the world, and no place in the world is uninteresting. It is the communication that can become faulty or boring. Becoming a travel writer can be real fun. You can also make some money while you are on it.
Writing is of many types and there are numerous genres of writing. Each writing genre has a certain trait that defines its nature. Travel writing is a form of writing that devotes itself to describing different places. The place can be real or imaginary and is of interest to public. So the travel writer explains the exciting and interesting places vividly. These places can be of historic interest to people or have a religious connotation.
Travel writer is usually a person with a deep interest in tourism. The works of freelance writers result in travel guide books and travel manuals. The work can also be included on websites associated with tourism. The main purpose of freelance travel writing is to bring awareness to the masses about significant travel places. The travel writer also describes the means of transportation and ways through which people can access those places.
Travel writing is fast becoming one of the most popular fields of modern research writing, both for short work (articles, etc.) and for novelists. Since travel is a subject that fascinates most readers, the writer endeavoring to enter the travel writing market, needs to be aware of their market audience.
The travel reader is usually an intelligent person who either plans to travel extensively or may already have done so, or they are not in a position to travel and so use their reading as a substitute. Either way, knowing your material is essential to sell well in any travel writing market. Many guidebooks, travel web pages and other sources who utilize travel writing, require their writers to actually have visited and have first-hand knowledge of the area about which they write, in addition to having done extensive research.
While travel writing is essentially factual, it can be stretched and pampered a little with the use of colorful descriptive wording and allusions to activities that might be undertaken in the destination. This allows a writer room to stretch their vocabulary as long as they keep it within the limitations of fact obtained from an honest perspective. It’s no different to the academic approaches to critical essays at online universities or on-campus colleges – you’re writing for an audience that want to gain knowledge, but don’t necessarily want it delivered to them in a haughty, over-factual manner. Thus, it behooves the travel writer with less experience to refrain from using excessive first person statements and stick closer to their research.
