Ten Things Travel Writers Do That Folk Who Are on Holiday Don’t Do

I’ve written before about how fundamentally unglamorous it is to be a freelance writer. There are also many ways in which writing about travel for a living is very different from going on holiday.

This is particularly the case if, like most people with dependents, you’re cramming as many stories as humanly possible into a single trip and if, like almost all publications, the ones you’re working for don’t pay expenses. Here’s ten things travel writers do that folk who are on holiday don’t do.

Eat Two Dinners

This is, usually, not because you fancy another dinner, but because you forgot to try that dubious-sounding local delicacy everyone keeps banging on about in a suspiciously copy-and-pasted fashion and you feel you really should. Also, your flight leaves at the crack of dawn, cos you’re not on expenses, and, yes, you’ve checked they’re not open at 7am.

Take Random Photos

Often, you’ll find people gathered behind you, wondering what on earth you could be shooting from that angle that’s so interesting. The answer? THINGS YOUR EDITOR WON’T FIND IN A PICTURE LIBRARY. Those hard-to-get (and fundamentally unattractive) happy snaps will vastly overshadow the stuff you’d really rather be photographing, and then, when you get delusions of grandeur and stick a bunch of crap up on a picture library, that random bus stop picture will be the only thing that sells.

Hound Strangers

Well, of course, we all talk to strangers. But only a travel writer on assignment would talk to a stranger not because they’re lonely, not because they like the look of the person, but because they seem likely to yield the kind of colour dialogue and lively character the story needs to lift it off the page. Otherwise – corner, beer, notebook, sorted, ta muchly.

Have Imaginary Picnics

When most people are on holiday and they get to a beautiful spot where they’d like to spend a day, or a night, or even a weekend, that’s – pretty much! – what they do. Not you, however. When you reach the sort of idyllic, blissful location that’s just begging you to kick off your shoes, hurl down your camera bag and chill out with a good book for the next few hours, you race round the highlights as fast as you can (or stick your nose in just far enough to check it’s not actually a chemical wasteland full of zombies disguised as a rural idyll), make a note saying, “BRING A PICNIC,” and piss off to the next spot, making plans to come back to this one when off-duty. With a picnic. Cos the imaginary one you had for those 30 seconds you actually stopped moving was absolutely great.

Pursue Public Transport Beyond the Point of Reason

Yes, even in cultures where a taxi would cost what you earn in five minutes, even when that takes up valuable earning time, you doggedly insist on navigating public transport. That could be because you’re writing for an audience that doesn’t do taxis, or because you want to find out whether the person you’re reading ever did the route they’re describing, or because it just seems pathetic to write “buses are a complete pain in the arse, take a taxi” without even trying it. Budget travel writers can get quite dangerously obsessed (see also: walking trails, cycle routes) with getting from A to B using public transport.

Route Plan Obsessively

You know those 24 hours in…. / 48 hours in…. / a walking tour of…. stories? The walking/cycling tour ones are particularly lethal. You can end up losing hours trying to shave a corner off some 50-word fact box that nobody’s going to read, which, even if you’re on a buck a word, which most of the time you’re not, a day spent researching a 50-word walking route works out at $5 an hour. That’s less than minimum wage in most countries. A lot less. That’s before – if Google Maps doesn’t cover your area accurately – you’ve spent an evening trying to explain how to draw the route map.

Reshape Their Narrative

Now, everyone stars in the stories inside their own heads – don’t you? DON’T YOU?! – but as a travel writer every day is a chance to reshape that story. You are never going to be the first person to visit A, or even the first person to go from A to B, or even the first person to go from A to B by X, unless X is, you know, a llama, and possibly not even then. You’re almost certainly not even the first person writing about A or B for Y publication.

That means each journey has to have its internal logic and theme: it has to be about something. So each time you miss a planned stop on your itinerary cos you’re running out of time, you reshape your narrative to fit, often completely changing what your story’s actually about. Swinging this sort of 360 past an editor is a bit like successfully achieving a silent-but-deadly fart, and usually managed with plenty of nuggets, telling details, and the kind of chunky research you should really have done before you got on the plane.

Eat Alone

I have always enjoyed this aspect of being a jobbing hack. You get to sit down, order exactly what you want, and spend the entire dinner scribbling in a notebook, looking important, and frowning. It’s great. And, no, a laptop isn’t the same.

Scribble All Over Maps

During the annual tax return paper frenzy, you will find maps. Many maps. Most of them with weird circles, crosses and hieroglyphics like pirates’ treasure maps. These function more as a form of kinetic learning – by the time you’ve marked everything on a map and worked out the most efficient route to get round them, it’s firmly embedded in your brain — than as something to guide any subsequent writeup, which is probably most fortunate.

Observe. All the Time.

This is surprisingly exhausting. Hunting for the telling detail, trying to describe tastes, looking and looking to capture pictures, trying to grab the essence of an architectural style, and scribbling notes in conditions from boats to dimly lit bars, while drunk. Some of the time, to be brutally frank, you’d much rather be by the pool with a good book.

Image: Cooking with edible insects, crickets in this instance by Health Gauge on Flickr’s Creative Commons.