Every culinary dish needs seasoning. No one wants to eat bland food unless they’re on a crash diet. It’s the same with travel stories: to write a successful travel story, you need to spice it up. It’s not enough to return from Morocco and describe in chronological order the activities you did and the places you went through. A successful travel article needs more. Much more.
Use the five ingredients below to spice up your travel articles. With practice, patience, a lot of passion, and a constant curiosity about your travels, you have every chance of getting “cookery” out of your mind that will delight your readers and earn you a good income.
1 Replaying the atmosphere using your senses
You should reproduce the atmosphere of the place you are in as accurately as possible. This is the subliminal key that sets travel articles apart. How you manage to capture and convey the atmosphere, so the reader feels that they are in the middle is essential. It’s not an easy thing to do, and it’s not for everyone.
Suppose you’re on the streets of Jaipur in the midst of the familiar Indian chaos. And you see a cow. You write: “Among the cars, I saw a cow”? The reader will imagine a cow walking in the middle of Jaipur’s street. Interesting, but more is needed.
“A cow, originally white but so dirty it had turned grey, slowly rose from under a tree and started at a crawl down the middle of the road, virtually stopping the chaotic traffic. The chorus of Indian drivers’ horns suddenly became louder. Unperturbed, the cow made a holy delivery, and the atmosphere became downright incendiary.” It feels different, doesn’t it? Suddenly, the reader “sees” the cow better, even “hears” the street chatter, and even “smells” the smell of dung. In his mind, the scene comes alive.
A seemingly banal scene, which is probably repeated endlessly on the streets of Indian cities, becomes unusual, even amusing, for the reader who has never been to Jaipur but who now has the opportunity to ‘experience’ the atmosphere of the city with his mind’s eye, thanks to the above description. Use all your senses to portray the place’s atmosphere accurately – it is essential.
2 Perfect documentation
Documentation automatically implies accuracy, just of a different kind. A ‘mathematical’ one. Or ‘scientific’. You’re not excused if you fail at documentation. Let’s say you’re writing about Qatar and providing some information about the tiny Arab state.
Qatar’s capital is Doha, and the country has a population of 2.9 million, of which only 30% are Qatari citizens. Wrong! Of the 2.9 million, only 12% have Qatari citizenship. Imagine sending the article with this error to a travel publication. Due to the editor’s carelessness, the error is not corrected, the text is published, and then the readers of that publication send indignant emails pointing out the mistake. You will be put in an awkward position, and what’s more – you will put the magazine in an uncomfortable place for its readers. The future of your collaboration with that publication does not sound good, and your credibility as a travel writer diminishes.
Sure, we can all be wrong – after all, it’s not the end of the world. But pay close attention to the details of your documentation because they are essential in the article’s context. As a travel writer, you need to inform, not misinform and spout things that, these days, can quickly spread on social media as little fake news that annoys those in the know.
3 Drop the clichés
Often, writers and journalists tend to use clichés. These phrases or even whole schemes have become templates over time, being found in various articles or heard too many times from multiple people’s mouths and grounded as such. Sometimes, out of a lack of inspiration or a desire to get through specific passages more quickly, clichés appear—dull words and expressions. Beautiful mountains. Interesting rituals. Delicious dishes. Beautiful landscapes.
When you reread the final text, spot these patterns and change the wording. These expressions don’t really express anything; they trivialize the content. Replace them with sensations, feelings, and visions – in a word, bring the story to life, don’t let it die in the barrel of banalities!
4 Story characters and dialogues
Any travel story would do well to include one or more characters. We don’t travel in the desert, and even if we do, we’ll still meet people along our way. People give color to journeys. Their stories, their personalities, the way they interact, their daily lives, their habits and customs, and their successes and achievements are all essential ingredients of any travel story. That’s why the way you introduce the characters into the story is so important.
Readers always vibrate so much better through a well-described, well-shot, well-rounded character. Make characters out of the people you travel with or meet. Anyone can step into this role, whether it’s just for five minutes or whether they’re playing the lead in the story from start to finish. A guide, a museum director, a tribal chieftain, a long-forgotten musician, a village tavern owner, a former sailor – there are so many people who can become ad hoc characters in your story that you don’t even have to go to great lengths to seek them out.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to write about every person you interact with. Get curious and find the story behind the person to tell after you’ve outlined your character. You don’t need a lot of detail to do it. Do you know those drawings made of a few strokes but with a strong visual impact? That’s how you have to do it, in words.
One thing that will help you a lot in making your text engaging is incorporating character dialogue into your story. Make a note in the notebook you carry with you at all times of snippets of conversation with the characters you meet, and later reproduce them in the text, keeping their charm embedded in tone and expression.
An exclamation, a question, a bizarre reaction, a shout, an expression of pain or delight – any feeling of the interviewee that you somehow capture when you are talking to them and which you later reproduce in the text, helps to define better and color your story. Pulling out your notebook and writing it down is sometimes awkward while having a casual, somewhat informal conversation. But remember (you can easily do it at the moment), and as soon as you’re no longer near the person, or catch a moment of silence, take out your notebook and write it down. It will come in handy later.
5 Details and interesting aspects
We all know the expression, “the devil is in the details”. Coming out of the hell zone, the phrase is perfectly true and points to one clear thing: we need to pay attention to every detail. More often than not, the details make the difference.
A travel story can only be good if it abounds in tasty details. Look for the details in everything, identify their presence and describe them in great detail to set off the wells of imagination in readers’ minds. You’ll never be able to capture every detail of a place. But once you’ve identified the most interesting ones and planted them in the fine soil of literary and journalistic talent, they will flourish your story and make it shine.
See what details would ennoble the text, and to do that, engage (and enhance) all your senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch and… possibly invent new senses to help you. Although it’s a feature and not a sense, I like to lump another term into this category, indispensable to any travel writer: curiosity.
Conclusion
These are the five basic ingredients to spice up your travel stories. Use them in any text you write, and your success will be half-guaranteed. The rest is down to talent and passion, other ingredients you certainly have since you’ve chosen the travel writing profession.
Pin it!
You may also like: The six essential questions every travel writer must ask. Plus, an important one