Last
week was filled with a cousins’ reunion and a nephew’s wedding. I will write
about them in the next week or two, but for now I am reprinting a post I wrote
for the Indiana Writers' Consortium blog on June 3, 2015.
No
Travel Logs, Please
In March, I attended IWC’s Paper Fields
workshop and took two sessions on travel writing from Kenneth Tressler. One of
the points he made was that travel magazines don’t want travel logs.
Consider these two opening paragraphs.
Our trip to
Utah began on September 2, 2014 with a flight into McCarran International
Airport at Las Vegas, Nevada.
or
As I stood
in the middle of the Sevier Desert, I drowned in the bleakness and isolation of
the parched terrain. How could 8,000 Japanese Americans live crammed together
in this one square mile of desolate landscape without losing their sanity? Yet,
somehow, they did just that.
Both openings are true, but I’d rather
read—and write—the second one. Good travel writing is creative non-fiction and
should tell a story. Yes, give pertinent information about the trip, including
your favorite places to eat and stay along the route. But don’t bore your audience.
Write the story you would want to read if it were written by someone else.
Good travel writing also proves the cliché
that a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider this picture, which I took
through the windshield while driving along U.S. 89 in Utah. (No, I wasn’t behind
the wheel.)
I could have said that the blue sky accentuated the red rock formations striated with tans and browns. Or I could have used many more words in an attempt to describe the landscape. But the picture says it better than I ever could.
Travel magazines want photos to go along
with the story. So if you want to sell an article about your trip, take along a
good camera. For use on the Internet, a cell phone might do. But if you want to
submit a feature article to a print magazine, you need a camera with high
resolution and interchangeable lenses.
As you vacation this summer, go ahead and
take the logbook along. It’s good for notes that aid your memory.
But it makes a terrible travel article.
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