Travel writing advices

The ideal travel book should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in searching of something. Christopher Isherwood

Personality comes through in a travel book. We can’t say: This is how it is. We can only say: This is what happened to me. This is what I felt. This is what I thought. I may be wrong.  Colin Thubron

In writing non fiction travel, as much as in writing fiction, one has to construct a persona, which is a variation on the truth but never the full embodiment of the truth. In order to make a story work, you have to construct a facsimile of yourself. Pico Iyer

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau

Every act of writing is also an act of choice. each word is a decision, each comma or sentence a different direction. It’s easy to get frozen up by this. the trick is to ignore the fear and let the words pour out. never mind if they don’t make sense, if you haven’t a map to plot the journey from empty page to finished story. Jonathan Lorie

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a
drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all
detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Strunk

At the heart of the finest travel book is the writer’s passion. In practical terms that means one’s starting point must be a feeling, a memory, a quest or an obsession. Such a personal beginning will not only excite the writer, engaging him or her with the chosen place, it will also excite the reader. Rory Maclean