Writing Meaningful Travel Stories

Whether you’ve traveled to Key West or the Far East, your travels matter. Your travel stories can matter to readers near and far, too. Lots of folks want to experience travel-free travel — to travel vicariously with someone who can communicate the experience in an ordered and interesting way. Would you like to give those readers that chance?

Traveler or tourist?

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton

Travel stories of depth are different from travel blogs, like ones that report What I Did on My Summer Vacation (on Monday we went to the museum, we saw stuffed dinosaurs, we ate hamburgers, etc.). They are different from guidebooks, too, that suggest what to see, where to stay, and what to be sure not to miss seeing or eating. While you may include a description of those details in your stories, the kind of travel writing I’m talking about reads more like a memoir or a novel. It’s your true-life story about your travel experience, whether visiting or living in another city, state, or country a while.

Travel writing aims to relay something uniquely meaningful to you, perhaps even life-changing. In turn, it offers readers a journey beyond their comfort zone. One such travel writer is Paul Theroux who says, “When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.”

Sources to get your travel story moving

For more than twenty years, my husband and I have travelled near and far. I’ve written journals, emails, and blog posts about experiences and taken tons of photographs of these journeys. If you’ve kept those sorts of documentation from your travel adventures, they are the #1 source material for your writing project. Start with them.

With a yellow highlighter and your journal, mark sentences that jump out at you; they may be pointing you towards what your specific theme(s) will be.

Drag out those boxes of postcards, brochures, and mementos from the back of the closet. Sort them by topic. Comb through your photos; hunt to find especially good ones to draw readers into your story. Or study those photos to bring back memories of sounds and colors.

Relive the smells and look of unique foods you tasted, your transportation challenges and how you solved them—or not—the fine and/or unusual people you met.  In other words, rev up your travel engine senses to get your story moving.

Keep nonfiction travel writing simple

Keep it simple. Convey just one aspect of your trip. For instance, relay serendipitous events that feature the kindness of strangers. I remember when a drugstore clerk in Shanghai, China, couldn’t understand that I desperately sought a bottle of Vitamin C — I had a terrible cold. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and even with my best game-of-charades gestures, I failed to communicate.

After a few moments of confusion, the clerk called to her adult daughter who was back in the stock room. She came to the counter and told me that because she worked in a hospital, she had learned some English. What luck for me! Her mother could have waved me away — an annoying American tourist — but instead, she took pity and helped a stranger, resulting in lots of smiles, gratitude, and a lasting memory. Times like that show the loveliness in humanity.

Pick a corner of the planet

William Zinsser in On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, points out:

“… Nobody can write a book or an article ‘about’ something. Even Tolstoy couldn’t write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write it. Therefore, think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well, and stop.”

Describe in full

In Jack Heffron’s The Writer’s Idea Book: How to develop great ideas for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and screenplays, he offers writing prompts galore, including this one about place:

“Write about the best place you’ve ever been. ‘Best’ can have a few meanings: most exciting, most fulfilling, most interesting. … Take time to describe it in detail … After you have a few pages of description, you can begin to explain and speculate upon why this place had such a profound impact on you.”

Dig into your heart and sift through your travel memories, selecting one to describe in full. Reflect on why you found that time or place meaningful to you. Universal appeal for readers usually turns up in specific, personal incidents that reveal your vulnerability.

Vulnerable traveler = humanizing story

A way to get personal is to imagine you are writing a dear friend about your travels. She is starving for a travel experience worth having. You know your friend loves you and that confidence can ease you into revealing more of the feelings and insights you had during and after your escapades.

Include as many details as you can to engage her. Use strong adjectives, i.e. “The cantankerous hotel manager.” Tell your friend the effect travel had on you. Be honest. Be thoughtful.

Gustave Flaubert shared this soul-enriching effect: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

Recommended reading

1. The Best American Travel Writing 2011. Sloane Crosley, Editor. Series editor: Jason Wilson (Other years besides 2011 are also available.)
2. The Mindful Traveler: A Guide to Journaling and Transformative Travel by Jim Currie
3. Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2015) by Paul Theroux was described by Kirkus Reviews in a starred review as “an epically compelling travel memoir.”
4. The Travel Writer’s Handbook: How to Write — and Sell —Your Own Travel Experiences by Louise Purwin Zobel and Jacqueline Harmon Butler