Travel Writing While You Live Abroad
This may be a fantasy you play with in your mind: You’ll travel to exotic parts of the world (at least exotic to you) and write entertaining articles or stories about your adventures. You’ll make good money selling articles to National Geographic or The New York Times, or you’ll save your stories and publish a book.
Well, it’s nice to have dreams but not everyone will be able to achieve that kind of success. How do you get started with learning to travel write? Here are a few tips to get you thinking and moving in the right direction:
Read, read, read. If you want to be a successful travel writer, read what others have written. Read magazine and newspaper articles on faraway travel destinations—even if you know you will never go to Tunisia—and start to look for things like the writing style (formal, informal, humorous), scope (what topics are covered), and length (how many words). Also, book compilations on travel are great for enjoyment and research. My favorites are the Travelers’ Tales Guides.
Start small. Travel writing on the Internet is huge. There are many sites that are looking for travel articles on all kinds of subjects: forgotten places, the best places to travel with children, tips for train travel, the best public toilets in Paris, etc. If you have an interesting angle on something, or even if you are writing about something that has likely been covered before, you’re bound to find a place for it on a travel Web site. The downside is that most don’t pay, or pay very little. The upside is that since these sites need a lot of material, the chances of your submission being rejected is much lower and you can get experience writing and submitting articles fairly quickly, with some regularity. Here’s an article with a list of travel e-magazines that are actively looking for articles: 50 Travel Magazines That Want to Publish your Writing.
Join a travel writing forum. Being around other people (even virtually) who are in the same boat as you—interested in writing but starting out and don’t really know where to begin—can help you to ask questions and share your thoughts about effective writing, and reaching a target audience. Often, others have great tips or share their own success stories, giving you ideas of where and how you can submit writing. Travel Writers has a forum with hundreds of topics covered from how to get a comp trip, to grammar and punctuation questions.
Writing rarely comes easily. Luckily you don’t have to rely on talent alone and instead can learn the skills necessary to be a successful travel writer.
