Wandersluts: The Kaladkarin Chronicles

Pico Iyer's Tips for Travel Writers

I was introduced to Pico Iyer's work by my good friend Karlo Samson. On our way to Sagada some years ago, he let me peek into his copy of Video Night in Kathmandu. That book (and Karlo, for that matter) introduced me to the genre and world of organized travel writing. My journeys have become more meaningful and purposeful since. The following is an excerpt from the Lonely Planet book Travel Writing by Don George:

What tips would you give to budding travel writers?

Do it for the love of it, and always begin by asking yourself what you have to bring to the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon or Venice that no one has brought before. What is particular about your experience and background and interests that will allow you to see and describe things that most of the rest of us could never see?

Maybe you're a jeweler, and so can read meanings into the lapis and coral of the inlay work at the Taj that few of the rest of us could discern; maybe you're of Islamic descent and so can see how the gardens outside the Taj produce the outline of the Islamic paradise; maybe you're an architect, and so can explain to the rest of us how science and craft can produce wonder. But you have to begin with something more arresting than just the place and the emotions it arouses in you.

And having chosen a focus--as specific as possible--and decided what will be your angle and your structure, having asked questions of both the place and yourself, and having taken down all the details you could want and more, then you have to work out how to shape the piece and how to find a voice that will make it compelling and fresh to the reader who has no interest in you and never wants to see another piece about the Taj Mahal. Tell your experience and observations as if you were trying to convey them to a friend with whom you long to share your passion; but do so as if you had to win that friend over every time, with your enthusiasm, your clarity, and your specifity.

And write it all up even if there's going to be no guaranteed publication, and no reader other than your mother, your partner, or your best friend, at the end of it. You won't regret it.

posted by outsidebound @ 5:19 PM