South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Meeting people: It can sometimes be difficult meeting people—depending on the place (holiday resorts where you don’t speak the language are especially tough) and on your own degree of comfort in approaching strangers. But once you do, it’s easy to talk to them because you’re so well-informed; you’ve read their hometown paper, you’ve watched the films of their great director, you’re curious about the Nobel prospects of their feminist novelist.

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South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Venturing beneath the surface: Having walked and sat you want something a little richer. You’ve observed the surface, and now you want to venture beneath it; you want to participate in the life of the place. You call your contacts. You search for a character or an incident or even a calamity that can become your subject. The worst trips, it is famously said, make the best stories, and, in a kind of proof of that, Vintage published in 1991 an excellent anthology of travel writing titled Bad Trips.

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South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Arrival and first impressions: Travel writers, when thought of at all, are seen as charmed figures, always moving, never stymied in front of an immigration officer (or computer screen). Travel writers, if we reflect at all, see ourselves as aimless, inconsequential, and nevertheless under-appreciated beings.

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South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Pre-trip preparation: As soon as you’ve decided where to go, you start your research. You read the guidebooks, just like a tourist. But you also read history books and novels set in the place. (If it’s a foreign country, read both those by English-language authors—you will not be at this long before you run into Graham Greene—and those in translation.) Travel books are, of course, also important, but stick with the older ones; anything written within the last few years will be too close for your own visit, and you don’t want another person’s impressions coloring your own.

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South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Where to go: Only amateurs think that writing begins when you sit down at the computer. The professionals remember Sir Joshua Reynolds who, on being asked how long it took him to do a painting, answered: “All my life.” Travel is a genre of writing that encompasses, not surprisingly, the world: flora and fauna, architecture, language, history, food, music, religion, politics, art. All of a writer’s experience goes into his or her writing; it’s just that travel writers, because of their chosen form, need to experience more than most.

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