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.

If you travel with a spouse, especially a wife, you may find it easier to strike up a conversation. While women traveling alone are sometimes vulnerable, men traveling alone are often suspect. People feel less threatened by a couple.

But most travel writers go it alone. So much of what you do as a travel writer is unexplainable wandering and inexplicable dawdling. Because, after years of doing it, you get a sense—or think you do—that perhaps, if you head down this street instead of that one or hang out on this square for awhile (there’s something indefinable in the air), you’re going to find gold. And most sane companions will have had enough of this by the end of the first day.

You have so little time in each place you visit that, even if you split up during the day and get together only for dinner, that meal is valuable minutes lost. You are in your own little bubble, talking about home. You are not noticing the rows of river bass hanging on the far wall, the couple at the next table gossiping about the mayor, the way the waiter wears his apron.

A companion provides you with a comfort level that is inappropriate to your task. It is not that you have to suffer to write well, but the loneliness—a true travel writer spends a great deal of time watching other people have fun—will push you, eventually, into action.

Through the inhabitants of a place, you learn and, often, connect. A wonderful trip is when you meet good people, discover new things, and participate in everyday life. You get invited into someone’s home, for instance, the travel writer’s Holy Grail. And there are those amazing times, not frequent but occasional enough to keep you coming back, when you get on such a roll that the people become friends, the information becomes insight, the participation becomes engagement. You find yourself emotionally attached to the place. The best trips, you suddenly suspect, make the best stories, and you almost can’t wait to get home to your computer to prove it.

--Thomas Swick is the author of A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler and Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland. Earlier this year, he was a guest blogger on World Hum, and he has been featured in a World Hum interview.

Previously:
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Venturing Beneath the Surface
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Arrival and First Impressions
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Where to Go
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Pre-Trip Preparation