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.

This philosophy is behind the trend in adventure travel. Risk, its heated buildup and colorful consequences, is an irresistible subject. The problem with much of the writing that results is that it’s heavy on personal rather than worldly insight, portraying not the place but the author’s mettle. You could call these journeys “ego trips.”

But at least the adventurers have a quest, a reason to be in the place they have come to. You struggle with definition. (And not only you; the great travel writer Bruce Chatwin titled his last book What Am I Doing Here.) You are not one of the tourists, though you share their transport, their hotels, their intoxication with the new. You snap pictures and send postcards, but you are not on vacation. You shun tour groups—traipsing through neighborhoods, sitting in dives—and thereby make yourself even more out-of-place.

You are engaged in work that looks a lot like play but without play’s essential carefree quality. There is a story, you know, that has to result. And it weighs on you, this thought, along with the idea of your impertinent existence.

So you go to the places where you’ll find locals: a game, a bar, a church (even if you’re agnostic), and you stay for the coffee hour. (The Anglicans in Porto, Portugal, serve port wine, and in Bangkok, if you’re lucky, you’ll eat shrimp curry.)

It helps if you pursue a passion or a hobby: a love of bridge will find you partners around the globe who speak your language, and an interest in genealogy leads you into government buildings that are not surrounded by tour buses and forces you to ask questions. Being in need of assistance is a great boon to conversation.

In the evening, you head off to a concert you’ve read about in the paper or to an art exhibition in a neighborhood far from the center. (Neighborhoods are to you what museums are to tourists.) You’re interested in art—you’re interested in everything—but you’re especially interested in people. And not just anyone—those warm, quotable souls who will be your entry into the place.

--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: Arrival and First Impressions
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Where to Go
* Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Pre-Trip Preparation