by
Kathryn Page Camp
In March, I attended
IWC’s Paper Fields workshop and took two sessions on travel writing from
Kenneth Tressler. One of the points he made was that travel magazines don’t
want travel logs.
Consider these two
opening paragraphs.
Our trip
to Utah began on September 2, 2014 with a flight into McCarran International
Airport at Las Vegas, Nevada.
or
As I
stood in the middle of the Sevier Desert, I drowned in the bleakness and
isolation of the parched terrain. How could 8,000 Japanese Americans live
crammed together in this one square mile of desolate landscape without losing
their sanity? Yet, somehow, they did just that.
Both openings are true,
but I’d rather read—and write—the second one. Good travel writing is creative
non-fiction and should tell a story. Yes, give pertinent information about the
trip, including your favorite places to eat and stay along the route. But don’t
bore your audience. Write the story you would want to read if it were written
by someone else.
Good travel writing also
proves the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider this
picture, which I took through the windshield while driving along U.S. 89 in Utah.
(No, I wasn’t behind the wheel.)
I could have said that
the blue sky accentuated the red rock formations striated with tans and browns.
Or I could have used many more words in an attempt to describe the landscape.
But the picture says it better than I ever could.
Travel magazines want
photos to go along with the story. So if you want to sell an article about your
trip, take along a good camera. For use on the Internet, a cell phone might do.
But if you want to submit a feature article to a print magazine, you need a
camera with high resolution and interchangeable lenses.
As you vacation this
summer, go ahead and take the logbook along. It’s good for notes that aid your
memory.
But it makes a terrible
travel article.
__________
Kathryn Page Camp is a
licensed attorney and full-time writer. Her most recent book, Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words
Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), is a Kirkus’
Indie Books of the Month Selection. Kathryn is also the author of In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First
Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion (FaithWalk Publishing 2006)
and numerous articles. You can learn more about Kathryn at
www.kathrynpagecamp.com.
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