How (and why) to travel like a travel writer
Sound advice from our friend Wayne Curtis.
Wayne has written about travel frequently for The Atlantic and the New York Times, and has been a columnist with Garden & Gun, American Scholar, and Imbibe. A former Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year (Society of American Travel Writers), he’s also the author of two nonfiction books focusing on history: And a Bottle of Rum and The Last Great Walk.
I’ve been a travel writer on and off for most of my professional life. The gig is pretty straightforward: it mostly involves traveling somewhere then mining stories from landscapes, landmarks, and the varied private geographies of those who live there. Places, it tuns out, always have tales to tell. The problem is, they’re often told in a language that’s indecipherable to those just passing through. The travel writer’s job is to learn that language of place, then translate it for travelers who follow.
I sold my first travel stories in the early 1980s. Along the way I’ve learned that the process of researching a travel story can be deeply satisfying — sometimes more than the travel itself, as travel invariably involves as many blemishes as beauty. Even when I don’t have an assignment, I still travel like a travel writer. That is, I do a lot of research and I get very, very nosy. Walking into a museum and reading wall texts is all very fine and well, but I always get itchy to go deeper, sometimes by contacting the exhibit curator to start a discussion. After nearly forty years of travel writing, I approach nearly every trip as if I’m on assignment.
Of course, if everybody called up curators whenever they visited a museum, curators would have the highest suicide rate in the world. And you often need an assignment to get through the public relations gatekeepers to secure an interview. (But not always. You’d be surprised.)
Travel writers are a bit like archeologists — always looking beneath the surface, and then trying to assemble stories out of the curious artifacts they uncover.
Here are some guidelines for traveling like a professional snoop:
Do your research. Dig down before you depart. Find out who can direct you to the unspoken sights when you arrive. This might not be a professional guide but a local enthusiast. Scan local newspapers, newsletters and websites to see who the colorful, outspoken gadflies are. Added bonus: the local press will give you conversation points when talking with local residents.
Avoid the bucket list. Two things are guaranteed if you start ticking off the 1000 places you need to see before you die, etcetera. First, you will never be alone. These places will likely be mobbed. And second, few travel editors are likely to buy unsolicited stories about such places. Editors want the undiscovered and unexplored, not the familiar and over-Instagrammed.
One example: This summer I drove Acadia National Park’s famed Park Loop Road, whereupon I found about a mile’s worth of cars parked along the road near Thunder Hole, one of the park’s bucket list attractions. Thunder Hole can be remarkable when there’s a heavy surf or storm. Yet on this day the ocean was as calm as a millpond. Hundreds of people, two and three deep along the railings, leaned over to stare at motionless seas lapping quietly at a fissure in a rock.
I pushed on and explored the rest of the park, with its forest and streams and stone bridges, which is extraordinary, if in a less brash way. It was also empty of gawkers. Stories are rarely found in a parking lot. Go beyond.
Let history be your guide. Parachuting into a new place can be daunting. Arriving with historic context can provide a helpful anchor. I love reading old newspapers from places I’m headed, which give me a sense of what’s been important in the past and see what carries over to the present. Genealogy websites have archives containing millions of pages of old papers and are a trove of forgotten local knowledge and intriguing stories.
As are other not-of-the-moment resources. I once traveled Florida’s Gulf Coast using a guide to motorcourts from the 1940s that I’d picked up at an antique mall. It put me in mind of a travelers from my grandparent's generation, and what they saw and experienced. On another assignment, I spent several days touring Havana using a guidebook that was published in 1952. What had been lost was as fascinating as what survived.
Be still. One of the chief tasks of a travel writer is to avoid cliche. For a decade I wrote travel guides to New England, an experience that was often great, and sometimes less than great. You’re basically a database manager who engages in ruthless triage. But I look back with satisfaction on one thing: I never once used the word “quaint.” It's one of a class of lazy and uninformative words, red flags suggesting that the writer hasn’t taken the time to really see what’s there.
And getting beyond cliche takes some doing. When I first arrive somewhere, my head invariably overflows with cliches. An Itialian plaza looks like ”something from a Fellini movie;” visiting an historic Vermont town is like “stepping back in time;” the glaciers and volcanoes of Iceland combine to create “a land of many contrasts.”
One could commit these initial impressions to paper, but one should not. An editor would laugh you off their pages. You need to get beyond those early thoughts, and the most fail-safe way to do that is to simply be still. Find a bench or a fallen log or just lean against a wall and pause for a time — maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. And soon enough the place will start to reveal itself.
A cliche only tells the reader what one place shares with another. A travel writer’s job is to find the elements unique to each place, the things that separate it from all others. That could be a cultural moment that defined the place, or an architectural detail. Give yourself the time and permission to notice.
Follow a theme. Travel writers often get assignments simply by devising an angle that an editor hasn’t been pitched three dozen times before. This may often involve chasing down a single theme when moving from place to place or following in the footsteps of someone notable.
Some years ago I drove from New Mexico to Maine, for which I bought a guidebook to Frank Lloyd Wright houses. I mapped out a route that would take me to as many as was practical. (About a dozen, it turned out.) I read biographies and other accounts of the great architect along the way, and have strong memories of the trip, in which each place came alive in a memorable way.
Truth is, you can be a travel writer without ever writing a word — travel writers travel in both worlds and words in their heads, places they’ve constructed through research, contacts, and approaching each step by looking through various lenses.
It’s a way to get beyond the cliché and the rutted paths. And it’s a way to travel that I can highly recommend.
-Wayne Curtis
If you dig on Wayne and his words, he's co-director of a food and travel writing workshop in New Orleans this October and he invites you to come on down:
“We spend mornings in our Faubourg Marigny classroom, discussing the art, craft, and business of writing, and hearing from guest speakers including New York Times food writer Brett Anderson, and Jame Beard award-wining chef Melissa Martin. Afternoons are dedicated to exploring New Orleans. Group excursions will open the door to parts of the city ordinary tourists rarely see—from attending a second line to going behind the scenes at famous restaurants—while participants will also be guided to pursue their own stories, to interview locals, discover new flavors, listen to world-class musicians, or just take the time to linger over a po-boy and smell the jasmine. They will also meet one-on-one with instructors, to shape and hone their stories. Our goal is to send them home with stories to tell, the tools to tell them, and a deep new love for the city that we ourselves love.”
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