Travel writing

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Generic overview of travel writing

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Travel writing is a genre that has as its focus accounts of real or imaginary places. The genre encompasses a number of styles that may range from the documentary to the evocative, from literary to journalistic, and from the humorous to the serious. Travel writing is often associated with tourism, and includes works of an ephemeral nature such as guide books and reviews, with the intent being to educate the reader about the destination, provide helpful advice for those visiting the destination, and inspire readers to travel to the destination. Effective travel writing should allow readers a vivid recollection of the area/areas being described in a way that is useful and entertaining. Travel writing of various degrees of quality may be found on web sites, in magazines and in books. Travel writing has also been produced by other types of travelers, such as military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists,pilgrims, and migrants. Travel writing which is valued as literature in its own right may be referred to as travel literature.edit

British Guild of Travel Writers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The British Guild of Travel Writers (BGTW) was formed in 1960. It is a membership organisation that admits authors whose work focuses on travel. It also includes among its membership many other professionals who generate travel-related content for print, broadcast and online media. The membership, which now numbers over 200 individuals, thus includes not only authors of travel literature and guide book writers, but also journalists, editors, photographers and broadcasters. The Guild's registered office is at Salisbury in England. A small secretariat is based in London.

Travel and writing go together like passports and visas. Most major newspapers have travel sections, dozens of magazines are devoted to travel, book publishers churn out guidebooks to destinations great and small, and books by authors like Paul Theroux and Peter Mayle have helped to breathe new life into the long-dormant travel narrative or "armchair travel" genre. This doesn't mean that travel writers are getting rich. (In fact, most aren't.) But it does mean there's a large audience for travel prose. You can reach that audience if you know your subject and can bring it to life through good writing.
Definition: A form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. See also:

100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There" Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description "Niagara Falls," by Rupert Brooke Nonfiction Susan Orlean's Extended Metaphor

Examples and Observations:

"The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention, they make ample use of their imaginations. . . . "The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plotline of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay, and the--often inadvertent-self-revelation of a memoir. It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of lifes infinite possibilities." (Thomas Swick, "Not a Tourist." The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2010)

"There exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greene's Journey Without Mapsor [V.S.] Naipaul's An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator, so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing, is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre. . . . "Freed from strictly chronological, fact-driven narratives, nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both astheme and style, offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms." (Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World. Routledge, 2002)

V.S. Naipaul on Making Inquiries "My books have to be called 'travel writing,' but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme. I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative rwiter. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (V.S. Naipaul, interview with Ahmed Rashid, "Death of the Novel." The Observer, Feb. 25, 1996)

Susan Orlean on the Journey "To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience--the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing--the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses--that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen." (Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere. Random House, 2004)

Jonathan Raban on the Open House "As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where differentgenres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing." (Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987. Picador, 1988)

"Some travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol' American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages." (Frances Mayes, Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002. Houghton, 2002) Also Known As: travel literature Scrapbook of Styles: Places

Susan Orlean's Extended Metaphor: "Super-Duper" Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"

Process Analysis in Barry Lopez's "Migration" Creative Nonfiction Nature Writing Memoir Biography Classic Essays Classic British and American Essays In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs Outcasts in Salt Lake City, by James Weldon Johnson Related Articles Best Womens' Travel Writing 2009 Crafting the Travel Guidebook - By Barbara Hudgins Best Womens' Travel Writing 2010 Make Your Own Women's Travel Gift Set - Add One Women's Travel Book The Best American Travel Writing 2009 edited by Simon Winchester

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