Travel Writing Editing Services

Bringing the reader along

Travel writing, at its heart, is about bringing the reader along with you, helping them to see through your eyes, and learn more about the greater world beyond their everyday horizons to help inspire them to someday pack a simple bag, get on a plane or boat, and go explore a little slice of this planet for themselves. This requires that the travel writer has the capacity to ignite the reader’s imagination while providing useful tips and tricks about how to navigate the destination in question.

You have to write objectively about your experience, if you get lucky and score free tickets to an excellent avant-garde play in a warehouse or get unlucky and the weather happens to be horrendous for the entirety of your stay, you have to keep these factors from colouring your review of the place. Plays tend to have limited runs, free tickets are unlikely to happen twice, and weather is beholden to the vagaries of chaos theory, whereas your travel writing should focus on what is attainable and consistent.

Your reader may be looking at what you wrote a decade ago and find it wholly unrelated to their experience! However, playhouses and opera theatres that put on regular performances can generally be relied upon to remain in place and continue operating in the long term, good walks around nature reserves or national monuments are unlikely to be rendered inaccessible to the casual tourist, and prevailing weather patterns can be useful to keep in mind so that future travellers can pack appropriate clothing for the place and season.

Developing a distinctive voice

There remains a question of how to differentiate your travel writing from the competition. Many early writers relied on the exoticisation of the unfamiliar to draw readers’ attention, including creating the myth that lemmings would hurl themselves to their death off of cliffs (Crotch, 1877) that was later popularised when it was staged for the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness by a filmmaker who erred on the side of spectacle rather than academic rigour. Enlisting the help of a travel writing editing service, particularly one with direct experience of the country or situation (such as a zoology specialisation) can help writers understand where they may have over-exaggerated the traits of local flora, fauna, or inhabitants to the detriment of their writing.

Hunter S. Thompson developed a unique voice by thoroughly immersing himself in the culture of the people about whom he wrote, living with the community and participating in their rituals. However, his reporting thereof caused disagreement with the American Hell’s Angels biker gang, and he later described being assaulted by members of the group. Anthony Bourdain had a more relaxed experience with travel writing, drawing on his experiences as a chef to provide a foodie’s perspective on the places he visited and the local cuisine they offered.

Finding your perspective

I believe that this last example provides the most useful guidance for how a good travel writer can provide useful information while presenting it in a unique style that exemplifies their Unique Selling Point (USP) and so differentiates their work from that of their rivals in a useful and meaningful way that readers will appreciate. Accept that you are an individual with a specific set of specializations that mark you out as having a unique perspective on the world and play to this strength by filtering your experiences through that lens.

If you are in a band that tours internationally, you can talk about your experiences while on tour, talk about the good performances you heard from other bands while traveling around the world (as compliments can help open doors in future if you gain sufficient notoriety) and talk about how venues treated you and what dramas played out behind the scenes. Similarly, you might be an athlete who competes internationally, a lorry driver, or on-site consultant with many different clients.

All of these can provide useful, varied, and atypical perspectives. Alternately (and more broadly) compare your experiences to those of your travel companions, see how men, women, etc., rich and poor, white, black, etc., able and disabled, mentally handicapped and physically handicapped people are treated by different strata of the various societies you encounter. Just make sure that you always write with compassion and care, noting that there is often a gulf between personal experience and what can generally be expected in a country.

Here again, a professional travel writing editing service can help as they may be differently able or have a different economic or racial background, which can help give your writing a more balanced perspective. A useful tip is that a traveller can often gauge the general public’s opinions and attitudes regarding discrimination based on both how local newspapers report on stories related to such issues and how general passers-by react when different people express different needs. Equally though, no one culture, country, or people can be described as uniformly homogeneous, which comes back to my earlier point of never assuming that your specific trip is indicative of a country’s overall status and the behaviour of its citizens.

Truly, this is a balancing act that requires a subtle and thoughtful demeanour.

References

Crotch, William Duppa (1877). "The Norwegian Lemming and its Migrations" Popular Science Monthly D. Appleton & Company vol. 11, pp. 412–413

Unique Selling Proposition (2020, August 19). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unique_selling_proposition&oldid=966799589