How I Got Started as a Travel Writer

People used to wait eagerly for news of the traveler; reports from Constantinople and Cape Town, remote locations most would never visit in a lifetime. Only a couple of decades ago, explorers would pack up their donkeys and their Sherpas, returning years later with a literary masterpiece. Today…well, we have instant gratification. I remember when it started, because that’s when I started my career as a travel writer.

In 1995 I took off on a motorcycle adventure around America. I was test riding a WWII Russian Ural with a sidecar, a motorcycle whose basic design hadn’t changed since 1938; a machine that, in its native habitat, putted an average of 35 miles per hour in a climate typified by snow and slushy rain. The importers of the Ural hoped to sell thousands of these machines to motorcycle enthusiasts in the USA, but they didn’t know if it would run at 60 miles per hour in the heat of a typical midwestern summer day.

Well, I volunteered to try it out, and won an assignment from the first online magazine to publish real-time travel reports. The editor was eager to work with a writer who knew how to use a modem, so that he wouldn’t receive phone calls in the middle of the night from a technology-impaired journalist under deadline, as he had just previously.

This is how I got my big break. Though my travel writing credentials were short, my technical writing credentials were long. I had spent a decade writing manuals instructing users how to plug this into that and that into there, and so my prowess with a laptop weighed in heavier than the competing journalist’s prowess with a pretty phrase. Besides, he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle.

So off I zoomed across America, sending dispatches back to an audience that then, largely consisted of geeks and academics who were fascinated that this thing called “the Internet” had an actual real-world application, after all.

As for myself, I have for years now been proving the point that the bigger disaster the trip, the bigger success the story. The Russian motorcycle, as predicted, strenuously objected to the heat and the pace of American back roads, and demonstrated her unhappiness by breaking down every few hundred miles for the 4000 miles and four months of my trip.

The story, the plot, the cliffhanger? All that was easy. I just recorded my life day by day.

I’ll give you a snapshot: I was stuck in a Southern Canadian town populated by paper factory workers and Harley Davidson fanatics, one of whom was letting me sleep on his couch and use his garage to replace the entire right side of the engine that had cracked and literally almost fallen into the road at 50 mph.

I was grateful to have a place to sleep in a land of no motels, even when the Harley gang gathered around to watch me replace the engine, drinking beer, smoking joints, and handing me wrenches, apologizing that they didn’t know how to help me make the repair.

Ahhhh…to have those days back again, when even America was an adventure, when everyone on the Internet was hanging on my every word, and sending me emails about how fascinating and brave and capable and entertaining I was.

In 1998 I accepted an invitation to ride a similar vintage sidecar motorcycle through China, an illegal trip, as it turned out, made even more stressful by the bike’s habit of breaking down every few hundred miles, just like it’s Russian cousin. I was a better writer then, also aware of my increasing competition on the Internet, so I vowed to pay more attention craft, no matter how exhausted I was each night. However, I’m afraid that I dispatched thousands of words that might have better been left to my private journal.

There aren’t many expeditions today that will hold the kind of wide attention I used to automatically enjoy. By the time I got to India in the year 2000 most remote villages were “wired” and already documented by pilgrims who’d strayed from the hippie trail.

In 2001 I explored Italy on a Moto Guzzi. By then my corner on the real-time travelogue market, even the real-time motorcycle travelogue market, had really shrunk. And, as for exotic? Constantinople it is not. I know parents who have sent their teenage daughters on Girl Scout expeditios to Florence.

So here’s a short list advice for writing for the web:

• Save the really flowery prose for the print edition.

• Cut stories to under 800 words, or slice and dice into installments.

• Create a thrilling lede that compels the reader to “drill down.”

• Find a truly unusual angle, a niche market, like riding WWII motorcycles by yourself in countries where you don’t speak the language – no wait – that one’s taken.

• Make sure each one of your dispatches is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In the world of online travelogues it’s important to pay attention to these rules, because when the Girl Scout troop has gotten there ahead of you, all you’ve got left is your craft.

[From a speech given at the San Francisco Writers Conference 2004.]