For the inquisitive traveler: here are some tips to improve your travel writing abilities.
Try to see your own culture through a wider lens by exploring how people around the world make the most of similar resources, economic systems, relationships, and governmental structures. Study the world around you. Ask how things work and why they appear the way they do.
Integrate discoveries into precise and palpable prose.
Create rings of resonance by situating the place in a larger context.
Start with a short anecdote that sets the story’s tone, mood, and main idea. Then get to the where, what, and why of the story.
Create a unifying theme that connects the various scenes.
Make the story come alive by including quotes and conversations you heard, Introducing the people and the place where you met them.
Aim for fresh, meaningful descriptions, steering clear of clichés like “bustling markets”, “azure sea”, “nestled in the mountains”, “hidden gem”, “breathtaking view”. What sets good travel writing apart is detail: you must sweep the reader across the journey with you.
Personal mishaps don’t necessarily make for interesting reading. Avoid telling about missed buses, diarrhea, rain and focus on an experience that they might experience if they were to repeat the trip.
Seek out places locals might frequent, off the beaten track places, and give your story a richness that you won’t get with a description of a visit to the tourist cafe in the main square.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you are there. Waves crashing against a mildewed sea wall; a young couple cavorting in a dark, dilapidated alley; guitars and voices harmonizing over a syncopated drum rhythm; sunlight slanting across rotten peeling paintwork; a handsome youth in a guayabera shirt leaning against a Lada; the smell of diesel fumes and cheap aftershave; tourists with Hemingway beads; Che Guevara on a billboard, a banknote, a key-ring, a T-shirt… No one could have invented Havana. It’s too audacious, too contradictory, and despite 50 years of withering neglect, too beautiful.
Lonely Planet, Cuba