Where In The World #6
The number one most important thing you can do to improve your travel writing, why I ignore emails...and let's chat about editors stealing ideas, shall we?
Travel is a beat
I bet, from that headline, you think I’m going to write something poetic about how travel “aligns with our hearts’ rhythms”.
Or perhaps the way “each footstep we take on the earth is a drumbeat on our quest for learning.”
Er no. Have you met me? I’m usually about as poetic as Prince Harry’s todger anecdote.
No. What I want to talk about today is the fact that travel writing is - above all - a journalistic ‘beat’.
It is, more than anything, an exercise in reporting. It requires you to keep on top of new openings, new innovations, new contacts - and you need to stay on top of those things across the entire world.
It’s a ‘beat’, in the same way that court reporting is a beat, or medical reporting or politics reporting. This is why it’s hard to ‘parachute’ into travel writing. The fluffy, descriptive ‘look at the pretty sunset’ stuff is a tiny fraction of the work. Mostly, it’s good, old fashioned research, contact-building and information-gathering.
It’s journalism.
Which is why I like it so much. That’s my background. And that gumshoe, ‘find things out’ stuff is the part of travel writing I like best.
(An editor from my old, non-travel writing world once told me that it was a ‘waste’ of my reporting skills to go into travel writing. Oh, fren. Your reporting skills rarely get more of a workout than when you’re trying to use them in an unfamiliar place, in another language, with jetlag.)
In terms of the sheer volume of information you need to process, it’s the hardest beat I’ve ever covered. You need to have a grasp of geography, food, arts, geopolitics, cultural sensitivities, history, humanities, pop culture, flora and fauna. You need to be across hotel and restaurant openings, airlines, cruises, trains, road routes, tours, attractions and natural phenomena. You can rarely report a single story in a vacuum. You need all this contextual information.
I don’t always get it right. Despite having worked in this area for about seven years, I look at many of my colleagues and think they are thousands of years ahead of me in terms of how well they are knitted into this intense world.
If you’re starting out, that’s what I’d advise you focus on.
Not finding better ways to describe the colour of water around tropical islands (although I am extremely envious of whoever came up with ‘gin-clear’ because it was bloody great and now it’s too overused and we need something else).
Not chucking two adjectives onto a noun where none would be better.
P.S. if you want an example of someone who has way too much love for an adjective, King Charles is your guy:
Tragic loss? Fine. Lose ‘utterly’. Thoughts and prayers - OK, if you must. ‘Special’ is tipping into melodrama. Perhaps this works for a British monarch commenting on such a grave subject, but leave it to people with crowns on their heads. Simple is best for the rest of us.
Get hooked in to every travel information hub you can - services like Travmedia, Social Diary and travel writing associations. Follow travel writing hashtags on social media, as well as tourism boards. Sign up to industry newsletters that drop travel news info into your inbox.
This is the stuff that will make your travel writing better, more so than finding more flowery ways to describe sand. That said - it also helps to think of flowery ways to describe sand. Try to make it less cringey than Harry and his todger.
A note on PR emails
Here I am lecturing everyone on ‘contacts’ and ‘research’ and yet I bet there are PRs reading this thinking “COOL ALEX BUT YOU NEVER REPLY TO MY EMAILS, AMAZING CONTACT-BUILDING.”
This is 100% fair.
I am hyper-organised in all areas of my life - ask my friends about the twitchy texts I send if anyone’s 45 seconds late for a scheduled meeting time. They secretly think it’s cute, I’m sure of it.
You have to be rigid about life to stay on top of deadlines as a freelancer. But one area I’m not so great at is emails. I very rarely have time to reply individually unless I happen to need that precise piece of information exactly now.
But I think of my email inbox as a big filing system, and praise-be to the ‘search’ function. Maybe you sent me information about a great new restaurant opening in Queensland. I may not be writing my Qantas magazine restaurant pages right this second but I will be in two weeks. I will use the search, and if you have included the right terms (‘restaurant’ and ‘Queensland’ should do it) it will float back onto my radar.
So please know that I read them all. I really do. I once worked in PR. I appreciate how much work goes into making a great press release. And I am not being flaky or too cool or rude (not intentionally, anyway) when I don’t reply.
I’m just saving you for a special occasion.
Will editors steal my ideas?
I stumbled across an interesting tweet this week, from a US freelancer. It read:
“Another day, another publication taking my pitch and assigning it to a staff writer.”
This is a tricky observation, and one that you hear some freelancers complain about a bit.
I don’t know this writer’s exact circumstances but it’s not something I’ve ever experienced. Nor was it something I ever did - ever - when I was a commissioning editor. And I think you have to be very, very careful making this assumption. I’d certainly be wary about making it publicly unless you were very sure.
“Another day, another publication taking my pitch and assigning it to a staff writer” - freelancer
The responses to the tweet were varied. “This happened to me. Respected broadsheet supplement mag. It was a gut punch,” was one comment.
“My fave is ‘sorry we already have someone on staff writing this’ - COINKYDINK” was another.
But someone else wrote:
“When I was a commissioning ed, I got about 10 pitches a day for articles that were already being written by someone else. They were nearly always ideas prompted by a press release or upcoming event. I know some publications do steal pitches but maybe not quite as often as we think.”
I think the above is - honestly - the most likely explanation.
Editors are more likely than to be plugged into that ‘travel beat’ matrix I talked about up top, than anyone else. So the odds that they knew about a story - and were already working on it - before you did are pretty high.
There could be very rare occasions when you pitch a truly great idea but the editor doesn’t feel you have the experience or skill to pull it off. I did have that happen once in my commissioning days. In that instance, I offered to co-write the piece with the pitcher. It was a slog - I don’t think I’d repeat it in a hurry - but it was the ethical thing to do.
Australia is a small market. We talk. We know each other. If there was a dastardly, moustache-twirling, tying-maidens-to-the-traintracks villain editor in our ranks we’d all know about it.
Perhaps I’m naive, and there is. Let me know, I live for the tea.
TTC Playlist
‘At The Airport Terminal’ by Bill Wurtz. This is one of my favourite songs. It includes the incomparable lyric “BBBBRRRRRLLLLLLBBBLLLLLLLLL” which is the sound of a suitcase rolling across an airport terminal floor:
Thanks as always for reading. Travel somewhere nice if you can.
Alex
Gin-clear water 🫢. You read my Kangaroo Island story! Cringing. Seriously, when you’ve been pondering a non-hackneyed way to describe water for two hours, sometimes you just go with what you ordered to dull the pain.
Interesting read :) Especially about editors, I'd hate to think they steal ideas like that! Surely it happens, but also surely not that much.