Writing Travel Stories

I've always wanted to travel and write. The notion seems so romantic and glamorous. Who wouldn't want to travel the world, see new places, meet interesting people, writing about it, and making money doing it all. Yeah right. Well it's true many people do make money from travel writing. But which came first? The travel or the writing?

I think this is like the question about the chicken and the egg. It's difficult to say. Some people have been lucky enough to spend a lot of their time travelling, and than decided to write about it. While others have been writing all their life and have stumbled upon a travel story or decided to give it a go. Whichever works for you is the way to go.

Travel stories about faraway places, hidden islands, exotic towns and foreign people sound like the type of stories you find in magazines like Conde Nast Traveller, CNN Traveller and Wanderlust. But what happens if you want to write a travel story and don't have the cash or the connections to get to that faraway place. How do you become a travel writer?

This is something that's been on my mind for some time. Do I have to travel to faraway places to sell travel stories to the right magazines? Where can I find the magazines that want the type of stories I write? How do writers find the time and energy to write all those travel stories? Do they really travel to all these places? How do they break into the right magazines and sell their first piece?

I did it. It wasn't planned. I was sending out queries to magazines and happened to send one out to a travel magazines. A stab in the dark. A magazine that I had never read in my life but stumbled while searching for markets on the Internet (this is not recommended, you stand a better chance getting your writing accepted if you've actually read at least one copy of the magazine).

My first travel story was 'Learn Through Travel' for Real Travel (UK) magazines' May 2009 issue. A 2000 word feature with photos. First I was excited and than petrified. How in the world was I going to come up with a 2000 word feature about learning foreign languages while travelling? And quotes? Who was going to give me quotes? And with only three weeks to get it all done. How?

The Internet of course. I started searching for language schools in Europe and sent them email asking if any current or past students were interested in being interviewed for an article. One day passed, two days, three. It was over. And than I got a response and a few interviews. I remembered I had a friend from high school who spent two years in Italy, another who planned on learning in France and one who spent some time in Japan.

The interviews were done via email. If you're on difference continents with different time zones I think this is the easiest way to do this. I emailed the questions and gave them a time frame as to when I needed their responses. Easy. The interviewees were even willing enough to provide some cool photos to go with the story, making my life a hell of a lot easier.

In the meantime I started working on the outline and an initial draft. Once the questions arrived I managed to put it all together. Five or six rewrites later I had a feature article to send to the editor. A month later, my story was published.

The first one was a fluke. The second one is going to be a little bit more challenging. In the next couple of days, I'm going to write how I plan to tackle landing my next travel story assignment.