6 Ways to Be a Better Travel Writer

The best and worst thing about being a travel writer is that there is no clear pipeline to success. No two writers will follow the same path and the journey is universally and almost necessarily circuitous. At our hearts, writers are professional observers, and it takes time to cultivate our worldview.

(How My Travel Writing Strengthened My Fiction.)

As a baseline, you must love travel so much that you are willing to ruin it for yourself. Or at least the glamorous veneer of it. Being a writer, after all, is a human experience. It requires the full spectrum of rapturous joy and crushing loneliness. The real work is in the tedious, unseen details. The endless flights and bus rides. The food poisonings and tropical fevers. The fast friendships and faster goodbyes. You must love the elastic FOMO that stretches across every story and drives you to keep searching.

Here’s the good news. Travel writing requires all types of experiences and voices. There is no right way to go about it. However, we (myself and co-author Caroline Clements) have identified a few core principles that have served us well.

1. Follow your interests

This is good advice for life but especially people trying to make their way as a writer. You are always going to create the most authentic work when you are genuinely invested in the story that you are telling. As a travel writer this means exploring your own interests and style of travel.

When we pitched our third book, Places We Swim California—a guide to the best rivers, lakes, waterfalls, beaches, gorges, and hot springs—we knew we would be doing this trip regardless of if it ever became a book. We wanted to explore California’s wilderness and we would be hiking and swimming our way across the state. We were doing it to satisfy our own curiosity.

If you love architecture and food, that is your angle. If you love tattoos and video games, that is your angle. The trick is to be honest with yourself about your interests and you will find an audience.

2. Do the most valuable work before you leave

The more you can prepare before going on a trip, the easier the travel will be. You often only get one chance at a travel assignment but have a long time to prepare. We read books and articles. We speak to friends and search for local contacts who share our taste. It’s a process of making lists and then checking those lists against other recommendations. We start with a lot of ideas and then slowly refine them through our research. The final distillation happens on the road.

Doing the research ahead of time will allow you to prioritize your experience and itinerary once you arrive. You know what can be ruled out and what should be investigated further. Of course, you always leave space for surprises.

Check out Dillon Seitchik-Reardon and Caroline Clements’ Places We Swim California here:

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3. Don’t schedule every minute

The cost of extensive research is that you often feel like you are missing out on something. It’s easy to get caught up in rushing from destination to destination as you try to check things off a list. However, the best experiences are often the ones that you least expect.

You must build time into your schedule to just be somewhere. You need time to sit and observe. To be unhurried enough that you can have conversations with locals and do so without an agenda. It’s the hardest thing in travel writing, but it is important to let a story evolve organically. The story that you plan for is not always the story that you will write.

4. Trust people and say “yes”

Opportunities constantly present themselves to deviate from your well-planned travels. Sometimes it is a nagging feeling that you missed something, and other times it is a well-meaning person inviting you into their world. We try to say “yes” as much as possible.

Most people are unbelievably kind and curious. If you allow time in your schedule for spontaneity, then you will end up in weird and wonderful places. This is a travel writer’s bread and butter. Trust that invitations are sincere and always have a reason to leave if things get too weird.

5. Keep a journal

This is an obvious one, but something we always come back to. Writers are professional observers. Writing in a journal, especially writing by hand, is a way to ground yourself in a moment or place. 

It’s a practice of observing your internal and external environment. How does it feel to be there? What are your senses telling you? These snapshots, no matter how brief, will trigger your memories later and make the writing process so much easier.

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!

6. Be useful, be a curator

The amount of travel information available to all of us is overwhelming. You can find advice about every place in the world, often expressed as diametrically opposing views. So where does this leave the reader? The abundance of information makes trusted brands and sources more valuable. Most people want advice from a couple of credible sources and know that they are in good hands.

You can be that credible source. Be consistent and clear about your offering. Don’t waste your words on negative reviews. What’s the point? Tell people where to go and why it is great. Celebrate the best of the world. If we don’t like something, we don’t write about it. We write about hiking and swimming as a way to explore beautiful places. These are niche, curated experiences for people who share our love of adventure. 

Our job as writers is to trudge through all the mediocre places so that our readers don’t have to. If you can consistently give useful advice, then you will build a community that trusts you.