How My Travel Writing Strengthened My Fiction
It’s always enlightening when surprised readers stumble upon my other life after reading my novels.
They comment on the way I describe the city of Stockholm, the background against which the lives of my Black protagonists play out. They say they can smell the cinnamon right off the page, taste the Swedish foods through my words or envision the cultural traditions in detail.
(4 Tips for Writing Food in Fiction.)
Their curiosity about me as the author drives them towards my career as a travel writer and photographer spanning close to 15 years. Before becoming a published novelist, I’d already built a career within the travel industry as a visual storyteller and published several nonfiction books. I explore cultural connection through food, tradition, and lifestyles, and this beat is reflected in my work.
But travel writing wasn’t my first love. Writing fiction was.
Growing up in Nigeria, I started writing short stories when I was 10 years old and continued through my teenage years. I filled pages upon pages of notebooks with short stories and novellas. I traveled through my fictional characters. I knew I wanted to be a storyteller, but I just didn’t know travel writing was going to be my route; I always thought fiction was going to be my medium of expression.
When I moved to the US to start college, I studied information systems and would go on to work as a programmer and system architect for 12 years. But creative writing always tugged at my heart. It was while volunteering with an expedition race in Fiji—I was responsible for writing daily dispatches about the contestants, the places they were navigating, and Fijian culture, landscapes, and seascapes—that I realized travel writing was a passion and potential career.
Fast forward 20 years and I currently do work as a professional travel writer, but I never forgot my first love: fiction.
So, in 2010, I first tried rewriting some of those short stories and novellas from my teenage years. I struggled, though, because I had been writing them from my closed box of inexperience. What did I know of life as a 10-year-old? Since then, my work as a travel writer has taken me to over 80 countries, reporting on myriad cultures and subcultures, getting beneath traditions, partaking in festivals and rituals, and meeting some of the most engaging, enthralling, and entertaining people everywhere from Mongolia to the Faroe Islands.
Meanwhile, I had also finally settled in my new home, Stockholm. I’ve integrated and I speak the language. I had even written about the city and Sweden for several high-profile publications. So, when I started the process of writing fiction again, my years of travel writing spilled onto the page, but this time they were about my new home country.
Check out Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s Everything Is Not Enough here:
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Travel writing at its core is about showing the essence of a place using all your senses. What are you seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching? Weaving words that denote the character, energy, and feeling of a place requires you to “show, not tell” through your words. As a travel writer, I can’t simply say “Stockholm is a stunning city.” I need to show its elegant, cream-colored buildings that look like cake icing piped along the waterfront. I need to show it shimmering under the sun’s setting rays and its golden reflection bouncing off still waters.
My job is to make the reader want to come experience a place. To make them walk side-by-side with me and absorb the culture, traditions, and environment through my eyes. And this is why, despite the heavy topics I tackle in my novels, they still draw readers to the lure of Stockholm.
Beyond the descriptions which make the city feel like a character in its own right, my readers also comment on the intensity and energy of the pacing of my novel. “It just never lets up emotionally,” one reader told me. I immediately understood their sentiment.
Most travel writers get only 800-1,200 words to tell fully fleshed out stories about a place or experience for a publication. We’re working with limited space to condense our rich narratives. This means we need to start with gripping beginnings that instantly hook the reader with a promise, fill the middle of our stories with lots of texture to keep them reading, and leave them with an ending that makes them eager to book the same experience.
Except we don’t have the luxury of 90,000 words to pull that off! I’ve been conditioned to write in an enticing and succinct way for over 14 years, so it makes sense that both my novels are written like a series of 800-1,200-word articles stitched together. This sustains the intensity of the story—with no natural breaks—and gives my work that “page turner” feeling.
My career background also helps me cover heavy topics like racism, tokenism, class conflict, or trauma in a way that doesn’t feel forced. Because with travel writing, I can’t tell you to go to Italy. That’s heavy-handed. I have to show you why you should go to Italy.
It would seem my career as a travel writer was preparing me all along for that long-awaited reunion with my first love…fiction.