{"id":11251,"date":"2016-05-29T09:05:38","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T16:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=11251"},"modified":"2016-08-14T10:30:42","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T17:30:42","slug":"how-to-be-a-travel-writer-in-20-messy-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/29\/how-to-be-a-travel-writer-in-20-messy-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Become a Travel Writer in 20 Messy Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

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  1. Be a bookish child. Have a preference for the kinds of books that involve maps. If it’s Tolkien, it’s not your fault, you’re of a certain generation.<\/li>\n
  2. As a young teenager, discover you have a gift for language. Ace French until you’re bored to tears, switch to Spanish, annoying your Spanish teacher who will tell you he can’t give you an A because you don’t come to class. Have your teacher recommend you for foreign exchange in spite of your obvious “issues” with school. When you ask for Spain (after all, you’re acing Spanish) get sent to Sweden instead because your Youth for Understanding councilor thinks you’ll find Spain a bit too… conservative.<\/li>\n
  3. Spend a summer in Sweden drinking beer, sometimes kissing a Swedish boy, sometimes learning wacky regional Swedish. Get the fever for travel, get it bad. Cram massive amounts of text on to the paper thin aerogrammes you send back home.<\/li>\n
  4. Scrape your way through high school and, as a graduation present from your Dad, get shipped off to work on a kibbutz for the summer because it’s “what the tribe does.”\u00a0 Your fever for travel uncured, extend your stay until you sign up to learn Hebrew, and meet a bad English boyfriend who also loves to travel. Master wicked street Hebrew, but never learn to properly read or write. Cram massive amounts of text on to the paper thin aerogrammes you send back home.<\/li>\n
  5. Run out your visa and return to the US to work in order to save enough money to get out of the US again. Obnoxiously declare “abroad” superior to the US. With your savings, buy a ticket to London where the bad English boyfriend lives. Cram massive amounts of text on to the paper thin aerogrammes you send back home.<\/li>\n
  6. Work out an insane scheme to travel overland through Europe, then get to India via Pakistan. Do exactly<\/em> this in the company of the bad English boyfriend. Through Pakistan<\/em>. In the 80s<\/em>. Have the kind of adventures that years later, you won’t believe are real even though you did them and still have the curved edged photos to prove it.*<\/a> Cram massive amounts of text on to the paper thin aerogrammes you send back home.<\/li>\n
  7. Ditch the bad English boyfriend and go back to the US with a wicked case of traveler’s gut, skinny as a rail, culture shocked as fuck, and angry. Cry in the shampoo aisle at the supermarket because how can there be so many kinds of shampoo. Take a good two, three, years to wrangle your life into a kind of meaningful state while riding a bike everywhere and applying to art school.<\/li>\n
  8. Meet a guy who loves to travel as much as you do. Get married, do a fair bit of traveling, graduate from art school with honors. After graduation, travel around Europe for a while, first with the husband then solo, hanging out in Portugal for a while to make art. Make lasting friendships with fellow travelers. Cram massive amounts of text on to the postcards you send back home. Go back to the US to do … something.<\/li>\n
  9. Get divorced when it becomes apparent that your fever for travel (and a number of other mitigating factors) mean you and your spouse just don’t have the same view of what life should look like. Move to Seattle. Watch your international travel budget collapse because you’re always strapped for cash, but don’t find that particularly crippling because you live in the Pacific Northwest, a region that is full of marvelous places to see and play outside. Ease up a little on the snottiness about the US because the PNW, man, it’s great; you can get a close enough hit of “travel” without getting on a plane.<\/li>\n
  10. Catch the dot com wave when it arrives and get a gig at Microsoft as a caption writer when it turns out your ability to squeeze a meaningful text into small space is a marketable skill. Work on a variety of contract gigs that pay more than you ever imagined making after art school. Spend your free time hiking, riding a bike, and generally playing in the outdoors.<\/li>\n
  11. Say ‘no’ to your friend when he invites you on a trip across Australia. When he asks you what else you’re doing that’s so important, come to your senses and book a flight to Brisbane. Meet another traveler and fall hopelessly in love.\u00a0 Cram massive amounts of text on to the postcards you send back home.<\/li>\n
  12. Embark on what any sensible person would call a ridiculous commuter relationship between a small town in Austria and your home in Seattle, and do so just as this thing called “blogging” is taking off. Stop cramming text on to paper and start cramming it on to “the Internet.” During your stints in Austria, get a few stories published, here and there. Ponder the idea of being paid to do what you’ve been doing since you were 16.<\/li>\n
  13. Through the magical networking powers of the web, get a referral to write a guidebook to the Hawaiian Islands. Say yes even though the math is terrible, because… travel writing! Take on another guidebook after that, one to British Columbia even though the math is terrible because…travel writing! Continue to write for your blog because it’s fun. Publish the occasional travel story here and there; it’s early days on the web so find it’s not that hard to land a story if you just do a little research.<\/li>\n
  14. Become, accidentally, an early adopter of a practice that later becomes a juggernaut of marketing in travel, a thing called “travel blogging.” Have a session proposal rejected by BlogHer, a giant women’s blogging conference, for being “too niche” but later, present on that same topic at SxSW to a packed room. Continue to write for your blog because it’s fun.<\/li>\n
  15. Meet all the players in travel and the web simply because the space is so new that everyone’s trying to figure it out. Get invited to speak and teach at blogging conferences. Find your tiny blog is surprisingly well respected and have that lead to all kinds of crazy possibilities — a trip to Antarctica, a safari in East Africa, and also, actual paid writing gigs. Build lasting relationships with like-minded editors and writers who share your values and appreciate your style. Enjoy the early adopter edge even while you don’t know that it is rapidly slipping away as a monster named Google shadows the horizon, shifting the landscape from a creative free for all to one designed to appease the Google monster over all other masters.<\/li>\n
  16. Decry the exploitation of “new media” for marketing and search even while you don’t understand that you’ve been a pawn in that scheme. While refusing to adopt them, become increasingly versed in the less-than-ethical tactics of buying popularity and gaming traffic on social media, because a) social media is now an inseparable part of being on the web and b) popularity is the number one determiner of value in the marketplace. Watch the traffic for your own little blog enter gradual decline as hundreds of blogs become thousands of blogs become literally millions of blogs. Wonder if the people you call sell-outs and hacks and pyramid schemers and a number of other things it wouldn’t be polite to list didn’t have it right with their unethical tactics. Rather than being associated with the terms “well respected blogger,” migrate to being associated with the terms “Get Off My Lawn.” Lose friends and professional contacts over this, fearlessly (or stupidly, depending on who you ask) burning a very public bridge with TBEX, the best known travel blogging conference*<\/a>. Emotionally divest yourself from the blogger cons, rationalizing that if you wanted to be a marketer, you’d have taken that path long ago.<\/li>\n
  17. After a year or three of bouncing between intermittent anger that the medium you love has become the equivalent of the kid that’s good at math going into dealing crack and accepting that the medium isn’t the message, it’s what you do with it that’s the message, realize that the whole time, you’ve been following a respectable career path, go figure. Look back at your portfolio — you have a portfolio that includes some fairly fancy magazines and newspapers and you’ve done some very good work for your own blog, work you’re proud of. That regional visitor’s bureau didn’t hire you because you had a zillion “impressions.” That boutique creative agency didn’t hire you because you had good “engagement.” Nope. Those folks — and many of your other projects — wanted insightful, well researched writing. Finally understand that monitization — making money from blogging — isn’t just about getting paid to be a marketing shill or an affiliate retailer. It can also be about creating a showcase for your skills.<\/li>\n
  18. Find an uneasy peace with the idea that, as unconventional as your route and some of the work you’ve done is, you accomplished what you set out to do: you became a travel writer. Occasionally write something for your blog because you feel like it and it’s fun, but more often focus on well paid projects that you’re surprised and delighted to find yourself working on.<\/li>\n
  19. Realize that you’ve squandered far too much time overthinking it. You have a deadline for a glossy magazine and this stuff isn’t going to write itself.<\/li>\n
  20. Get back to work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    Oh, hi.<\/strong> Are you here from WordPress? Did you read the whole thing and you’re STILL HERE? Wow. Okay, a few bits of advice, because a few people have asked.<\/p>\n