Travel journals are the stories of people in interesting places. They have become a bit cliched (predictable) because there was a period where so many people just wrote about the mountains, the weather and the food - basically the things that we would like to see lacking in a holiday in England. Travel journals become so all encompasing (and many guides still are) that they take away the excitement of being somewhere new because you already experienced it vicariously through the guide...
Modern writers now have to make their stories very specific - writing about something that isn't mountains and sunshine and everything else; but a specific music event, a particular meal beside the beach, spotting animals, a discussion of what the buildings look like, conversations they had or the place's history. Travel writing has become incredibly unique, narrow and imaginative whilst still being a true and persuasive account.
Read the start of Paul Carr's current article for The Guardian in which he opens describing how a hotel robs him of money, to then retell a story in which he finds himself locked outside of his hotel room - naked. We hardly find anything out about where he is but his stories make us want to go there.
Travel writing has evolved into something humoured and interesting, it's story telling whilst also drip feeding facts about the area without just listing them off (we know for instance the price of his hotel room, but because it is snook into the story and not just fired off as another fact you should know).
Your task this week is to think of holiday and a particular moment that made it exciting, or a huge failure. Describe this in detail building tension whilst attempting to be informative too. This description of a single event might be all a reader needs to be convinced to go to or avoid your destination - and they will want to experience everything else for themselves and be surprised.
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