By writing your own travel stories, you are an autobiographer. You are broadcasting your ideas and worldview for others to absorb or react to.
My hope is that you do not hold yourself back from writing the tales you want to but that you are mindful of the stories you tell about yourself. Make sure they present you truly, accurately, and to the best of your ever-evolving ability. Let them connect you to others and help you realize further truths about yourself.
Travel writing allows for digesting novel experiences and healthy introspection, an action that must be prioritized by globe-trotters of all ages. With all that bombards us on the road, once-known unknowns and stimuli beyond imagination, the act of rethinking what we once knew and re-evaluating ourselves as evolving minds couldn’t be more essential.
These pieces are dually beneficial for writer and reader and create a footprint of humanity in our current golden age of travel. While the genre of travel writing is certainly saturated, good travel writing isn’t so prevalent. I hope you can use these techniques to find what your good can be.
“Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we’re about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what’s going on when nobody’s looking.”