I’ve learned to jumpstart my writing through inventing interesting structures for my travel memoir stories. Innovative ways to organise the elements of my travel essay can help me locate where my essay begins, and it can even help me decide the entire arc of the story I’m going to tell. Inventing different ways to structure an essay even gives me more ideas for essays that I had never thought about before.

Here are five innovative essay structures I’ve used to jumpstart my travel essay writing:

1. Write about your expectation vs. reality.

This kind of essay would describe your mental image of the place you are going before you arrive, and what you expect will happen there. The following section would focus on the actual details of your travel journey. Whether your expectation was better or worse than the reality, the distance between our expectations and actual experiences is an interesting space to explore.

2. What do you love and what do you hate?

This essay could be set up in alternating sections, first describing all the wonderful things about the place where you’ve visited or lived, and then describing the things that bother you, that are unjust and ugly. The two sections can work together to highlight the strong and contradictory emotions this place evokes in you.

3. Jump cut to new scenes.

This is an interesting way to get to the action of your story. Each section could be a small or even important moment of action in your travel story. You can leave out the summary details and give the reader only those moments of interaction of exchange between yourself and other characters, or within the place itself.

4. Write a braided essay. 

A braided essay traditionally has three parts, or three separate but interrelated stories that inform each other throughout. These essays are often reflective and lyrical, and require some work from the reader to put together the meaning of the three pieces of your essay. An example might be the story of your first night in a new place, a connected story based on an important historical event or person from that place, and the story of one of your important relationships that relates to why you decided to go on this trip or why you decided to leave. All three of these stories would be woven together in a braided essay.

5. Describe one night, or even a memorable hour, of your travel experience.

Zoom in on one particular night or moment from your time in this new place. It could be your first night there, or your last, or somewhere in between. This should be a moment of change or realisation, when your perspective widens in some new way. Get up close and make the reader feel like they are there with you. Use all five senses to bring the reader into this important moment.

6. Reflect on a travel experience from five or more years ago.

This essay can focus much more on summary than number 5. Zoom out to give the reader a wider perspective on that past travel experience and its meaning to you. Describe how you now feel about what happened on that trip all those years ago. Who was that person? How have you changed since then? What does that younger you have to teach you now, and what do you have to teach her?