Transform Your Travels Into Meaningful Memoir
We all know that to travel inherently means the traveller has some kind of privilege to possess the money, resources and time to leave one’s home. No matter how much we’ve scrimped and saved, no matter if we are backpackers living in the cheapest, barest hostels around, or living out of a camper van, going […]
Whether it’s learning to live ‘Danishly’, or becoming a master flamenco dancer in Spain or testing yourself by travelling alone for a year, most travel books have a gimmick. These gimmicks aren’t necessarily cheesy or superficial, of course. Instead, they serve as a hook, and sometimes even an anchor that gives the story a very […]
When you’re by yourself, or with one other companion, keeping track of your own personal story, or that of you and your companion, is fairly simple. But when you also have to deal with the demands of family–your partner, kids, and any other combination of relations–how do you keep up a coherent narrative, and deal […]
How boring is it when you’re travelling companion doesn’t seem interested in anything at all? Travel should especially bring out the curiosity in us. Our interest should be more than piqued; we can and should develop obsessions. Obsessions are inherently interesting—they compel us to act in pursuit of them, even take risks. Once you have […]
Sometimes, I like to turn my real travel experiences into fiction stories. I tend to do this when I can easily imagine ratcheting up the tension of a trip beyond my actual experience. As an example, when I was living in Dubai, I took a trip to Oman with a friend. We both had a […]
As I’ve written about in a previous post, no matter how great the middle and end of your travel memoir story are, openings matter the most. Readers are deciding whether or not to continue reading your tale, and they don’t want a painfully slow build up to the action. Here are some common mistakes in […]
How did your 2019 writing go? Did you have any writing goals that you met, or not quite? I fully endorse the idea of creating writing goals for yourself, and I often like a yearly goal to give myself a fairly long stretch. If something comes up and I don’t end up writing for a […]
Any reader would be interested in your travel story of life-changing proportions. You want to help others change their lives too by learning from your story. But how can you write it so that others will be interested? How can you tell your story so that the experience of reading it is as fascinating as […]