Quest might sound like a dramatic word choice, but your travel story, and the meaning you derive from it, is indeed a quest.
Besides, a quest is simply another way of saying: a want, a desire, a goal. Once you’ve read my previous blog post on How to Find Your Quest, you’re going to be well on your way to writing something compelling about your quest. Writing about the thing you want will inevitably hook readers, as we are desperate to know if you will achieve your goal or not, and what you might learn in the process.
So, how do you write about your quest? Simply, you name it. What are you aiming to do, achieve, get, or learn on your travel journey? Early on in your story, tell us this quest. After you name it, we need to know why. Your reader will be interested to find out if you achieve your quest once you make it known, but the key to hooking your reader is filling us in on why this quest is meaningful to YOU. That involves digging deep to convey what it was that happened in your past, and how you interpreted those events, that led to this particular want or desire.
Next month, I’ll be writing about backstory, and how to use it to inform your quest and further hook your reader. For now, as you move forward in your story, you need to include scenes that relate to your quest, and continue to show us the ways you are pursuing your quest, and perhaps facing obstacles to attaining your goal.
For example:
If your goal is to find the perfect amber ring in Prague (because your grandmother loved amber and you lost all of her jewellery in an accident), then what scenes might follow? What did you do in Prague in order to find that perfect ring? Perhaps you visited a great deal of jewellery stores and spoke to many salespeople.
You probably would want to include a scene of you interacting with a saleswoman, and interpreting what you learned from that interaction. Perhaps you also asked local friends their thoughts on the best place to find such a ring, and where to get a good deal. Perhaps you found a book about amber and could inform the reader of what you learned from it. All of these scenes would focus your story on the steps you took to achieve your quest, and keep the reader interested as you come closer and closer to reaching your desire.
Here’s another example.
Let’s say your goal is feel connected to a small village in Sardinia where your great grandmother came from. Again, you would want to think about your answer to a question like this: what did you do to achieve this quest? Perhaps you sought out the cemetery where your great grandmother’s relatives were buried, and the church where your great grandmother got married.
Perhaps everywhere you turned in that village, you tried to imagine this woman and what her life must have been like, and what would have been going through her mind when she decided, or was told, that she would leave her home for another country. All of these scenes and elements focus your story on the achievement of your quest.
Do some brainstorming of scenes that would help focus the reader on the steps you took to achieve your quest. Write out those scenes, and keep reinforcing and building upon your progress toward achieving your quest. Do this, and you will hook your reader on your travel journey story.
