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6 Tips for Page-Turning Travel Writing
Grab Your Readers, Then Whisk Them Away
Note: This piece first appeared on Writers Online in April, 2021.
All the travel taught me a lot. It’s how I became myself. Writing about it taught me even more. It forced me to reflect and mature. It took me almost four years, but now my book is a real thing. It’s something I’ll have to explain one day to my nonexistent future grandkids.
Recently, I published a painfully honest travel memoir about my first four years backpacking across four continents. I started as a scared young pup in Colombia and eventually got thrown in an Australian immigration jail before being forcibly removed from the country. The Australian government flew me (first-class baby) to Asia, so it wasn’t all bad. Looking back over my first four years on the road, a lot happened. A lot took place between Colombia and Asia.
My book ended up clocking in at over 120,000 words, but it started with one sentence. At a goal-setting retreat, I promised myself, and declared to the entire group, that I’d write one story worth reading before the end of the month. I thought of the first sentence while walking down a steep hill in Split, Croatia. Momentum is a powerful force, and once the words started tumbling downhill, I found that the “T’s” and “X’s” rolled just as fast as…
