Travel diaries are a fantastic raw material, but a travel story requires you to do more than say what you did each day. Do this successfully and you create a story that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, one that will take your reader on a ride. To do this, you need a structure, a framework on which to hang the various points and ideas you want to share about the place. Now for the main course: building a story.
RELATED: IMPROVING ANIMAL WELFARE IN EGYPT From travel diary to travel story Or find some totally new way to start a story that no one has ever tried before. You can even ask a question or start with a quote. The hook can also introduce the main idea of your story or make an observation about the place or about travel, or life, in general. The most common way to start a story is to drop the reader in the middle of the action: “I’m standing naked on the rooftop of a Bangkok hotel with no idea how I got here” (or something). This is where you “hook” the reader and make her want to keep reading, so it pays to spend more time crafting that first sentence or two.įortunately, travel writing has a few road-tested hooks. The next most important part of the story is how it starts. Instead of writing about the San Francisco food scene, for instance, write about the foods unique to San Francisco (like fortune cookies who knew they were invented in San Francisco’s Chinatown?). Don’t try to cover too much in one story.
Read through your notes, look at your photos, take some time to think about the trip and jot down any themes or highlights you might be able to string together into a story. Different stories often require different strategies. Other times it helps to write down all the main ideas you want to include in a kind of mind-map. Sometimes the best way to find out what your story is about is to start writing and see where that takes you. Whatever it is, it could become the backbone of your story or at the very least the hook you start it with.
RELATED: MUCH MORE THAN A DESERT – A TRIP INTO THE SAHARA Finding story angles How-to stories: Don’t forget destination-less travel stories such as “How to” and stories based on issues or travel trends.Breakout boxes are also handy, a good place for information that might otherwise break the flow of the main story. Sub-headings help you structure a longer feature, organising your ideas into clusters. A word of warning: diary-style stories are generally easy to write, but can be boring to read unless there’s a reason you’re writing in a day-by-day format. That is, you can write about it roughly from start to finish, condensing some bits and expanding on others to create interest. If your trip takes you from A to B, whether by road or camel train, on foot or by cargo ship, the journey is your structure. These stories are usually short and written to a template set by the publication such as “48 hours in…” or a “Three-minute guide to…”. Quirky, odd-numbered lists such as “21 reasons you should live in Berlin” and “29 Insta-worthy places to go” are increasingly popular, particularly online, but the Top 10 is a classic that never goes out of style. These showcase a selection of experiences or destinations sharing a common theme. There are five common kinds of travel story that can help you make sense of your travel notes, each with a built-in structure: