travel writing

September 30, 2005 10:20 AM

Good Travel Writing - i'd like to learn how to write better. Not for professional submission, just for me. Any suggestions of good books? (Besides the Best American Traveling Writing that's released annually) Good websites with advice or excerpts?
posted by jare2003 to travel & transportation (21 comments total)

Read William Least Heat Moon. Blue Highways is the standard roadtrip book, but also make sure you read PrairyErth, which is the opposite of a travel book - he stays in one place and writes about the microcosm of a county in Kansas. Just gorgeous stuff.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 10:32 AM on September 30, 2005

Anything by Jan Morris.

On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

The website Travel Intelligence has some decent writing, but it's a bit hit or miss.
posted by occhiblu at 10:38 AM on September 30, 2005

Better link for Travel Intelligence's Destinations page. (They've added a bunch of hotel and commercial stuff that makes the actual articles somewhat hard to find.)
posted by occhiblu at 10:44 AM on September 30, 2005

If you'd like to improve by reading some good amateur travel writing by a one-time Irish barrister, try Heldencrow, especially the world reports (I've posted it before). It's out of date but the writing is excellent. Examples: 1, 2, 3.
posted by nyterrant at 10:46 AM on September 30, 2005

50 Writing Tools

I can second Blue Highways.
Bruce Chatwin is also good. I liked In Patagonia and The Songlines.
W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn is amazing. No, really they are.
The Journals of Lewis and Clark are fantastic reading.
posted by driveler at 10:52 AM on September 30, 2005

Also, travel writing is an extremely popular avocation (I say this as a former travel writer/editor and current travel-industry employee). I constantly see courses at extension schools, adult ed centers, and writing or publishing centers (like Media Bistro) for travel writing. (In fact, Media Bistro has been sponsoring a bunch of travel-writing seminars led by Lonely Planet authors for the past month or so, all over the country.)

So if you're really serious and want feedback rather than just good examples, there should be a lot of resources available to you.
posted by occhiblu at 10:56 AM on September 30, 2005

Travels With Charley
It's really old now, but still good.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 11:15 AM on September 30, 2005

Three favorites:

Three Men in a Boat
Three Men on the Bummel
both by Jerome K. Jerome

and

Roughing It
by Mark Twain

I haven't found anything funnier than the first two. The third one is also funny and a delightful, historically informative, easy read.
posted by redteam at 11:27 AM on September 30, 2005

if you're going to add Twain, also see A Tramp Abroad and Innocents Abroad. Hell, for that matter, include Life On The Mississippi.
posted by cptnrandy at 11:56 AM on September 30, 2005

Theroux, Chatwin

Graham Greene's Travels with my aunt.

Pico Iyer (though, a bit pretentious and up his own arse at times, he also makes interesting points.)

trashy fiction-ish side: Sean Condon, William Sutcliffe, Emily Barr

A couple of LP writers have turned in some interesting fiction that is very travel oriented. I think LP publishes those. LP publishes some collections of travel writing as well.
posted by shoepal at 12:04 PM on September 30, 2005

I love Bill Bryson's travel writing. But that's probably not what you're asking. He may have written on writing, but I'm not aware of specific examples. Sorry.
posted by GuyZero at 12:09 PM on September 30, 2005

Rolf Potts has a good blog/website geared towards travelers and travel writers alike. Vagablogging.net.

His section for writers sounds like something you're looking for.

He interviews other famous travel writers, and gives tips for people interested in jumping in the business.

He's also got a great book while you're at it.
posted by nitsuj at 12:13 PM on September 30, 2005

Do you want to write about horizonal travels, or vertical ones?

If the latter, then may I suggest a cool selection of writings by Greg Child, or Fred Beckey's Challenge of the North Cascades; and of course Jon Krakauer
posted by seawallrunner at 12:35 PM on September 30, 2005

Tim Cahill
posted by kirkaracha at 2:21 PM on September 30, 2005

You must, must, must get a copy of Abroad by Paul Fussell. It's a great meditation on travel/tourism in general (excerpt) that focuses on British literary travel between the wars. Or skip straight to one of the better books he touches upon, The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron.
posted by Vervain at 2:35 PM on September 30, 2005

Travels, by Michael Crighton (yes, that Michael Crighton). It's an autobiography, but I loved the way he handles travel story-telling.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:16 PM on September 30, 2005

Civil_Disobedient means Michael Crichton, not some obscure, mysterious Crighton that no one knows about.
posted by redteam at 5:27 PM on September 30, 2005

Alain de Botton has a book called Art of Travel, which isn't so much travel writing as meditations on travel(liing).

VS Naipaul (an area of darkness)

Robert Young Pelton
posted by shoepal at 7:21 PM on September 30, 2005

I second Twain's Innocent's Abroad. Here's a great excerpt that, if nothing else, proves that the phenomenom of juniors coming back from a semester overseas and calling their dorm rooms "flats" is nothing new:

“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can ‘show off’ and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our own untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off...The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.”
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:11 PM on September 30, 2005

not some obscure, mysterious Crighton that no one knows about.

Man, I knew I was spelling his name wrong. Thanks.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:00 AM on October 1, 2005

np, Civil_Disobedient ... I hope that didn't sound snarky, btw :)
posted by redteam at 6:13 AM on November 3, 2005