Should I turn my old travel diary into a project and if so, how?
June 4, 2014 8:05 AM   Subscribe

In 2003 I backpacked alone around Australia for a few months. This was a pivotal trip for me, and I kept a detailed diary and took a ton of photos. I'm thinking about doing something with all this content instead of letting it just sit there. Should I publish it somehow, or is this a ridiculous idea?

The trip changed my career, personal direction, everything. Like most people who go on such trips, I met some crazy (for me) characters, did some crazy (for me) things… and learned a lot in the process. The diary is very detailed, very intimate; the photographs are pretty average travel snaps of people and places. I also have some other bits and pieces (mostly documents) from the trip.

So what I have is a chunk of content, rough but (I think) interesting in parts, organised around a specific subject, and chronologically ordered. It haunts me that I have this, locked in notebooks and plastic bags and dusty old CDs, and I'm getting older and I'm not doing anything with it... not even to preserve it. So my current idea is to turn it into a long-term web-based project, perhaps something like a digital scrapbook.

The thing is though, I'm not sure if I should be doing anything with it at all. Put simply, I think I'm too close to the content to think straight about it!

Questions I’m struggling with:

- Would anyone find it interesting/relevant, or is this just one big Me-trip? If it's not interesting, how could I turn it into something that might be?

- Should it be published publicly, or just be a personal project that I show to friends (or nobody!)? If it’s public, what should be stripped out? Should I try to publish it as a fiction; something that happened to someone else?

- What format could it take (even offline)?

Can you give me next steps, ideas, questions I should answer to get clarity on this? Anything that can help me structure my thoughts? Good examples of where this has been successfully done? Or whether I should just abandon this idea entirely and move to something else?

(Apologies if this question isn’t clear, guys. When it comes to this potential project my head really isn’t...)
posted by scrm to Media & Arts (9 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I went on 3 month backpacking trip 5 years ago. It was amazing, not life changing but a seminal part of my experience. I had a blog that was well followed by friends and took lots of pictures (unlike you, it seems). I went to picaboo just this year and thematically (mostly geographically) put my pictures in a photo book. I added some random blog entries (and just pieces-- the text was way too long) and added some statistics like population and distance traveled.

It sits on my shelf but it was a immensely satisfying experience in nostalgia. I'd do something like this at the minimum.
posted by sandmanwv at 8:13 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


In real life, unless you're a really amazing or established writer or photographer, no one will want to publish this.

HOWEVER, I love the idea of making a project to share with friends. A pal of mine spent a year living and traveling through Asia and kept an incredibly detailed diary (like the one you describe). She turned the journal into a scrapbook with all her souvenirs, photos, ticket stubs etc., and I really enjoyed getting to look at it. It was a great way for her to remember her trip and share her experiences with us back home. I remember at the time thinking what an incredibly cool project it was - what a great thing it would be to share with her kids in the future, etc.

If you want to put it online, I did that with a trip I took to Europe in 2006. I used Wordpress to publish entries & photos while I was there and scanned & uploaded all the other stuff when I got home. My friends and family got a kick out of reading it, and I'm glad to have it now, but obviously I've never made money off it (nor did I expect to).
posted by goodbyewaffles at 8:14 AM on June 4, 2014


Also for the record, I think my friend's physical scrapbook is infinitely cooler than my blog - there's something so wonderful about a person's handwriting and scribbled notes in the margins. It's very romantic. A blog...is not so much.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 8:16 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


If the trip was important to you, it's important to remember and publishing it could be a great way to go down memory lane yourself and share with others.

Option A: You're going to have to self-publish this.

My recommendation would be to either a) learn all about it yourself or b) hire someone to put your bits and pieces into a beautiful collection, and then head over to CreateSpace, amazon's Print on Demand wing, submit the work, get yourself a copy, and maybe a few copies to give away to friends, family, etc.

Option B: You're going to have to put this online.

My recommendation would be to get a WordPress.com blog and start putting in the bits and pieces, on a daily basis, until you have everything online. Then you just send folks the URL and you're off to memory lane and sharing your experience.

Either of these ideas is totally cool, you just need to decide how you want to present your trip to the world, and then go from there.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 8:28 AM on June 4, 2014


I think a blog would be the natural way to go since its a nice format for a combo of written and visual material. I'd be interested in reading this if it was one of my friends, or if I had ever been to Australia or had plans to go there (which I don't per se, but if this was about a trip to say, Italy which I have more particular interest in, I would definitely be interested in reading about it.)

I actually have similar material from a trip to Italy in 2005 that I'm working on organizing into a scrapbook. I don't have plans to put it online - too personal for me - but if I did, it might be neat to scan some of the scrapbook pages for a blog. (And in any case I am thinking of scanning certain excerpts from my journals to incorporate into the scrapbook.)
posted by Shadow Boxer at 8:31 AM on June 4, 2014


Do it if you think you'd get something out of the process of doing it. I think it sounds like a great idea, myself.

In 1997, I kept a completely paper-based travel diary that I taped train tickets, pictures, etc, into, and I still have it on a shelf. It's a nice artefact of the trip.

In 2010, I kept a travel diary online, which involved some setup work (customizing a Wordpress installation). People still stumble across it every now and then when they're contemplating the same trip. So it's some benefit to some people out there, and that was one of my goals for it. But I mostly did it for personal gratification, and I'm glad I did.
posted by adamrice at 8:59 AM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The main thing that is complicated with publishing it is figuring out what you're publishing it for.

Because the material is so old, it probably isn't useful as any kind of guide to Australia, because the details will have changed over the decade since you were there.

So you'd probably want to turn it into some kind of memoir. Which is great. I love travel memoirs, and your story fits pretty well with the general idea of that kind of work.

Next order of business. Is what you have actually relevant to anyone other than yourself? I'm going to be super frank here, as someone who played with the idea of becoming a travel writer and learned that it's more complicated than it looks:

Lots of people have formative travel experiences. Lots and lots and lots. To the point that it's almost a cliche. Experiences like this -- especially if you're an American, where long term international travel is somewhat unusual -- seem extremely unique and important, but ultimately they're not important to anyone but the person having the experience.

But this doesn't mean that it's not worth writing that travel memoir! You can go to any bookstore and see travel memoirs about places like Prague and France, places that are well on the beaten tourist trail, and were when those authors decided to write their books. And I don't know that there is a book out there about traveling around Australia as an American. Depending on what your trip was like and how you frame it, yeah, sure, I can see someone pitching that as a book and selling it to a publisher.

But there's another hurdle, here. How good a writer are you? And do you have any other writing experience that shows you can do this? Are you already a well-known writer or person with name recognition, where people will buy your memoir just because they're curious about what scrm's trip to Australia was about? The two memoirs I linked above are by a best-selling novelist and a staff writer for the New Yorker. Your memoir is much more likely to be published if you're an especially talented writer with experience to back that up, or if you have some name recognition that will sell books.

On the other hand, you mention wanting to do something web-based with all this. In that case, yeah, I think you should just do it. There are fewer hurdles to publication if you can just do it yourself, on the web. I think you should brace yourself for it not to get a lot of traffic, or not to make you famous, just because there isn't a lot of precedent for that type of project. People aren't out looking for online travel scrapbooks.

You could turn it into a blog, which would give people a good framework for finding it (someone googling "travel blog Australia" will potentially find you), but even so, I don't think you'd have as big a chance of getting noticed or bringing your work public as you would if you were able to sell it to a publisher in book form. I blogged a similar trip I took to India in 2008, and I'm pretty sure that site gets basically zero traffic, ever, even though my experiences are unique enough that people here at metafilter sometimes send me mefi mail asking for India travel advice. My India blog is just sort of floating around on the internet in a blogspot subdomain, maybe reaching people, maybe not, but getting zero meaningful feedback.

If you really don't care about anyone else ever seeing it, I would just concentrate on digitizing and preserving what you have, or maybe making it more accessible to yourself and future family/friends you could see sharing it with. Maybe this involves the internet, or maybe this just means an afternoon at Kinko's with a document scanner and a thumb drive. One important thing is to store all paper originals (photos as well as journals) in archival quality acid-free containers.
posted by Sara C. at 10:43 AM on June 4, 2014


Oh, and another fun idea -- I once curated a gallery show of artists' books, and one of the pieces we chose was an artist's walk through Paris which she made in book form. It was sort of a map/pastiche/collage type of thing, which could either be read as a conventional book or unfolded into a map of the city which featured text and illustrations of her walk. On the off chance that you are into the visual arts at all, you could take the general gist of your trip, as documented in your journals and photos, and turn it into a piece like this. Maybe something digital, or maybe a physical object, depending on what you're most confident with.

For something like this I would just appreciate it as the beautiful artwork that it is, and not worry about getting it out to the general public.
posted by Sara C. at 10:46 AM on June 4, 2014


Archivist here. Down the road, a repository may be interested in acquiring it (diaries are a huge research goldmine for social science researchers and historians).

If nothing else, and even if you aren't interested in archiving it beyond your own sphere, make sure you're actively preserving the physical content, and if you decide to digitize it, also preserve the digital files. Advice for preserving the physical, advice for the digital.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:21 PM on June 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


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