If you love to travel and love to write but are unsure about how best to combine the two, this daylong workshop provides you with the practical information that you need to get started. Travel writer Michael Luongo explores how to use all your senses to create a compelling travel article that jumps off the page and makes readers want to know more about the destination and editors want to know more about you.
The morning session includes an overview of the various kinds of travel writing—travelogues, feature articles, fiction, memoir, and guidebooks, as well as writing for the Internet, and how social media fits into all of it. The importance of establishing objectives for your writing, determining the audience you are trying to reach, the tone of the piece, ways to take notes and remember the trip, and how to understand sense of place in travel writing are also addressed.
Following lunch (on your own), participants examine the structure of articles, including how to create strong, attention-grabbing, informative openings to hook their audience, along with other techniques for grabbing a reader’s attention; how to avoid clichés, overwriting, and other pitfalls; along with self-editing a piece to understand essential elements, flow, and length.
The day concludes with a discussion of the importance of marketing yourself and your writing, both before and after getting published. Topics include how to approach publishers and editors and what they look for; which publications accept submissions from freelance writers; how to pitch an idea for a book; self-publishing through Amazon and other sites; and travel-writing competitions and associations as a means of polishing your skills and developing a broad network of contacts.
Luongo has written for Smithsonian magazine, the New York Times, CNN, and National Geographic Traveler, and is the author of Frommer’s Buenos Aires guidebook and the Routledge book Gay Travels in the Muslim World.
