Where’s my Travel Writing Tip?

I’m currently jaunting through Central America, so the tips may not be uploaded every day at the moment. I managed to stock a few up in advance, but not quite enough to cover the fortnight I’ll be away. Normal service shall be resumed shortly though.

#24 - Film-related travel stories

Or taking advantage of the set-jetters.

Filming locations
One excellent source of story ideas is the cinema. If a big movie is slated to come out soon, you can bet your bottom dollar that will be a market for a story on the filming locations used in it.
This is especially true if it’s been filmed somewhere exotic.

James Bond
I’ve now lost count of how many stories I’ve sold that have a tenuous link to James Bond. I once made the decision that I was going to watch all of the films, make notes of what happened in particularly interesting destinations, and then research where those destinations are.

Multiple articles
It was a real bugger of a task – at one point I never wanted to watch a Bond film again – but it paid off. I’ve sold multiple articles based on that research, and the material is timeless. Every two years or so, when a new Bond movie is released, I can re-package it and sell it on again.
It may be as the cities of James Bond, it may be as Bond’s beaches, it may be as the lairs of Bond villains. Either way, most of the work is done.

Quantum of Solace
Quantum of Solace – the latest in the Bond series - is out in November. Which reminds me – I should really start pitching the Bond material out again, especially given that I’m actually in the film*. It’s practically guaranteed that there will be a glut of Bond-related travel articles out there at the time.
I’m already doing two pieces on places featured in the new film (Panama and Siena, Italy), and I’m sure others will be doing more.

Pirates of the Caribbean
It’s not just Bond of course – most big films lead to a bit of a travel boom. There was Pirates of the Caribbean in St Vincent and the Grenadines, Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and all manner of plodding costume dramas in England.
I’ve ended up trotting out travel articles on Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, The Italian Job, Star Wars, Roman Holiday, Mad Max, The Matrix and probably many more.

Internet Movie Database
But how do you find out about where these locations are and which movies are coming up? Well the Internet Movie Database is a fabulous resource, but can be scant on the details. Otherwise, tourist boards are always keen to promote anything filmed in their area. They’ll almost certainly have a list of films that have visited in the past, and ones that are due to arrive.

Apocalypse Now
Then there’s searching on the internet. Want to find out where the river from Apocalypse Now** is? Just do an internet search. The results may not be accurate, but at least they’re a starting point.

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*I was in Siena while the crew were filming Il Palio, the famous horse race held in the city centre. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pick myself out in the crowd in a wide shot. And I’m telling everyone that I’m the star until they can prove otherwise.

** It’s the Pagsanjan River in the Philippines, if you must know.

#23 – Picking the right notepad

Or why good things come in small packages.

Fussy about the notepad?
It’s amazing how picky some travel writers can be about the notepads they use. Some aren’t fussy at all – they’ll take any old scrap of paper, or whatever’s lying around in their hotel room. Others are incredibly specific, and like Ernest Hemingway, will only use a Moleskine.
I’m not even going to begin to push you towards one sort of pad. But I will try and explain why I favour the ones I go for. And I shall start with a cautionary tale.

Large pad = easy filing
When I first started out as a full time freelance travel writer, I’d carry a large pad around with me, trying to get all the notes from one trip into one pad.
There was good logic to this – it would make filing the notes away a lot easier: One per trip – it’s logical.

Five days worth of notes
And then I lost it three quarters of the way through the trip. Five days worth of notes, all gone. I manage to rescue some of it from memory, but a lot of the little details were gone, and I’d say I probably lost out on two or three stories as a result.
That, as you can imagine, hurt.

The advantages of small notepads
Since then, I have learned from my mistake. I now use a series of small notepads – a maximum of two days’ travelling per pad, and never more than one destination in one pad. And after experimenting, I’ve found that there are a few other characteristics I like:

- Soft cover, not hard cover. It’s more comfortable in the pocket.
- A cover that can be written on. It sounds silly, but many notepads have glossy covers or covers that are so dark that the writing can’t be seen. And when you have piles of pads in a drawer, being able to look at which one it is from the cover is a great help.
- Lined paper. It keeps my scrawling in some sort of check. With plain paper, it’s absolutely all over the place.
- Small enough to keep in my pocket, ready to be withdrawn when needed. But big enough to be able to get a decent amount of material in there over the course of a day.
- If ring-bound, I prefer the binding to be on the side. When it’s at the top, pages and the cover have a tendency to tear off when you lift it out of your pocket.

But, as I say, this is entirely subjective. Everyone has a pad that suits them best – it’s just a case of finding it.

#22 – Why round-up articles are more likely to be accepted

Or taking advantage of the gap in the market.

Less competition
Editors (on the whole) love list articles, but that’s not the only reason you should start thinking about ideas for some and pitching them. The other is that other writers aren’t pitching them. There’s less competition.

Not glamorous – but profitable
Putting together a round-up article isn’t particularly glamorous or exciting, but that’s precisely why you should do it. Think about it – if you prefer to be writing flowing, literary prose about one destination, then there’s a high chance that most other writers out there are too.

Gap in the market
So if most other writers are pitching destination pieces that they enjoy writing, there’s something of a gap in the market, isn’t there? If you’re prepared to do the round-ups, then you’ve got a better chance of making a sale.

#21 – Why editors love round-up articles

Or playing the numbers game

Money-spinning list articles
Round-up – or list – articles are brilliant money-spinners for the freelance travel writer. I’m afraid that if you keep coming back to this site, you’re probably going to get bored of me saying that. I’m not going to apologise for this – it is a point well worth emphasising. Even if it is with a sledgehammer.

Editor response
I will always remember the response of one of my editors when I pitched him one of these best-of pieces. I can’t even remember what it was now (probably something like Top Ten Adrenaline Rushes in Australia), but the e-mail he sent commissioning it was very illuminating.

Number on the cover
I’m paraphrasing a little here, but his response was something along the lines of: “Yep, sounds great. And it’ll keep the publisher happy – get a number on the cover and all that.”
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But an enticing magazine cover is a hugely important factor in getting readers to pick up and buy a magazine.

Top Ten or Fifty Best?
And list articles will do that. Think about when you read through a magazine or travel section. Most of us will flick past stories about destinations we’re not interested in. But when there’s a Top Ten, Fifty Best or 100 To Do Before You Die, we’ll look. Well I certainly do, and magazine sales figures suggest that others do too.

Menu of choices
Why do we do this? It’s partly out of curiosity – we want to know which has been deemed the best, and want to argue over it. It’s also partly because we like having a menu of choices – if we fancy going to a tropical island, it’s nice to have bite-sized round-ups of a few tropical islands to look through.

Selling more copies
To the publisher, however, it’s all about the bottom line. Sell more copies, make more money. And if having a few numbers on the front (30 greatest, top 50, whatever) sells more copies, then they’re going to want articles that allow them to do that.
And unless the editor doesn’t want to keep his or her job, (s)he is going to be looking for that sort of piece to put on the cover too. The magazine can have some of the best writing in the world, but ultimately the editor’s performance will be based on how many people buy the thing.

Not an isolated incident
This editor wasn’t the first to mention this tendency to me either – another said much the same thing when I proposed 50 Things To Do In Australia For Free to her. “Ooh – that’ll look good on the cover...”

#20 – Using trivia in round-up articles

Or making money from themes.

Can’t get to the world’s biggest cave?
In my previous post, I suggested using snippets of pub quiz-worthy trivia as a basis for stories. This is all very well, but what if you can’t get to the place? It’s all very well, for example, knowing that the world’s biggest cave is the Sarawak Chamber in Malaysian Borneo, but it’s a right bugger to get to. And not cheap either.

Round-up articles: Bread and butter
So does this information become useless again? Not at all – it’s just a case of using it in a different way. And by that, I mean a round-up article.
Round up articles are great bread and butter for travel writers. A lot of the time, you don’t need to go to the places mentioned – just find five, ten, twenty things linked by a theme, write 100 or so words on each and put in details of how to get there.

Writing for the internet
It’s not glamorous work, but it can lead to good money. It’s also the sort of thing that many editors want to balance out their destination-based pieces. And if writing for the internet, then round-ups are almost certainly what the editor is after.

Record-breaking caves
To use the cave example, the Sarawak Chamber can easily be used as part of a round-up. That’s the biggest cave, but where’s the biggest cave complex? Where are the world’s oldest caves? The biggest accessible caves? The biggest stalagmites and stalactites? Work on slight variations on that theme, and you have a piece on record-breaking caves.

World’s booziest nations
The same applies to my Luxembourg example. Luxembourg consumes more alcohol-per-capita than any other, but what if you can’t get there to investigate more? Well, how about breaking the stats down? Look at which country consumes the most wine (it’s Luxembourg, again), the most beer (Czech Republic), the most rum, whisky, vodka and gin. There you have the basis for a piece on the world’s booziest nations.

Thinking in themes
A similar approach can be applied with almost any bit of trivia that has a vague relation to geography. If you know where the world’s shortest airport runway is, then a bit of research can lead you to a piece on the world’s scariest airports.
If you know where the world’s longest bridge is, then look into the tallest, the most expensive, the most used etc.
These pieces won’t always sell, of course, but the important thing is to start thinking in themes to make the most of the material you have. There’s good money in it.

#19 - Turn trivia into a story

Or how to make money from useless pub quiz knowledge.

Soaking up seemingly useless trivia
I am one of those people that has a tendency to soak up seemingly useless trivia. I may be hopeless at DIY, completely unable to identify a brand of car and terminally feeble in the kitchen, but ask me to list capital cities or unique endings of football team names and I’m in my element.
In short, I am the sort of person that’s quite useful to have on your pub quiz team.

Nuggets of information
So how does this fit in with being a travel writer? Well, there comes a point where that useless trivia isn’t so useless after all. Those little nuggets of silly information can come in quite useful. Let’s face it, if you found it interesting enough to remember it, then surely some other people will too.

First World War and Compiegne
I’ve got many a story from this approach. On the very basic level, the fact is almost the story in itself. A classic example is in Compiegne, France. In a woodland clearing, there is restored replica of the railway carriage in which Germany surrendered in the First World War and France surrendered in the Second World War.
There’s also a small museum attached. To me, this is a fascinating tale, and a couple of editors clearly agreed.

World’s smallest divided landmass
Similarly, the Caribbean Island of St Martin/ Sint Maarten is the world’s smallest divided landmass. Check out both the French and Dutch side, compare them, and it’s an easy sell purely because it is such a geographical oddity.
In a similar vein there’s Nicosia (or Lefkosia) in Cyprus – the world’s only divided capital city.

Liechtenstein’s Royal Winery
Then there are other things where a bit of lateral thinking is required. When in Liechtenstein, I visited a winery. Not particularly interesting, you may think. But when you know it’s the Royal Winery, then there’s a story.
When you discover that it’s the only winery in the entire country, it’s even better. And if you know that Liechtenstein just happens to be the world’s smallest wine producing nation, it’s pure gold.

Alcohol per capita
But my favourite example of turning trivia into a story is with Luxembourg. Did you know that Luxembourg consumes more alcohol per capita than any other nation in the world? At face value, that’s a mildly interesting bit of trivia.
More importantly, it’s one that doesn’t half go against the country’s dull, sober image. The tip about looking for the opposite of a country’s reputation applies again here, but this was even better.

Discount rates and non-permanent population
Surely if they drink that much alcohol, there’s one hell of a party going on somewhere? I tried to find that party when I went there, investigated the best pubs and bars, and discovered what was distorting the statistics.
It turns out that the French, Germans and Belgians are nipping over the border to buy alcohol at discount rates, and the large non-citizen and non-permanent resident population skews the boozing-per-capita numbers.

Turn information into articles
That turned into a fascinating story that I managed to sell twice, barely changing a word. The point is, though, that many of us have such snippets of information in our head that can be turned into articles. Either that or we read them somewhere. They’re worth using – and not just in a pub quiz context.