Travel Quiz
Last month the Victorian Writers Centre [http://www.writers-centre.org/] grilled me on the sidelight of travel writing - does it pay? How much? And how the hell can a literate bum get away with it?
At least a bunch of questions along those lines. See if you can’t derive your own brand of sense from Part A, as appearing in the centre’s March issue:
1 How did you get into travel writing?
The verbs chose themselves in a way – I travel and I write. So why not put both in the same sentence, I thought.
As a feature writer, I’ve only dipped my freelance toes into the travel genre, sending stories to papers about life on a cargo ship, or jaguar-spotting in Belize.
Since then, writing Cassowary Crossing – A Guide to Offbeat Australia, the project was more consuming and workaday. Over a year I raided each state, armed with trivia research, and drove to every corner, looking for the wombat hospital, or cheese museum, and compiling a thousand verbal snapshots as I went. The book was an ideal antidote to a bleaker true-crime book I’d written.
2 How do you sustain yourself as a travel writer? How do you keep material fresh and travel never routine? What inspires you to continue?
Okay, three questions there:
1) Don’t rely wholly on a travel income, you’ll die. Nurture the gig as part of several other tangents. I survived 18 months in South America, living lean and sending back word puzzles to the Sydney Morning Herald. The internet makes nomadic wage-earning even more possible.
As for the Cassowary book, I mapped the idea out, and Penguin lunged with a contract. Kicking things off, you’ll need to do the hard yards first, before any cheque appears in the mail. Editors seldom commission amazing ideas, and never unknown writers. You need to take the leap.
2) Style gets round staleness – plus humour or sharp observation – and try to find new eyes with each landscape. Don’t eternally compare, rather be. If Mozambique is getting ho-hum, go home. Or time for another meridian.
3) Knowing life is short, and that warm bath of peers’ envy.
Check by in a few days for Part B.