Travel
Narrative, Travel and Making it Pay
by Greg Breining

Recently I did something really illuminating and depressing. I tallied up my writing jobs from the previous several months and calculated how much they paid per hour. I wanted to separate winners from losers, in hopes of focusing my efforts on the kinds of jobs that paid more.

I looked at jobs that paid least. What did they have in common? They were among my favorite stories to write. All had required time-consuming travel. While they paid a fairly good word rate, on a per-hour basis, they ranked with day labor.

This was bad news indeed since I fancy myself a travel writer.

So why do it? Why write about travel when travel is time-consuming and expensive? Why do it when the competition is fierce? Why do it when any flight in an airplane, no matter how short or how smooth, leaves me feeling as drained and bruised as a street fight?

And how can one make it pay?

I didn't start out to be a travel writer. As a cub reporter, inspired by Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism and later by John McPhee's New Yorker pieces, I had discovered the joy and challenge of writing narrative nonfiction. In the years that followed, before I realized there was such a genre as travel writing, I found myself writing about whitewater kayaking, wilderness canoeing, backpacking and other adventures. In outdoor travel I discovered a source of personal drama and contemplation I could express in articles and essays. A brief turn as a bureaucrat on the Minnesota wild and scenic rivers program required—required!—that I paddle a bunch of streams and write a guide book about them. Soon I was freelancing how-to and where-to travel pieces as well as narratives.

Yet it was narrative writing that remained the source of my satisfaction. I especially enjoyed writing about places that were never what they seemed—whether traveling in Siberia during the waning days of the Soviet Union, or tracking tigers through South China, where everyone insists the tiger still lives when in fact it no longer does. There's a delightful dissonance in such experiences, a kind of binocular vision—one eye guided by reason, the other by hope and irrationality. It's a wonderful frame of mind for a writer. As Frances Mayes has said, "I like to read about journeys when the traveler is charged or changed by the place, when the traveler is moved from one psychic space to another."

Usually, I'm looking for some story within the context of place—a story that might stand on its own even if I weren't on the road. So, on a recent trip to Puerto Rico I wrote an essay about trying to discover the spirit of fly-fishing that might have existed in the Florida Keys a half century earlier. I wrote an adventure piece about the apprehension of exploring an underground river and cave. Another piece told about kayaking around the old U.S. Navy bombing range on Isla Vieques. A fourth story, on efforts to restore the exceeding rare and endangered Puerto Rican parrot, was hardly a travel story at all. But as Bill Bryson has said, "Travel writing is the most accommodating of genres. As long as you leave the property at some point, you can call it travel writing."

Still, if this travel business is to be sustainable, one eventually has to make some money at it. So what advice can I give to make one's travels profitable?

1. Decide if you're going to take "fam" or "comp" trips. Some publications, including The New York Times, won't hire travel writers who go on discounted press trips. So if you want to write for them, don't. While press trips let you see a lot in a hurry, they also provide an unreal experience not available to regular travelers or conducive to writing narrative. For a writer, those may be bigger problems than whatever bias that arises.

2. Line up work before your trip. I prefer to have two or three assignments, travel oriented or not. They give structure to the trip and ensure I'll come home with something. Working on several assignments helps pay for the time of traveling. Landing an assignment (or several) from major markets in advance is a good way to get someone else to pay for your trip. So much the better if chance meetings and spontaneous events provide fodder for an unplanned essay or article. Try to make the most out of every trip.

3. Remember that travel is an indispensable part of your work. If you're interested in making ends meet, don't think you can ignore the time spent traveling simply because you enjoy it. You can fool yourself only so long before going broke. ASJA member and fellow travel writer Todd Pitock told me recently there are three reasons to write: for money, prestige, and fun. In most travel writing, fun is a given. But, Todd said, any worthwhile assignment should answer at least two of those needs.

4. Take time to reflect. Follow your emotions. What did you find most exciting/interesting/frightening today? What happened that would never have happened at home? Who was the most memorable character you met today? What do you see/hear/smell/taste/feel at the moment? What have you seen that reinforces/contradicts expectations? Write a headline and deck for your experiences today.

5. Get out of your bubble. Sometimes as I'm grooving on the experience of travel I have to remind myself to really explore what people think about their lives and the place they live. The human stories we hear allow us to understand and to write. Travel writer and editor Thomas Swick said it beautifully: "What can you know—and feel—about a place when you don't meet the people who live in it? We learn through human contact, and the knowledge that we gain is of infinitely greater value than any number of practical tips."

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Greg Breining writes about travel and nature for The New York Times, Audubon, Wildlife Conservation, National Geographic Traveler, and others. Books include Super Volcano and Wild Shore. After writing about travel for 30 years, he feels he's still making progress.