When I first started writing for the Wheel & Anchor newsletter in July 2018, I was 7 years into working as a travel writer.
In so many ways it’s a strange profession: there are no official rules for doing it, there are a million ways to approach it, and you can simultaneously be having the most thrilling time of your life and also in desperate need of an actual, honest-to-goodness holiday. (When everyone else is relaxing, that’s when you’re supposed to be working your hardest.)
But however crazy the profession may feel from within, you do pick up a lot of really useful skills that can be applied to a life built around travel and meeting strangers for a living – and for that, I’ll always be grateful.
This month I’m moving on from Wheel & Anchor – and looking back over the hundreds of pieces I’ve written for the newsletter has reminded me of the ways I’ve tried to pass along some of what I’ve learned, in the hope it’ll be of use as you continue to explore this magnificent and endlessly fascinating planet for yourself.
Here are ten of my favourite tips from writing from the road!
1. How To Tell A Great Travel Story
“Any good drama is made of a series of scenes. The same is true for travel stories – although you also have the option of zooming out and telling the big picture using well-chosen words and images triggering your audience’s imagination.
But mainly, it’s scenes. Small, intimate moments that your audience can really imagine themselves being in the middle of.
What would grab your attention quicker – a discussion of the wider economics of the Azerbaijani carpet trade, or a scene where someone’s actually trying to buy a carpet?”
2. Why You Need A Guide: Lessons From A Weird, Wet Walk Across Berlin
“The internet is always going to win on facts. If you want the telephone number and address of a particular restaurant, you’re always going to check Google first.
However, if you want to know why that restaurant is worth visiting, and if it’s the best place to spend your precious time, you’re going to need much more than simple facts.
You’re not going to want to trawl through page after page of TripAdvisor or Yelp reviews, looking for the best picks. You want a particular perspective that chooses the kinds of experiences you’re after, while instilling the sense of curiosity and wonder that you can only get from exploration. You want an opinion.
What you need, in other words, is a guide.”
3. Three Ways To Break The Ice Like A Travel Writer
“The best way to start a conversation with someone is to make them think it’s their idea.
When people are on the defensive, they clam up. This is a major problem for stalwart ice-breakers because by necessity, they’re “on the attack”. Their job is to sidle into someone’s personal space, scaling the walls of their aloofness and fencing wildly across the drawbridge of their confusion until a connection is made.
Imagine a stranger just fired a question at you in the street, and because of their accent, you didn’t understand it. It’s an awkward moment, the very opposite of what they intended. Shoulders are hunched, perspiration is beading, throats feel tight – and embarrassment grows exponentially.
Sometimes this is simply unavoidable. Sometimes awkwardness is a requirement and you have to push through.
But here’s one way to do it differently…”
4. Sometimes It’s Great To Just Stop: Why A Long Stay Is a Good Stay
“Short-term kinds of travel can be very hard on the heart. They don’t give you time to make many friends, to watch many of the rhythms of local life, to push back at your ingrained bounded awareness so you can really, truly see where you are. And for people pursuing my particular profession, it generally gets in the way of all the things that a working travel writer needs to do to find something worth writing about.
It’s also, beyond a certain point, just not terribly fun. Once the novelty wears off and you’ve drained all your supplies of adrenaline, your inner child starts yelling “are we there yet?” at a volume that’s difficult to ignore.
For the last three and a bit years, my antidote to this approach has been the long stay – where you visit somewhere worth exploring, and then you drop your bags and stay put for weeks or sometimes even months, until you feel like you’ve really done the place justice.”
See also: Wheel & Anchor’s various LiveAway trips.
5. Woah! The Surprising Science Of Awe (No Rainbow Required)
“Berkeley’s research suggests that experiencing awe has the following beneficial effects on us:
- increased feelings of humbling self-diminishment (nicknamed “the small self”), where you realise how relatively unimportant and temporary your struggles are compared to other things
- a deeper sense of connection to the people and places around you
- an increased capacity for critical thinking and healthy skepticism
- a more positive outlook on life
- a decreased concern with materialism, ie. Stuff.
So should we all immediately go chasing rainbows?”
6. Follow Your Nose: In Appreciation Of The Sense We Really Can’t Do Without
“When was the last time you let aromas guide you when you go exploring?
As a travel writer it’s an eternal mystery to me how devalued our noses are as tools of global discovery – and why it’s not a common thing to be presented with a “smell map” of a place when you first arrive, highlighting the sources of the most interesting and evocative lungfuls of air.
Yet I’m far from the first to wonder this…”
7. I Was A Terrible Suitcase-Packer. Here’s How I Got Better
“What’s your first instinct when you go shopping for a new suitcase?
Well, like any kind of shopping, you want value for money – in this case, the most baggage for your buck. And if it’s a bit oversized, not a problem, you’ll have room to bring more souvenirs and gifts back home, right?
This is not true. What it means is you’ll have the freedom to take even more stuff you don’t need.”
8. Better Than Travel Insurance: The Subtle Art Of Deterring Pickpockets
“According to a travel insurance comparison company’s recent survey, you’re most likely to be pickpocketed in Italy, and specifically, in Rome. This is very relatively speaking, of course: the chances of having your possessions stolen as you travel is still very small indeed. Millions of people travel around Europe every year without falling prey to thieves (and apart from that one time in Düsseldorf in 2012, I’ve never again been bothered by thieves, despite many dozens of trips). The upshot: you’ll almost certainly not be pickpocketed.
But as that crazily stressful time proved to me, just one theft can start an avalanche of consequences that can quickly unravel your entire trip. So yes, let’s all assume it’s not going to happen – but what if it did?
This is the reason for travel insurance (which you should always have), but on the actual day the theft is happening, you won’t care that you’ll eventually get your money back – you’ll be far too distressed and angry that it’s happened at all.
So, as highly unlikely as these events are, how can we make them even less likely as we travel the world?”
9. Never Forget Your Passport With This One Clever Trick
“If you’ve ever said to yourself or someone else “Oh dear, sorry, this is so embarrassing, I’m so forgetful” – well, you’re stating the obvious. Of course you’re forgetful: as a human, you’re made that way. If we didn’t forget huge amounts of things every single day, our minds would overload in no time. It’s as necessary to our ability to function as the domestic chores that keep our homes ticking along, like washing the dirty crockery that piles up in our sink.
This means it’s not something to be ashamed of, but something to manage. It’s all about making sure you’re forgetting the right things (eg. what a waste of time reading that tabloid news story was, or how much our big toe hurt when we stubbed it coming out of the shower) and retaining the actually-worth-remembering stuff, like meeting appointments, and anniversaries, and the PIN number for your credit card, and so on.
Only thing is: the important stuff is hard to remember too! We can’t just rely on our memory to rank this stuff in a sensible way. We’re too overloaded with raw information, too distracted and just too naturally forgetful by default, and our minds are less like neatly-indexed filing cabinets and more like that warehouse of endless rows of unmarked crates at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark...“
10. Making Good Travel Memories: Why Pen & Paper Works Best After All
“In terms of what your hands are doing, there is a huge difference between typing a word and writing it. When you type, it’s much the same physical action happening – maybe a bit of variation with what finger or hand you use to hit which key, and a little pivoting of your arms or wrists as they move over the keyboard, but that’s about it. You make nearly the same exact motion to type every key on a keyboard – which is why they’re so strongly associated with repetitive stress injury.
And tablets & smartphones? You can be hardly moving at all, frozen in place apart from a couple of your fingers doing all the work – and, perhaps more importantly, you’re using those fingers in almost precisely the same way for each letter you type.
Most of us can type much faster than we can write because we’re moving our bodies much less, which seems like a huge win in efficiency terms. But it seems the cost of that is we’re shortcutting our body’s role in helping us think and remember what we’re typing. That’s what handwriting is: it’s the slower, more physically arduous and complex way, but that physical demand upon us seems to be serving a really useful cognitive purpose. It’s just how we learn things properly.”
Find the complete list of Wheel & Anchor’s original writing within the Stories archive.