ENGL2045 Travel Writing –
First Assignment (25% of total course mark)
One piece of travel writing - Deadline 4th November, 2011
The objective of this assignment is to produce an original piece of
creative non-fiction using techniques you have learnt on the course. The
following tips and guidelines might help.
1. Learn from what you have read and studied.
The course covers a wide range of travel writing. Take note of the
narrative techniques (use of first person/third person, past/present tense
especially), and the descriptive techniques (landscapes, encounters
with foreign places and people) used by other travel writers. Try to
follow their use of literary language to make your descriptions more
vivid, more striking, and more interesting. You might try to imitate the
style of another writer. Look for characteristic turns of phrase, frequently
used metaphors etc. which make a writer‟s language distinctive.
2. Finding a voice
It is always difficult to strike the right note in travel writing. Unless you
want to sound like a guide book, the tone you chose will usually be
personal. Compared with a critical essay, you will be less detached from
the subject – more personally involved (but not as personal as an email
to a friend). Try not to sound too naïve, and avoid cliché (see below).
Remember that you can take on the persona of someone else, or shift
between first and third person – i.e. between a detached narrator and
an emotively involved character.
3. Choosing a journey or a place to write about
You have several options here:
a) Writing directly from experience – an account of a journey you
have taken or a place you visited (this does not have to be a
Grand Tour - a good travel writer will find plenty to say about a
local bus journey, or a journey across a desert).
b) If you can‟t remember much about a trip, then embellish it by
introducing historical background to a place, and inventing
dialogues with people or incidents around which your story can
develop.
c) Fictional journey – an imaginary journey, or a travel story. You
can invent the whole journey basing it on places you know
about but have not visited yourself. If you write a travel story it
should still be centred around a first-person account of a
journey or a place visited.
4. Grammar.
Write succinctly and use short sentences. Avoid complex sentence
structures and be consistent with tenses (you can use present and past,
but not usually in the same sentence, unless you are using the
continuous present tense e.g. you can say, “We went to Florence where
the plan for the city reveals a medieval sense of cosmic space.” But not
“I went to the town of Sienna where I visit the museum”.
Make sure you have subject-verb agreement (especially singular/plural).
e.g not “The orange trees of Seville gives the town a tropical feel”.
5. Ask someone to read your travel writing.
Get some feedback from a friend. Someone else can quickly point out
where your tone is off, or where descriptions are not working.
6. Some do’s and don’t’s
a) Even though travel writing is a personal form of writing, avoid being
too self-centred. The main subject is the place you visit, not you. Check
that every sentence does not begin “I ….”
b) On the other hand, you are expected to give reflections and
impression of places, not just the facts about places. The travel writing
should have a sense of the narrator actually being there. There are
various ways of giving the text „presence‟ (see below).
c) You won‟t remember everything you thought or felt when you visited
a place, so make something up (travel writers do this all the time). Still
try hard to remember as much detail as you can though. You will be
surprised what memories come back to you.
d) Avoid formulaic descriptions – they quickly become tedious and
repetitive (remember Polo): “The first thing I saw was … then I went
to … where I saw …‟ This will probably not be very revealing or
interesting. Look at how other writers vary the way they move through
the narrative from one place and one point to the next.
e) Do give „presence‟ and immediacy to your narrative through
descriptions of sounds, smells, colours, images and dialogue. This
gives texture to the sense of place you are trying to develop.
f) Do consider adding some historical facts and details to give more
depth to a place, and also make your voice seem more authoritative.
But don‟t overdo the facts. You don‟t want to sound like a Wikipedia
entry.
g) If you write in the third person, be careful not to generalize too much,
as in “In France everyone eats in pavement cafés” or “everywhere in the
city there was evidence of Americanization”, or “Hong Kong is a city of
contrasts”. These are examples of clichés to avoid – they probably don‟t
tell the reader anything they don‟t already know...
h) Rather than generalize, do try to be specific about such things as
street names, local food, local customs, dress, markets etc. Create
atmosphere through the details.
i) Do try to write in such a way that the reader can picture what you are
describing. The visual element of travel writing is crucial. You might
think about how you would describe a place to someone beside you
who is blind. Or, think like a movie camera – describing a panorama
and then zooming into interesting details (or the other way around).
j) Do consider the plot structure of your narrative. Does it build quickly
towards an interesting scene or event? Does it have a „twist‟ in the final
paragraph revealing a surprise, an irony, or an unexpected turn of
events?
k) Avoid unnecessary preliminaries. Get straight to an interesting point
or scene, and forget about how you and your friends got to or from the
airport.
l) Do consider including a companion. You can create interesting double
perspectives by bringing someone else along on your travels, especially
if he or she has different interests and opinions from you.
m) It is difficult to completely avoid clichés, but at least avoid using the same
cliché more than once or twice: e.g.s “beautiful”, “awe-inspiring”,
“breathtaking”, “stupendous”, “snow-capped peaks”, “bustling markets”,
“hidden gems”, “stunning”, “fantastic”, “must-see”.
n) Do use this exercise as a way of increasing your vocabulary AND being
more precise in your writing.