Search Results for: travel writing

LEARN HOW TO WRITE COMPELLING STORIES ABOUT TRAVEL AND DISTANT LANDS.

Getting paid to go on holiday may sound like a great lifestyle. But there’s a lot of hard graft involved – particularly, breaking into this industry in the first place. Few industries have changed as rapidly as publishing, and within publishing few areas have changed as rapidly as travel publishing. This book will bring you bang up-to-date with the latest trends in blogging, social media, magazines, websites, travel guides, and travel books. It provides specific advice for each sector, on how to write and, just as importantly, how to get published. Written by Beth Blair, an American travel writer who has been published in books, magazines, and online, this book is full of practical and inspiring advice that will help you broaden your horizons and turn your travel writing into cash.

ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children’s books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

Edinburgh is a city whose history is written on its face. The Old Town on its crowded rock, sloping down from the Castle to Holyroodhouse, has not significantly changed its atmosphere since the turbulent fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when riots, processions, or public executions jammed the High Street. And the very different era that followed the bloody religious wars of the seventeenth century is epitomized by the elegant streets and squares of the New Town – the eighteenth-century Enlightenment whose writers, philosophers and lawyers made Edinburgh famous.

This anthology of extracts from letters, memoirs, diaries, novels and biographies of interesting visitors and inhabitants, including the writings of Scott, Boswell, Cockburn, John Knox and many others, recreates for today’s visitors the drama, the history, and the life of the city in buildings and places that can still be visited. The daring Scottish recapture of the Castle from the English in 1313; the confrontation between Calvinist John Knox and Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in Holyroodhouse; an eye-witness account of the execution of Montrose at the Mercat Cross in 1650; reeking slop-pails in the wynds and polite manners in the ballrooms. . .

LEARN HOW TO SEE THE WORLD AND PUBLISH YOUR TRAVEL WRITING.

Get Your Travel Writing Published will give those of you who love to travel and long to write about it the essential tools to turn it into a profession. By the end of this book, you will know what steps you will need to take to get your work published, the ABCs of writing winning travel articles and the markets available to you, all while avoiding common beginner’s pitfalls.


ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children’s books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

The Tuscan landscape, writes H. V. Morton, “is embroidered everywhere by human living, and there is scarcely a hill, a stream, a grove of trees, without its story of God, of love or death.” Morton’s stories and observations of Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia, and Veneto, whether relating to the fantastic reconstruction of the La Scala opera house or the superstitious lovers at Juliet’s Tomb, make his style as engaging as the landscape and people he evokes.

“Re-centers and gives voice to a diversity of women naturalists and writers across time.” —Cultivating Place In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that makes their work both distinct and universal. Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history, Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES and THE INVENTION OF WINGS and her daughter comes a touching and perceptive memoir about mothers and daughters that will resonate with women of all ages.

Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Ann chronicle their travels together at a time when each had reached an important turning point in her life. What emerged was a quest for Ann and Sue to redefine themselves and also rediscover one other. Against the backdrop of the sacred sites of Greece, Turkey and France, Sue grapples with the problem of how to expand her vision of swarming bees into the novel that she feels compelled to write, whilst newly-graduated Ann ponders the classic question of what to do with her life.

In 1960, when he was almost sixty years old, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover his native land. He felt that he might have lost touch with its sights, sounds and the essence of its people. Accompanied only by his dog, Charley, he travelled across the United States in a pick-up truck. His journey took him through almost forty states, and he saw things that made him proud, angry, sympathetic and elated. All that he saw and experienced is described with remarkable honesty and insight.

From the walkable breweries of Ashville, North Carolina, to the Ølfestival in Copenhagen, Oktoberfest in Brazil to the breweries of Beijing, discover 101 traditional, quirky, absurd, must-visit beer destinations across the globe. Find the world’s most romantic pub crawl in Bruges, drink beer in paradise in Latin America or step into Germany via Bangkok, Thailand.

Complete with tasting notes, drinking tips and handy address lists, this is the perfect gift for both beer enthusiasts and keen travellers alike.

The first ever travel book showing you how to travel using your intuition – your best ever travel guide. You don’t need money to experience the wonder of the world, only time. Even a free afternoon is enough to propel you along the silver path of your intuition. However long you go for, you will be shown how to prepare, enjoy your destination and integrate your experiences when you return. Your magical journey does not exist in isolation. It can provide more than memories -like what you truly want to do in your life. Dr. Morrell provides examples of people who used their journey to change their life – and details of how you can follow them.
Dr Morrell identifies five principles for external and internal exploration. There are special sections for gappers, career-breakers, seniors, the differently abled and those travelling with children or animals – as well as tips on deciding how and when to go and how to use your trip to beat the credit crunch. It includes a comprehensive resources section with green and money-saving tips, recommended books and websites. Travelling Magically is a wonderful guide to improving your journey, as well as alchemising your life into a truer, brighter one.

In this book, award-winning travel writer Sarah Woods answers the question she is asked several hundred times each year: ‘how do I become a freelance travel writer?’ She offers practical advice on turning the dream into reality – from getting started to making a decent living. Sarah shares her tips on contacts, hard work, and the best way to attract a healthy dose of luck. In this book she: – De-mystifies the pitching process and guides would-be authors through the publishing maze; – Explains how to balance being on-the-road with meeting international deadlines across different timelines; – Provides tips on how to win ongoing business and how to secure the best rates of pay; – Looks at how to foster long-term relationships with editors and publishers; – Provides a guide to the world-wide market for those writers who want to maximize earning potential and writing outlets all across the globe; – Offers guidance to the required writing styles of consumer and trade publications, together with how to use travel writing skills in TV, radio and film.

This journal encourages us to take up travelling by bike – on short or long rides, through urban, suburban or rural areas, along roads, coasts and mountain paths – and record these colourful journeys.

Nigel Peake’s beautiful drawings map out ideas and guide riders through new landscapes, both real and imaginary.

With 20 illustrations, blank pages to write on and 4 envelopes to store mementoes of your journeys.

With beautiful watercolor illustrations and thoughtful prompts, this guided travel journal offers a place to reflect on and appreciate the beautiful details of your journeys.

As much about mindfulness as it is about travel, it will make every trip a transformative experience.

This journal features:

* Compact, travel-friendly design, with a durable hardcover case and rounded corners
* Uncoated interior paper perfect for writing and sketching
* 75 beautiful watercolor illustrations by Emma Block to offer inspiration and joy
* 50+ prompts to help you mindfully reflect on your adventures

On the Road meets Tuesdays with Morrie in this pilgrimage by “an American classic” (Newsweek) to thank his most important mentors through memorable meals and conversations

“Some years later, George Plimpton offered to punch me in the nose,” recounts Rick Bass, remembering fondly a conversation with the famed Paris Review editor in his office, in which Plimpton, who had been slugged by Archie Moore, offered to connect Bass to a “hoary genealogy” that would include Ali and Frazier. Lineage has always been important to Bass. Before the punch-that-could-have-been, there was his failed bid to become Eudora Welty’s lawn boy, and his first meal with Jim Harrison, during which he could barely bring himself to speak. That supper would eventually inspire this book, Rick’s years-long pilgrimage to thank his heroes, and to pass on their legacy of mentorship to the next generation.

The poignancy of this journey of thanksgiving is intensified by the place in life at which Bass finds himself. He is nearing sixty, his daughters are now grown, and his wife of more than two decades, who accompanied him on that long-ago dinner with Jim Harrison, has called an end to their marriage. In the wake of this loss, Bass sets out, accompanied by two young writers, to recapture the fire, the hunger, that has faded from his life.

The Traveling Feast is a book about meeting one’s debts in two directions–sending gratitude to the old exemplars, and a few contemporaries, from Peter Matthiessen to David Sedaris and John Berger to Lorrie Moore, while paying it forward to the next generation of writers, believing in and supporting them as Bass was by his own heroes. Each chapter in this fruitful journey recalls the meeting, the meal, and the history–the writer of the past and of the now.

From the disastrous pecan tart to the illegally transported elk meat to the photo op gone awry are many resonant moments. What emerges is a guide not only to writing well but to living well, to sucking out all the marrow of life, in Thoreau’s immortal phrase. The Traveling Feast is a chronicling of the old ways, a cross-continent pilgrimage to show gratitude for a legacy of American literature and the writers who made it.

Ah, travel! New scenery, exciting adventures, time alone with a loved one. Truth is, travel can make or break a relationship. Just negotiating when to leave for the airport can be tricky: she insists on arriving hours ahead of flight time, he likes the excitement of a photo finish. But as Mary-Lou Weisman sees it, “The inevitable rage with which we begin each trip only helps us to better appreciate the good times that lie ahead.” Or maybe not. When people have jet lag, can’t speak the language, figure out the money, or maintain intestinal regularity, they get cranky. And since they don’t know anybody else in Kyoto to take it out on, they take it out on each other. Alas, couples therapy is rarely available on vacation, which is why we need this hilarious and truthful take on travel and togetherness. Using her own misadventures–from honeymoon through Elderhostel–Weisman exposes all the gender landmines: Destinations: He wants to outrun molten lava down a volcano, she prefers raking gravel in a Buddhist monastery. Motivations: She longs for a change of scenery, he hopes for a change of self. Preparations: She keeps a file of required sights, he won’t be bullied by travel guides. Accommodations: She divides every hotel room in half so he’ll know on which side of the bed to throw his wet towel. Inclinations: She shops a country, he eats it. This is the real skinny on what happens when Mars and Venus hit the road. With a sly wink, a comic nod, and just the right amount of optimism, Weisman shows us that despite the shortcomings of one’s beloved, harmonious travel is possible.

By most people’s standards, Josie Dew is hugely adventurous. By American standards, she is completely insane. For Americans drive everywhere: through cinemas, restaurants, banks, even trees. But driving past Josie as she pedalled across America was a new and alarming experience.

On her eight-month journey Josie experienced it all; race riots in Los Angeles, impossible heat in Death Valley, Sexual Tantric Seminars in Hawaii. From Utah to the Great Lakes, via improbable places like Zzyzx and Squaw Tit, her two-wheeled odyssey brought her into contact with all the wonders and worries of this larger-than-life country.

Highly entertaining, richly informative, TRAVELS IN A STRANGE STATE is a personal memoir of an improbable journey, revealing the United States as it is rarely seen – from the seat of a bicycle.

Some of the extraordinary women whose writings are including in this collection are observers of the world in which they wander; their prose rich in description, remarkable in detail. Mary McCarthy conveys the vitality of Florence while Willa Cather’s essay on Lavandou foreshadows her descriptions of the French countryside in later novels. Others are more active participants in the culture they are visiting, such as Leila Philip, as she harvests rice with chiding Japanese women, or Emily Carr, as she wins the respect and trust of the female chieftain of an Indian village in Northern Canada. Whether it is curiosity about the world, a thirst for adventure or escape from personal tragedy, all of these women are united in that they approached their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion and empathy for the lives of those they encountered along the way.

Features writing from Gertrude Bell, Edith Wharton, Isabella Bird, Kate O’Brien, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and many others.

Travel writing matters

Explore the world through this beautiful collection of the finest travel writing published in British media in the 21st century – as judged by some of the most respected travel writers in the world: Levison Wood, Monisha Rajesh, Jessica Vincent and Simon Willmore

The world has changed, but our desire to explore new places remains as strong as ever. The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century includes 30 outstanding travel stories published in British media over the last two decades, as chosen by some of the top names in travel writing today. Through travel’s most talented storytellers, you’ll face adversity along the Congo’s raging River Lulua, make new friends aboard Iraq’s night train, and embark on life-changing pilgrimages from India to Saudi Arabia.

This book is an ode to travel and all that it offers, but it’s also a celebration of a genre that brings the world closer to us. At its best, travel writing encourages empathy and inspires change. Join our award-winning writers in marvelling at the power and beauty of travel, and let them inspire you to fall in love with the world all over again.

The Responsible Traveller is your ticket to sustainable and ethical travel. This pocket-sized book provides the knowledge and tools that can help you to explore the world with a lighter footprint.

Whether you travel out of curiosity, to find respite, to remind yourself of how vast and wonderful our planet is, or in search of life-shaping adventures, having the freedom to explore can be exhilarating and hugely rewarding. However we owe it to the people, cultures, ecosystems and wildlife that we encounter along the way to travel with respect; to preserve our beautiful world for generations to come.

The Responsible Traveller will show you how to make actionable changes that result in more thoughtful and adventurous travels, while also doing our very best for Planet Earth. Through case studies and storytelling, you’ll learn about the environmental and social effects of tourism and gain a deeper understanding of cultural sensitivity. And through simple, achievable tips and practical lifestyle changes, you’ll discover how you can make an almighty difference in reducing your impact. Empowered with this information, perhaps your next adventure will be inspired by consideration, understanding and compassion.

Written with elegance, warmth, and humour, this highly original “teaching memoir” by William Zinsser,renowned bestselling author of On Writing Well gives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveller. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. They are the same decisions you’ll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the interior of West and Central Africa was still known to most of the outside world as the ‘White Man’s Grave’ and consisted of vast expanses of mysterious and threatening primeval forest. When Donald MacIntosh, 23-year-old Gaelic-speaking Scottish forester, was offered a position in Nigeria in 1954, it was a dream come true and he found himself posted to the hot, cloying humidity of those fabled lands. During the next 30 years he was to wander through some of the most remote areas of West Africa where he operated as a forest botanist. There he listened to the tales of ancient Africa from the lips of hunters, fishermen, chiefs and witch doctors from a vast diversity of tribes in myriad encampments. He drank palm wine with them and attended their village dances and ceremonies under the tropic moon. He had many adventures with the creatures of the forest, from the magnificent leopard to the instantly fatal spitting cobra. The sinister arcanum of primitive Africa is never too far away from the surface in this book, encountering a host of characters along the way – with exotic names like ‘Magic T. Sperm’ and ‘Famous Sixpence’ – whose stories are all told here.

Squeezed in between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide – not a country which lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler found out when she travelled alone with two carpetbags from the top to the bottom, form the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica.

This is Sara Wheeler’s account of a six-month odyssey which included Christmas Day at 13,000 feet with a llama sandwich, a sex hotel in Santiago and a trip round Cape Horn delivering a coffin. Eloquent, astute and amusing, CHILE: TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY confirms Sara Wheeler’s place in the front rank of today’s travel writers.

I had no life experience, zero common sense and had never eaten rice. I suffered from debilitating anxiety, was battling an eating disorder and had just had my heart broken. I hoped by leaving to travel the world I would be able to heal myself.

Instead, Lauren’s travels were full of bad luck and near-death experiences. Over the space of a year, she was scammed and assaulted; lost teeth and swallowed a cockroach. She fell into leech-infested rice paddies, was caught up in a tsunami, had the brakes of her motorbike fail and experienced a very unhappy ending during a massage in Thailand. It was just as she was about to give up on travel when she stumbled across a handsome New Zealander with a love of challenges…

The great explorers were the celebrities of their day – the romance and danger of their daring expeditions captured the public imagination and the world’s headlines to an extraordinary degree. Not all of them lived to tell the tale, of course, but those who emerged triumphant from jungle, desert or polar wasteland were hailed as if returning from beyond the grave. Journalists vied for their stories and publishers rushed their first-hand accounts of exciting and dangerous journeys into print for a wide and voracious readership.

Acclaimed travel historian John Keay introduces this selection of the best of these first-hand narratives, including those of John Ross and John Franklin, writing about their experiences in the Arctic; Richard Burton’s account of his search for the source of the Nile; John Speke on Lake Victoria; David Livingstone and Henry Stanley’s adventures in central Africa; Alexander McKenzie’s first crossing of America and Meriwether Lewis’s encounter with the Shoshonee; Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen’s voyages to the poles; and the poignant last words of William Wills in Australia and Robert Scott’s In Extremis.

Keay includes the experiences of four remarkable twentieth-century explorers: Hiram Bingham on the discovery of Machu Picchu; Wilfred Thesiger on Arabia’s Empty Quarter; Edmund Hillary on reaching the summit of Everest; and Harry St John Bridger Philby facing despair and defeat in the Arabian desert.

LEARN HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM BEING A WRITER BY WORKING FREELANCE.

Make Money From Freelance Writing takes you step by step through every avenue for making an income from professional writing. Covering everything from travel writing to writing self-help features and full-length book commissions, it also includes writing for new media and the practicalities of finding a route to market/self-publicity. Each chapter contains a diagnostic test, case studies, practical exercises and Aide Memoire boxes. Each chapter concludes with a reminder of the key points of the chapter (Focus Points) and a round-up of what to expect in the next (Next Step) will whet your appetite for what’s coming and how it relates to what you’ve just read.

ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children’s books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.