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The Case Against Travel

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa , whose wonderful “ Book of Disquiet ” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson , a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “ Hosts and Guests ,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk. In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist’s project is self-undermining. I’ll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.” He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count. Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can’t truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon. Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this , and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel. ♦

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Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

Are you ready to be a better travel writer? One of the best ways to do this is to read great travel writing examples from great travel writers.

Writing about travel in a way that keeps your reader reading is not always easy. Knowing how to write an irresistible first paragraph to entice the reader to keep reading is key. Writing a lede paragraph that convinces the reader to finish the article, story or book is great travel writing.  This article features travel writing examples from award-winning travel writers, top-selling books, New York Times travel writers, and award-winning travel blogs.

Ads are how we pay our bills and keep our blog free for you to enjoy. We also use affiliate links; if you make a purchase through them, we may receive a small commission at no cost to you.

The writers featured in this article are some of my personal favorite travel writers. I am lucky to have met most of them in person and even luckier to consider many friends. Many I have interviewed on my podcast and have learned writing tips from their years of travel writing, editing and wisdom.

11 Great Travel Writing Examples

Writing with feeling, tone, and point of view creates a compelling story. Below are examples of travel writing that include; first paragraphs, middle paragraphs, and final paragraphs for both travel articles as well as travel books.

I hope the below examples of travel writing inspire you to write more, study great travel writing and take your writing to a higher level.

Writing Example of a Travel Book Closing Paragraphs

Don George is the author of the award-winning anthology The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George , and the best-selling travel writing guide in the world: How to Be a Travel Writer .

He is currently Editor at Large for National Geographic Travel, and has been Travel Editor at the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, Salon, and Lonely Planet.

I had the wonderful opportunity to see Don speak at Tbex and read from one of his books as well as interview him on the Break Into Travel Writing podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the closing of Don’s ebook: Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus: Dispatches from a Year of Traveling Close to Home

I continued hiking up to Lost Trail and then along Canopy View Trail. Around noon I serendipitously came upon a bench by the side of the trail, parked my backpack, and unpacked my lunch. Along with my sandwiches and carrot sticks, I feasted on the tranquility and serenity, the sequoia-swabbed purity of the air, the bird and brook sounds and sun-baked earth and pine needle smells, the sunlight slanting through the branches, the bright patch of blue sky beyond.

At one point I thought of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, the Japanese practice that has become widely popular in the U.S. This was a perfect example of shinrin-yoku, I thought: Here I am, alone in this forest, immersed in the sense and spirit of these old-growth redwoods, taking in their tranquility and timelessness, losing myself to their sheer size and age and their wild wisdom that fills the air.

I sat there for an hour, and let all the trials, tremors, and tribulations of the world I had left in the parking lot drift away. I felt grounded, calm, quiet—earth-bound, forest-embraced.

In another hour, or two, I would walk back to the main paved trail, where other pilgrims would be exclaiming in awe at the sacred sequoias, just as I had earlier that day.

But for now, I was content to root right here, on this blessed bench in the middle of nowhere, or rather, in the middle of everywhere, the wind whooshing through me, bird-chirps strung from my boughs, toes spreading under scratchy pine needles into hard-packed earth, sun-warmed canopy reaching for the sky, aging trunk textured by time, deep-pulsing, in the heart of Muir Woods.

• You can read the whole story here: Old Growth: Hiking into the Heart of Muir Woods
• Please also download Don’s free ebook here:  Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus
• In addition to writing and editing, Don speaks at conferences, lectures on tours around the world, and teaches travel writing workshops through www.bookpassage.com .

Writing Example of a Travel Book Intro Paragraphs

Francis tapon.

Francis Tapon , author of Hike Your Own Hike and The Hidden Europe , also created a TV series and book called The Unseen Africa, which is based on his five-year journey across all 54 African countries.

He is a three-time TEDx speaker. His social media username is always FTapon. I interviewed Francis on the Break Into Travel Writing podcast about “How to Find An Original Point of View as a Travel Writer “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the opening of Francis’ book, The Hidden Europe:

“This would be a pretty lousy way to die,” I thought.

I was locked in an outhouse with no way out. Outhouses sometimes have two latches—one on the outside and one on the inside. The outside latch keeps the door shut to prevent rodents and other creatures who like hanging out in crap from coming in. Somehow, that outer latch accidentally closed, thereby locking me in this smelly toilet. I was wearing a thin rain jacket. The temperature was rapidly dropping.

“This stinks,” I mumbled. It was midnight, I was above the Arctic Circle, and the temperatures at night would be just above freezing. There was no one around for kilometers. If I didn’t get out, I could freeze to death in this tiny, smelly, fly-infested shithole.

My mom would kill me if I died so disgracefully. She would observe that when Elvis died next to a toilet, he was in Graceland. I, on the other hand, was in Finland, not far from Santa Claus. This Nordic country was a jump board for visiting all 25 nations in Eastern Europe.

You can find his book on Amazon: The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us

For $2 a month, you can get Francis’ book as he writes it: Patreon.com/ftapon

Intro (Lede) Paragraph Examples of Great Travel Writing Articles

Michele peterson.

Former banking executive Michele Peterson is a multi-award-winning travel and food writer who divides her time between Canada, Guatemala, and Mexico (or the nearest tropical beach).

Former banking executive Michele Peterson is a multi-award-winning travel and food writer who divides her time between Canada, Guatemala, and Mexico (or the nearest tropical beach). Her writing has appeared in Lonely Planet’s Mexico from the Source cookbook, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast’s Gold List, the Globe and Mail, Fifty-five Plus and more than 100 other online and print publications.

She blogs about world cuisine and sun destinations at A Taste for Travel website. I met Michele on my first media trip that took place in Nova Scotia, Canada. I also had the pleasure of interviewing about “ Why the Odds are in Your Favor if you Want to Become a Travel Writer” . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Michele’s Lede Paragraph Travel Writing Example

I’m hiking through a forest of oak trees following a farmer who is bleating like a pied piper. Emerging from a gully is a herd of black Iberian pigs, snuffling in response. If they weren’t so focused on following the swineherd, I would run for the hills. These pigs look nothing like the pink-cheeked Babe of Hollywood fame.

These are the world’s original swine, with lineage dating back to the Paleolithic Stone Age period where the earliest humans decorated Spain’s caves with images of wild boars. Their powerful hoofs stab the earth as they devour their prized food, the Spanish bellota acorn, as fast as the farmer can shake them from the tree with his long wooden staff. My experience is part of a culinary journey exploring the secrets of producingjamón ibérico de Bellota, one of the world’s finest hams.

You can read the full article here: Hunting for Jamón in Spain

Perry Garfinkel

Perry Garfinkel has been a journalist and author for an unbelievable 40 years, except for some years of defection into media/PR communications and consulting.

He is a contributor to The New York Times since the late ’80s, writing for many sections and departments. He has been an editor for, among others, the Boston Globe, the Middlesex News, and the Martha’s Vineyard Times.

He’s the author of the national bestseller “ Buddha or Bust: In Search of the Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All ” and “ Travel Writing for Profit and Pleasure “.

Perry has been a guest on my podcast twice. He gave a “ Master Class in Travel Writing ” you can listen to the full podcast here . He also shared “ How to Find Your Point Of View as a Travel Writer ” you can listen to the full episode here .

Perry’s Lede Travel Article Example from the New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — A block off Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown – beyond the well-worn path tourists take past souvenir shops, restaurants and a dive saloon called the Buddha Bar – begins a historical tour of a more spiritual nature. Duck into a nondescript doorway at 125 Waverly Place, ascend five narrow flights and step into the first and oldest Buddhist temple in the United States.

At the Tien Hau Temple, before an intricately carved gilded wooden shrine and ornate Buddha statues, under dozens of paper lanterns, Buddhists in the Chinese tradition still burn pungent incense and leave offerings to the goddess Tien Hau in return for the promise of happiness and a long life.

You can read the full article here: Taking a Buddhist pilgrimage in San Francisco

Elaine Masters

Elaine Masters apologizes for pissing off fellow travelers while tracking story ideas, cultural clues, and inspiring images but can’t resist ducking in doorways or talking with strangers.

She’s recently been spotted driving her hybrid around the North American West Coast and diving cenotes in the Yucatan. Founder of Tripwellgal.com, Elaine covers mindful travel, local food, overlooked destinations and experiences. Elaine was a guest on my podcast where we spoke about “ How to Master the CVB Relationship “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Elaine’s Lede Example

I jiggered my luggage onto the escalator crawling up to the street. As it rose into the afternoon light, an immense shadow rose over my shoulder. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I burst into giggles, looking like a madwoman, laughing alone on the busy Barcelona boulevard.  The shadow looming overhead was the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It had mesmerized me forty years earlier and it was the reason I’d finally returned to Spain.

You can read the full article here: Don’t Miss Going Inside Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s Beloved Cathedral

Along with his wife, photographer Mary Gabbett, Bret Love is the Co-Founder/Editor In Chief of Green Global Travel and the Blue Ridge Mountains Travel Guide.

He’s also an award-winning writer whose work has been featured by more than 100 publications around the world, including National Geographic, Rolling Stone, American Way, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Bret’s Lede Example

Congo Square is quiet now. Traffic forms a dull drone in the distance. A lone percussionist taps out ancient tribal rhythms on a two-headed drum. An air compressor from Rampart Street road construction provides perfectly syncopated whooshes of accompaniment.

Shaded park benches are surrounded by blooming azaleas, magnolias, and massive live oaks that stretch to provide relief from the blazing midday sun. It’s an oasis of solitude directly across the street from the French Quarter.

Congo Square is quiet now. But it’s here that the seeds of American culture as we know it were sown more than 200 years ago. And the scents, sounds, and sights that originated here have never been more vital to New Orleans than they are now, more than a decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

You can read the full article here: Treme, New Orleans (How Congo Square Was The Birthplace Of American Culture)

Middle Paragraph Examples of Great Travel Writing Articles

Mariellen ward.

Canadian travel writer and blogger Mariellen Ward runs the award-winning travel site Breathedreamgo.com , inspired by her extensive travels in India.

She has been published in leading media outlets worldwide and offers custom tours to India through her company India for Beginners. Though Canadian by birth, Mariellen considers India to be her “soul culture” and she is passionate about encouraging mindful travel.

Mariellen’s Middle Paragraph Example

While the festival atmosphere swirled around me, I imbued my  diya with hope for personal transformation. I had come to India because a river of loss had run through my life, and I had struggled with grief, despair and depression for eight years. I felt I was clinging to the bank, but the effort was wearing me out. Deciding to leave my life and go to India was like letting go of the bank and going with the flow of the river. I had no idea where it would lead me, what I would learn or how I would change. I only knew that it was going to be big.

You can read the full article here: The River: A tale of grief and healing in India

Joe Baur is an author and filmmaker from Cleveland currently based in Berlin. His work has appeared in a variety of international publications, including BBC Travel, National Geographic, and Deutsche Welle.

He regularly reports for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and is the author of Talking Tico detailing his year of living in Costa Rica and traveling around Central America. I interviewed Joe about “ How to Find Unique Travel Stories “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Joe Baur’s Middle Paragraph Example

I first became aware of the Harz mountains and the Brocken when reading the works of some of Germany’s great writers, like Goethe and Heinrich Heine. Legends of witches congregating with the devil being the main theme of the mountain’s mythology. I, however, was more interested in a refreshing time spent in nature rather than reveling with the devil.

The first stage from Osterode to Buntenbock was a warm-up to the more rigorous stages ahead. It began on sidewalks before sliding into the forest sporting a healthy shade of green — a gentle jaunt that made my hiking boots feel a bit like overkill given the dry, pleasant weather.

You can read the full article here: Follow the witch through the forest: 5 days hiking Germany’s Harz

Samantha Shea

Samantha is a freelance travel writer with bylines in Matador Network, GoNomad and more. She also runs the travel blog Intentional Detours which provides thorough guides and tales related to offbeat adventure travel in South Asia and beyond.

When she’s not writing she enjoys cycling, hiking, the beach, as well as language learning.

Samantha Shea’s Middle Paragraph Example

Suddenly, the spark of a match pulsed through the early-fall afternoon and my head snapped towards the men. Amir touched the flame to an unidentifiable object that seconds later made itself known by the deep earthy scent of Pakistani hashish.

Amir’s ice blue eyes focused intently on his creation: a combination of tobacco and nuggets of greenish-brown charas. He forced the mixture back into the cigarette, before bringing it to his pursed lips, flicking the match, and setting flame to his high.

I reached out from the cot to take my turn and took a deep inhale, acutely pleased. I savored the familiar burn of the drag, the rows and rows of corn and apple plants in front of me, the stuttered cacophony of animal exclamations behind me, and the generosity of the men to my left, some of whom we had just met an hour before.

You can read the full article here: Thall Tales: A Hazy Afternoon in Thall, Pakistan

Final Paragraph Example of Great Travel Writing Articles

Cassie bailey.

Cassie is a travel writer who has solo backpacked around Asia and the Balkans, and is currently based in Auckland. Alongside in-depth destination guides, her blog has a particular focus on storytelling, mental health, and neurodiversity.

Cassie’s Final Paragraphs Example

So my goal is to feel, I guess. And I don’t mean that in a dirty way (although obvz I do mean that in a dirty way too). This is why we travel, right? To taste crazy new foods and to feel the sea breeze against our skin or the burn on the back of our legs on the way down a mountain. We want to feel like shite getting off night buses at 4am and the sting of mosquito bites. We know we’re going to feel lost or frustrated or overwhelmed but we do it anyway. Because we know it’s worth it for the ecstasy of seeing a perfect view or making a new connection or finding shitty wine after a bad day.

My goal is never to become numb to all of this. To never kid myself into settling for less than everything our bodies allow us to perceive. I’m after the full human experience; every bit, every feeling.

You can read the full article here: Goals inspired by life as a solo backpacker

Lydia Carey

Lydia Carey is a freelance writer and translator based out of Mexico City who spends her time mangling the Spanish language, scouring the country for true stories and “researching” every taco stand in her neighborhood.

She is the author of “ Mexico City Streets: La Roma ,” a guide to one of Mexico City’s most eclectic neighborhoods and she chronicles her life in the city on her blog MexicoCityStreets.com .

Lydia’s Final Paragraphs Example

Guys from the barrio huddle around their motorcycles smoking weed and drinking forties. Entire families, each dressed as St. Jude, eat tacos al pastor and grilled corn on a stick. Police stand at a distance, keeping an eye on the crowd but trying not to get too involved.

After this celebration, many of the pilgrims will travel on to Puebla where they will visit some of the religious relics on display in the San Judas church there. But many more will simply go back to their trades—legal and illegal—hoping that their attendance will mean that San Judas protects them for another year, and that he has their back in this monster of a city.

You can read the full article here: San Judas de Tadeo: Mexico’s Defender of Lost Causes

I hope you enjoyed these examples of travel writing and they have inspired you to want to write more and write better! The next article that will be published is a follow-up to this and will include travel writing examples from my first travel writing teacher, Amanda Castleman. This article will include travel writing tips from Amanda and travel writing examples from her students as well as one from her own writing.

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Alexa Meisler is the editorial director of 52 Perfect Days. Born in Paris, France she has since lived in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. She currently resides in San Diego with her husband and son where they enjoy exploring California and Mexico.

Travel has always been a part of her life; traveling to such places as Morocco, Tangiers and Spain as a young child as well as taking many road trips to Mexico with her grandparents as a young girl. Since then, she has traveled abroad to locations such as Russia, Taiwan and throughout Europe.

Prior to working at 52 Perfect Days she was a freelance travel writer; focusing on family and women’s adventure experiences.

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7 June 2024

A Writer’s Guide to Great Travel Writing

Travel writing is about visiting different places and observing things that are unique to the specific destination, like the landscape and geography, the people and their customs, the history, culture, and food. Travel writing informs people about particular locations through articles and blogs, and often provides tips about travelling to that destination. But it is also a form of literary non-fiction that tells a more detailed narrative about a journey or a place. 

What is travel writing

Travel writing is one of the oldest forms of literature — the earliest known records of travel literature date all the way back to the second century. Exploring new places and embarking on voyages has always been part of our DNA, and ever since humans have put pen to paper, we have written about the new places that we’ve discovered close and far, and similar and different from home.

There are many styles of travel writing, from the journalistic to the literary, to memoir , which can be both serious and humorous. Journalistic approaches to travel writing might explore a place’s history, politics, people, and culture in a measured and well-researched way, providing the reader with a realistic and well-informed account of what the place is like. More literary approaches to travel writing tend to be more personal, reflecting on the author’s personal response to a particular place or journey, which might be presented as a daily journal or a more expansive narrative . 

Types of travel writing

Travel writing is a fertile form of non-fiction, which intersects with other subjects, like nature , history, adventure, memoir, and food. While one travel book might paint a famous, familiar city in a new light, another might describe a treacherous journey through a little-known and isolated mountainscape, while another might delight you with sensory descriptions of a country’s delicacies, and another might entertain you with witty observations about a place or regale anecdotes of a holiday gone horribly wrong.

Travel writing can take readers from the hostile shores of Scotland, to the bustling streets of Mexico City, to the wild Australian outback, all focusing on different things — the natural landscape, the writer’s emotional response to the place, the unique food and fauna, or the local people. 

As travel writing is so broad, readers usually come to it for different reasons. They might be interested in deepening their understanding of a specific country’s culture, they might want to learn more about a cuisine, they might want to immerse themselves in the colours, smells and noises of a far-flung city or wild landscape, and they might want to be entertained as well as informed. 

What travel writing includes

It’s important that travel writing shows, not tells. Readers want to be immersed in a place , feeling as if they are there with the narrator, and in order to do that, an author must make sure that their writing is rich with description, using vivid language to tell compelling stories and paint colourful scenes.

Travel writing should speak to the senses – drawing out beautiful, surprising and entertaining descriptions of sight, smell, taste, sounds, and touch. Travel writing often combines different types of descriptions, from amusing anecdotes, to historical details, to flashbacks from the author’s own memories, to close-ups of minute details, to long shots of impressive vistas and scenes.

How you choose to compose travel writing depends on your own personal choice and writing style, but it’s helpful to keep in mind the different techniques available to you to keep the writing interesting for the reader. 

Tips for travel writing

• Open with a compelling and snappy anecdote or description to hook the reader’s interest from the beginning 
• Give the reader a strong sense of where you are through vivid language 
• Ground the reader in time, in climate, and in the season
• Introduce yourself to help the reader identify with you and explain the reason for the trip, and why you are writing about this particular place 
• Think about how best to describe the travel or journey unfolding in terms of the timeline and which themes, stories or memories you might introduce, and when 
• Include details about the people you come across, the sights you see, the history of a place, the things people say 
• Remember to appeal to the five senses to help transport the reader to the place 

Reading List

If you’re thinking of writing about travel, it’s a good idea to read some of the top-selling and most interesting books in this area to help you get a flavour of different styles and reading experiences. Reading some of these books should also give you helpful insights into different ways you can present your experience of a country or place, how to weave specific themes into your travel writing and how to create an intimate reading experience. 

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson 

Notes from a Small Island is one of the quintessential pieces of travel writing about Britain told from an American writer’s point of view. Bryson’s wry, perceptive observations on his adoptive country provoke both snorts of hilarity and uncomfortable winces of recognition for those familiar with British culture.

Before moving back to America, Bryson took a trip around Britain to take stock of the nation’s public face and private parts, and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite.

This is the perfect example of funny travel writing that fuses personal observations with history and culture.  

The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit by Helena Attlee

The Land Where Lemons Grow is a delightful book about Italy’s unexpected history, told through its citrus fruits.

By combining travel writing with history, recipes, horticulture, and art, Helena Attlee takes the reader on a unique and rich journey through Italy’s cultural, moral, culinary and political past.

Having lived in Italy for over 30 years, Helena Attlee gives us a really unique piece of travel writing which uses one object as a different way into a country’s fascinating history.

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux 

No list of travel books would be complete without a nod to Paul Theroux, a master of the genre.

The Great Railway Bazaar is Theroux’s classic and much-loved homage to train travel. From the Orient Express, to the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, to the Trans-Siberian Express, Theroux embarks on an epic rail journey from London across Europe to Asia.

This was a trip of discovery made in the mid-seventies, well before the West had embraced the places, peoples, food, faiths, and cultures of the East. Theroux vividly describes his encounter with the foreign and exotic, in an energetic style which is both pacy and lean. 

The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot by Robert MacFarlane

In The Old Ways , MacFarlane travels Britain’s ancient paths and discovers the secrets of Britain’s beautiful, underappreciated landscapes.

Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads, and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes crisscrossing the British Isles and beyond, Macfarlane discovers a lost world — a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts.

MacFarlane is a master at totally immersing the reader in a particular place. To read this book is to be transported to different parts of the British Isles and see them afresh with new eyes and appreciation.

Reading this book feels like an adventure and flight of discovery. It is a perfect example of how travel and nature writing intersect. 

One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake 

In One More Croissant for the Road , the Guardian’s food columnist Felicity Cloake embarks on a cycling trip around France to sniff out the delicacies that make the French nation the crème de la crème of European cuisine.

Cloake charts her journey, from the beach to mountain, Atlantic to Mediterranean, polders to Pyrenees, tasting the glorious local dishes at each stop.

Cycling 2,300km across France in search of culinary perfection, from Tarte Tatin to Tartiflette, she puts all that she learns about the French craft of cooking into creating a definitive recipe for each dish included in the book.

One More Croissant for the Road , is another great example of how travel writing can intersect with other subjects – food and memoir – and it is also the perfect love letter to France.

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Examples of Creative Nonfiction: What It Is & How to Write It

When most people think of creative writing, they picture fiction books – but there are plenty of examples of creative nonfiction. In fact, creative nonfiction is one of the most interesting genres to read and write. So what is creative nonfiction exactly? 

More and more people are discovering the joy of getting immersed in content based on true life that has all the quality and craft of a well-written novel. If you are interested in writing creative nonfiction, it’s important to understand different examples of creative nonfiction as a genre. 

If you’ve ever gotten lost in memoirs so descriptive that you felt you’d walked in the shoes of those people, those are perfect examples of creative nonfiction – and you understand exactly why this genre is so popular.

But is creative nonfiction a viable form of writing to pursue? What is creative nonfiction best used to convey? And what are some popular creative nonfiction examples?

Today we will discuss all about this genre, including plenty of examples of creative nonfiction books – so you’ll know exactly how to write it. 

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What is Creative Nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is defined as true events written about with the techniques and style traditionally found in creative writing . We can understand what creative nonfiction is by contrasting it with plain-old nonfiction. 

Think about news or a history textbook, for example. These nonfiction pieces tend to be written in very matter-of-fact, declarative language. While informative, this type of nonfiction often lacks the flair and pleasure that keep people hooked on fictional novels.

Imagine there are two retellings of a true crime story – one in a newspaper and the other in the script for a podcast. Which is more likely to grip you? The dry, factual language, or the evocative, emotionally impactful creative writing?

Podcasts are often great examples of creative nonfiction – but of course, creative nonfiction can be used in books too. In fact, there are many types of creative nonfiction writing. Let’s take a look!

Types of creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction comes in many different forms and flavors. Just as there are myriad types of creative writing, there are almost as many types of creative nonfiction.

Some of the most popular types include:

Literary nonfiction

Literary nonfiction refers to any form of factual writing that employs the literary elements that are more commonly found in fiction. If you’re writing about a true event (but using elements such as metaphor and theme) you might well be writing literary nonfiction.

Writing a life story doesn’t have to be a dry, chronological depiction of your years on Earth. You can use memoirs to creatively tell about events or ongoing themes in your life.

If you’re unsure of what kind of creative nonfiction to write, why not consider a creative memoir? After all, no one else can tell your life story like you. 

Nature writing

The beauty of the natural world is an ongoing source of creative inspiration for many people, from photographers to documentary makers. But it’s also a great focus for a creative nonfiction writer. Evoking the majesty and wonder of our environment is an endless source of material for creative nonfiction. 

Travel writing

If you’ve ever read a great travel article or book, you’ll almost feel as if you’ve been on the journey yourself. There’s something special about travel writing that conveys not only the literal journey, but the personal journey that takes place.

Writers with a passion for exploring the world should consider travel writing as their form of creative nonfiction. 

For types of writing that leave a lasting impact on the world, look no further than speeches. From a preacher’s sermon, to ‘I have a dream’, speeches move hearts and minds like almost nothing else. The difference between an effective speech and one that falls on deaf ears is little more than the creative skill with which it is written. 

Biographies

Noteworthy figures from history and contemporary times alike are great sources for creative nonfiction. Think about the difference between reading about someone’s life on Wikipedia and reading about it in a critically-acclaimed biography.

Which is the better way of honoring that person’s legacy and achievements? Which is more fun to read? If there’s someone whose life story is one you’d love to tell, creative nonfiction might be the best way to do it. 

So now that you have an idea of what creative nonfiction is, and some different ways you can write it, let’s take a look at some popular examples of creative nonfiction books and speeches.

Examples of Creative Nonfiction

Here are our favorite examples of creative nonfiction:

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

No list of examples of creative nonfiction would be complete without In Cold Blood . This landmark work of literary nonfiction by Truman Capote helped to establish the literary nonfiction genre in its modern form, and paved the way for the contemporary true crime boom.  

2. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is undeniably one of the best creative memoirs ever written. It beautifully reflects on Hemingway’s time in Paris – and whisks you away into the cobblestone streets.  

3. World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

If you’re looking for examples of creative nonfiction nature writing, no one does it quite like Aimee Nezhukumatathil. World of Wonders  is a beautiful series of essays that poetically depicts the varied natural landscapes she enjoyed over the years. 

4. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of the most beloved travel writers of our time. And A Walk in the Woods is perhaps Bryson in his peak form. This much-loved travel book uses creativity to explore the Appalachian Trail and convey Bryson’s opinions on America in his humorous trademark style.

5. The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

 While most of our examples of creative nonfiction are books, we would be remiss not to include at least one speech. The Gettysburg Address is one of the most impactful speeches in American history, and an inspiring example for creative nonfiction writers.

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Few have a way with words like Maya Angelou. Her triumphant book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , shows the power of literature to transcend one’s circumstances at any time. It is one of the best examples of creative nonfiction that truly sucks you in.

7. Hiroshima by John Hershey

Hiroshima is a powerful retelling of the events during (and following) the infamous atomic bomb. This journalistic masterpiece is told through the memories of survivors – and will stay with you long after you’ve finished the final page.

8. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you haven’t read the book, you’ve probably seen the film. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the most popular travel memoirs in history. This romp of creative nonfiction teaches us how to truly unmake and rebuild ourselves through the lens of travel.

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Never has language learning brought tears of laughter like Me Talk Pretty One Day . David Sedaris comically divulges his (often failed) attempts to learn French with a decidedly sadistic teacher, and all the other mishaps he encounters in his fated move from New York to Paris.

10. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Many of us had complicated childhoods, but few of us experienced the hardships of Jeannette Walls. In The Glass Castle , she gives us a transparent look at the betrayals and torments of her youth and how she overcame them with grace – weaving her trauma until it reads like a whimsical fairytale.

Now that you’ve seen plenty of creative nonfiction examples, it’s time to learn how to write your own creative nonfiction masterpiece.

Tips for Writing Creative Nonfiction

Writing creative nonfiction has a lot in common with other types of writing. (You won’t be reinventing the wheel here.) The better you are at writing in general, the easier you’ll find your creative nonfiction project. But there are some nuances to be aware of.

Writing a successful creative nonfiction piece requires you to:

Choose a form

Before you commit to a creative nonfiction project, get clear on exactly what it is you want to write. That way, you can get familiar with the conventions of the style of writing and draw inspiration from some of its classics.

Try and find a balance between a type of creative nonfiction you find personally appealing and one you have the skill set to be effective at. 

Gather the facts

Like all forms of nonfiction, your creative project will require a great deal of research and preparation. If you’re writing about an event, try and gather as many sources of information as possible – so you can imbue your writing with a rich level of detail.

If it’s a piece about your life, jot down personal recollections and gather photos from your past. 

Plan your writing

Unlike a fictional novel, which tends to follow a fairly well-established structure, works of creative nonfiction have a less clear shape. To avoid the risk of meandering or getting weighed down by less significant sections, structure your project ahead of writing it.

You can either apply the classic fiction structures to a nonfictional event or take inspiration from the pacing of other examples of creative nonfiction you admire. 

You may also want to come up with a working title to inspire your writing. Using a free book title generator is a quick and easy way to do this and move on to the actual writing of your book.

Draft in your intended style

Unless you have a track record of writing creative nonfiction, the first time doing so can feel a little uncomfortable. You might second-guess your writing more than you usually would due to the novelty of applying creative techniques to real events. Because of this, it’s essential to get your first draft down as quickly as possible.

Rewrite and refine

After you finish your first draft, only then should you read back through it and critique your work. Perhaps you haven’t used enough source material. Or maybe you’ve overdone a certain creative technique. Whatever you happen to notice, take as long as you need to refine and rework it until your writing feels just right.

Ready to Wow the World With Your Story?

You know have the knowledge and inspiring examples of creative nonfiction you need to write a successful work in this genre. Whether you choose to write a riveting travel book, a tear-jerking memoir, or a biography that makes readers laugh out loud, creative nonfiction will give you the power to convey true events like never before.  

Who knows? Maybe your book will be on the next list of top creative nonfiction examples!

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The Essence of Immersion

The art of hanging out

Even as a teenager, I knew I wanted to write documentaries on paper. Of course, at that young age, I had no language, no terminology, no understanding of how to do that or what it really meant, but writers like Ted Conover, William Finnegan, Thomas French, and Jonathan Kozol were my teachers. Their books— Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes; Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters; South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of the Twentieth Century; and Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America —were my textbooks. I read and reread their works and tried to pare away the story to find the process underneath, to understand how each author was able to observe, record, choose particular words, and craft narrative movements and sections of dialogue and characters’ thoughts.

Fast-forward ten years through multiple wrong (albeit possibly necessary) turns working inside a documentary television series, a newspaper, the evening news, and investigative reporting—and you would find me in rural South Africa. I was every parent’s nightmare: the twenty-four-year-old who moves to Africa with a one-way ticket and a plan that requires a backup plan. But over time, I made a life for myself as a reporter, an editor, and the founder of a writing school for African women. There, I eventually decided to write my first book, a work of literary journalism set inside a community with little written history.

In September 2005, I started my first month of intense immersion inside Rooibok, a community of three hundred Shangaan, Sotho, and Mozambican Tsonga families. The concept of immersion journalism was one with which, at that point, I had some experience and basic confidence. But never had I fully immersed myself (with the intention of long-term and long-form reportage) in a community with three languages—one that I did not know at all, one of which I knew only the basics, and one that I could read a bit and understand somewhat in conversation but could not really speak beyond greetings and a few token words—and three distinct cultures nevertheless bound together physically, emotionally, and psychologically by the history of apartheid. I knew, immediately, I would need to keep myself in check: asking myself questions, examining each day, and learning from each successful and not-so-successful moment of reporting. I also knew I needed to be willing to ask for advice from more experienced writers, and I did this often—via e-mail, over the phone, and inside existing literature.

Author and former editor of the American Scholar Anne Fadiman introduced me to the anthropological concept of a cultural broker and admitted, “There are [some] barriers you can never cross.” Then the St. Petersburg Times narrative projects reporter Thomas French pushed me to think cinematically as I reported and to be OK with being inside a story as it unfolds. Foreign correspondent Paul Salopek was brutally honest about language, being an outsider, and the times when a translator can also serve as a writer’s cultural or situational guide. Davan Maharaj, then the Los Angeles Times assistant foreign editor and former Africa correspondent, taught me the importance of clearly defining a translator’s role and being aware of your translator’s biases and bad habits. Washington Pos t reporter Anne Hull taught me to admit ignorance, to see place as a character with its own complex layers, and to examine my own biases. Norwegian war reporter and author Åsne Seierstad caused me to question the ethics of immersion and the idea of writer as character. And the scholarly publications of anthropologist Conrad Phillip Kottak helped me navigate ethnographic note taking, cultural consultants, and both emic (local-oriented) and etic (observer-oriented) research strategies. Ultimately, each pushed me to ask questions and to figure out the logistics for my particular situation.

But, years later, what I’ve realized is this: immersion is about waiting. It’s not about finding a story to fit inside your pre-constructed ideas, but letting story unfold. It’s about wading and waiting. What was I looking for? I wasn’t really sure. I wanted to paint a portrait—or a series of portraits—of the beautifully complicated daily life in rural South Africa. Only spending time inside Rooibok, observing, joining, and asking questions, would allow me to do that. So began my journey alongside three distinctly different community members: Regina, a weaver in her sixties; Thoko, a middle-aged traditional healer and shebeen queen (owner of a back-door, illegal pub); and Dankie, a young man coming of age as one of “Mandela’s children,” the first academic class educated entirely under democratic governance. Sitting, waiting, and wading allowed me to attempt a snapshot of a particular place and time.

Tom Wolfe called this “saturation reporting.” Gay Talese calls it “hanging out”; David Simon refers to it as “stand-around-and-watch journalism”; Bill Wasik uses the term submersion; and Susan Orlean prefers to avoid terms altogether, describing her work as simply nonfiction. I’ve also heard it referred to as “fly-on-the-wall,” “deep-dive,” and “immersion.” Ultimately, whatever you choose to call it, one thing is clear: this is not the description of a genre; rather, it is an approach, a commitment, and ultimately a category of reportage.

In The New Journalism , Wolfe emphasizes “sticking around” as the make or break element of any scene-based storytelling. You need to stick around long enough to see the scenes happen in front of you. In many ways, just as a documentary film crew needs to keep the cameras rolling and return to the editing room with as much as two hundred hours of footage for a feature film, I knew—as I reported for The Rainy Season—I needed to stick around to witness the scenes I would bring to the page. And in order to do this, I needed access.

Access comes with trust, and trust comes with time.

I spent time with the Shetlers; I helped them out if I could; I liked them and they grew to like me. More than that, they trusted me. Nobody swoops down on the Swartzentruber Amish and is allowed inside. It takes time. It takes trust. Trust is the key to access. After about five years [of friendship], I let the patriarch Samuel know of my interest in writing a book about them. He didn’t shut me down, but I didn’t push it any further. Every so often, I’d bring it up, but I never pushed. Waiting was the key. One day, my wife and I were visiting the farm. It was just before Christmas, and Samuel and Mary had just finished milking cows by lantern light. Something about the dusk and the lantern light and the easy laughter between the four of us drove me to the moment when I believed I’d burst if I didn’t begin researching and writing what would become Plain Secrets. The next day, I approached Samuel again. He said he needed to talk it over with his wife and let me know. So the next afternoon, I went to see him. He said yes. If I hadn’t waited—which is not something I do well—there would not have been a book.

While Joe Mackall was inside an Amish community just south of Cleveland, I was inside Rooibok, eighty-five hundred miles away. Every few weeks, we would get on the phone—a patchy Skype connection, thanks to the compact-car-sized satellite on my roof—and discuss our shared challenges. We pored over questions around language and trust, standing both inside and outside, and the act of waiting.

Plain Secrets is a portrait of a family, through which we’re meant to understand a community. And, really, this is what I was doing inside The Rainy Season , only through three separate yet interconnected lives. Our reportage and intentions were similar, but what divided us was form. I couldn’t imagine putting myself inside my book—a requirement for Wolfe’s new journalism, Wasik’s submersion, and Robin Hemley’s immersion writing. I could, however, understand why Mackall’s book required it. Samuel was his neighbor and friend—he could not deny this, and it was clear this relationship affected the story. In the most basic way, it’s the reason he had a story.

Ten years later, as I embark on new work with entirely different logistical problems than The Rainy Season, I’m exploring my basic understanding of immersion—pushing myself to consider it a verb much more than a noun—and have been looking to others, those inside and outside of creative nonfiction, to reshape and complicate how we see this form of reportage.

Rene Denfeld is the author of the novel The Enchanted , told through the eyes of a death row inmate, and the narrative nonfiction book All God’s Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families . Across genres, her writing is grounded in long-term immersion and investigation. Whether she’s writing or working as a death penalty investigator (work that often requires spending years talking to families), she’s a truth seeker. She’s collecting facts, she’s reconstructing a narrative, she’s waiting for each individual truth to reveal itself: the criminal truth, the narrative truth, the emotional or psychological truth. She’s willing to immerse herself inside a situation or community with the aim to listen and draw information, and with this reportage tool, she’s written fiction, nonfiction, and court documents for death penalty appeals.

I was trained as an investigative reporter by some amazing old-school journalists. I was taught the old-fashioned shoe leather approach. You simply cannot find the truth by sitting at a desk, making phone calls or Googling on your computer. That is how myths are perpetuated. You have to get out there, spend time with people, get to know them, help them feel comfortable sharing their truth. For All God’s Children, I spent a lot of time with street youth. I learned more in that time than all the studies and articles I read. ”

While walking through her Portland neighborhood not too long ago, Denfeld explained to me the role of fiction in her ability to tell truth. It was fiction, she said, that allowed her to get closest to the truth. And, yet, it was real life, long-term immersion that she also needed to get there—years of death penalty investigations, spending time inside prisons with men and women on death row, as well as with their families inside their homes, over and over again. A deep understanding and the ability to fictionalize is, for Denfeld, the closest she’s felt to the emotional truth of an experience. With journalism, there was always a wall she couldn’t pass, but writing a novel changed everything.

“I pursue every project as both a poet and an anthropologist,” says Nomi Stone. Indeed, she is both, and her recent work has taken her inside a foreign space on domestic soil. Stone spent two years hanging out in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America, where combat simulations take place. Her recently completed ethnographic fieldwork is the basis for two works-in-progress: a collection of poetry titled “Kill Class” and her dissertation in cultural anthropology.

It took Stone months to gain access to the villages. First, she had to wait for the military to trust a poet enough to open their doors. Then, through listening and observing, she had to gain the trust of mock villagers and mock (but not mock) military. Like Mackall’s ten-year relationship with Samuel and Denfeld’s investment in reporting on Portland’s street children and listening to inmates, Stone’s willingness to “stick around” was the key she needed to open a rarely budged door. She recalls:

I went to a mock village for the first time in 2010. I nearly stopped breathing. Hollywood artifice pulsed with an uncanny core of the real. I was put up in a mock Baghdadi hotel in the middle of the Mojave Desert, its check-in area decorated with platters of fake kabobs. Outside, a mock Babylonian statue towered over a fake traffic circle. A mock mosque contained only bullet shells within as a clue for the training soldiers. Mock blood and threads of mock organs from a shoot-out spumed over the set. And in the fake market, Iraqis, wearing laser tag belts to register their simulated deaths, played war every day. These spaces demanded the most careful precision in my observation. I invoked the anthropologist to think about, for example, how “authenticity” is referenced by the military through the construction of the sets. Which gestures—a prayer rug; Arabic graffiti; the call to prayer; and in some simulations, even odors designed to mimic mass graves—generate a sensory apparatus for both the training soldiers and the Middle Eastern role-players inside? Meanwhile, it is my poet-side who inflects these spaces with the affect, emotion, and sensation that a cursory observer would not glean.

These two distinct filters that affect Stone’s observation and fieldwork skills ultimately inform all of her writing. Inevitably, her anthropology is also poetic and her poetry is deeply anthropological. Like Mackall and Denfeld, Stone seeks truths that only immersion—time and access—could offer.

“Waiting is important at every stage,” explains Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and the author of eight books, “but particularly when you are with your subjects. You need to wait for a relationship to form, and you need to wait within that for a subject to talk openly and intimately. That’s why I don’t come into most reporting situations with a list of questions; having that list burning in my pocket would make it that much harder for me to sit back and wait for the relationship to form and for the subject to open up.”

This level of waiting—whether you’re conducting two years of fieldwork or two weeks of “hanging out”—is what it takes to let the story unfold. It’s the difference between setting up a camera for a twenty-minute interview, during which time you’re the dominant voice, and approaching with a camera that doesn’t stop rolling. Let the camera roll long enough, and a story will reveal itself.

“Most good journalists who hope to get inside someone else’s world and stay there awhile come on very softly and do not bombard their subjects with questions,” wrote Wolfe in The New Journalism . Wolfe’s advice is one of the reasons I believe in porch-sitting. When I first started reporting in South Africa, I knew that just sitting on the stoop for a cup of tea was more valuable than asking questions. I learned to listen, and I learned to let someone else fill empty space. I learned to let others converse and to simply steer the rudder now and again. And, sharing a good, long cup of tea often makes someone comfortable enough to invite you to return, and to start hanging out longer and longer each time. Once such trust is developed, people begin to reveal themselves on their own terms.

“[I] have no need to impose a narrative on others,” explains Denfeld, “I am comfortable with receiving the complex truth of other people. Too often people approach other cultures and have a strong need to have them fit into a narrative—either romantically sympathetic or unforgivably horrible. I don’t have that need. I am comfortable finding out any truth.”

As I spent most of a year inside Rooibok, my subjects took me places I never would have known or thought to ask about. They recognized I really was there to listen and that, when I did ask questions, I was seeking to understand further something they’d told me or I’d seen. Often, when I asked a question, people were surprised by how much I had absorbed and processed.

Through this porch sitting, through my trust in waiting, I was able to see stories and character unfold. Regina revealed herself as an elderly woman standing at the crossroads where her Catholic faith and the AIDS pandemic crash; Thoko started taking steps to turn her shebeen into a fully licensed tavern; and Dankie was approaching the matriculation exams that would determine whether he could go after his dreams to become a detective or if he’d find himself working in the fields, the trees, or the city like other men in his community. And, just as these three revealed themselves and their complexities, the community of Rooibok also revealed its own character with its own narrative arc. It sits inside a larger village where an outdoor butchery occupies an old petrol station and a funeral parlor sits in the attached garage. It’s a place where an AIDS education center sits across the street from a West African doctor selling cures for the pandemic. It’s where BMWs are parked outside of crumbling cement homes and the availability of water changes with the day of the week. During northeastern South Africa’s rainy season, as the land shifts from dusty winter blond to lush summer green and back again, Regina, Thoko, and Dankie all face the challenges and possibilities of the new South Africa.

For me, immersion is about experiencing the world outside of myself. More than anything, I aim to tell others’ stories. And, sure, through these stories, I learn about myself and my place in this world, and I recognize that my essay or feature story or book is ultimately curated through the filters that represent my life, but I don’t aim for my journey to be the narrative upon which the camera is focused. I will not deny that this, surely, affects my curation, and in some circumstances—as was the case for Joe Mackall and Ted Conover—my personal journey is a necessity in telling the story I set out to tell. However, unlike Robin Hemley, author of A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel , I don’t believe immersion is a type of writing grounded in memoir; rather, I see this as an information-gathering and truth-seeking tool available to writers in every genre and grounded in the fieldwork of investigative journalists, war reporters, and anthropologists.

When I first started reporting for The Rainy Season , I reached out to Pulitzer Prize-winning Paul Salopek to learn from his experiences with translators and the challenges he has faced when reporting in Africa—or, more generally, in communities and cultures other than his own. At the time, I’d been obsessed with Salopek’s work for National Geographic and the Chicago Tribune , specifically his serial narrative set on the Congo River. Paul was not a parachute journalist in Africa—something that is often impossible to avoid given the way the continent is often considered a single beat; rather, he was immersing himself inside communities and situations and pulling out deeply personal and deeply insightful narratives.

Today, Paul’s work represents a new level of reportage. Some might even call it extreme immersion. Having begun in Ethiopia in 2013, he will walk until he reaches South America in 2020, retracing the path early humans took sixty thousand years ago as they populated the globe, moving from pre-historic Africa across the Middle East and Asia before crossing into North America and then south. As part of this journey, he will report on the stories that feel most pressing: climate change, cultural survival, the effects of technology, and migration. The work is documentary and personal all at once, encountering people whose stories otherwise go unheard and untold.

My most recent correspondence with Salopek found him inside Georgia, where he’s stopping for a few months. He wrote me:

On this project, I’ve come to a few conclusions about speed. You can skim across the outer surface of a story very fast, the way a stone skips across a deep lake, leaving behind insignificant ripples. You can sink into a story for years—disappear into it, vanish inside it, get smothered by it, and lose your perspective as a writer. Or you can walk through a story, literally or metaphorically speaking. I think walking speed is just about right: You move into and out of the story incrementally, steeping yourself meaningfully in the lives of others—but not for so long that you become bought-in, jaded, or so immersed that you no longer recognize what’s in front of your nose. Three miles an hour, with a lot of stops, is just about right.

Examples of Great Travelogue Writing to Inspire Your Next Adventure

‍“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta.

Ah, the joy and thrill of travel! Discovering new places, meeting strangers, and immersing yourself in unfamiliar cultures. But what’s the point of all this if you can’t capture the essence of your expedition in words?  That’s where travelogue writing comes in. 

Have you ever read a post that made you feel like you are experiencing the adventure alongside the writer? Well, that’s the power of a well-written travelogue.

It can transport your readers to far-off lands and make them feel right there with you. Add vivid descriptions, engaging anecdotes, and personal reflections, and voila!  - You’ve got yourself some entertaining travel tales to share.

So, are you ready to unlock your inner travelogue writer? 

Craft captivating tales that will leave your readers wishing for more. Let’s get started and master the art of travel writing!

Discover the Art of Travelogue Writing

From ancient Greece to modern-day blogs, travelogue writing has existed for centuries. It is a form of creative non-fiction that combines memories and factual data. But it’s not just about facts and statistics - a journey of self-expression, storytelling, and adventure. 

Remember - it is your travel tale, not a guidebook!

Travelogue writing captures a location’s essence in conveying its beauty and complexity. The key is to immerse yourself in the culture and environment of the places you visit.

Tips for Crafting Engaging Travel Narratives

Once you’ve gathered your thoughts and experiences, it’s time to craft them into compelling narratives. Here are a few tips with examples to help you get started:

Start With a Strong Hook

A vivid description, intriguing anecdote, or thought-provoking question can do the trick. For instance, the following example firmly sets the scene for the travelogue.

“Ever wondered what it’s like to explore Tokyo’s bustling streets? To taste fresh sushi, see neon lights, and immerse yourself in tradition and innovation? That’s what I did on my recent trip to Japan.” 

Create a Sense of Place 

Use descriptive language to create a vivid image for your readers. The following passage skillfully portrays the same.

“The narrow streets of Marrakech were alive with color and sound. The scent of spices and grilled meats filled the air, and vibrant textiles hung from every stall. As I made my way through the bustling souk, I couldn’t help but feel swept up in the city’s energy.”

Show, Don’t Tell

Suppose you visited a beach and want to write a travelogue about it. Don’t write, “The beach was beautiful.” Instead, convey as shown in the given example.

“During sunset, the sun casts a warm glow over the white sand. The sound of waves filled the air as I dug my toes into the sand and breathed in the sea breeze.”

Now you know the difference. Use dialogue and sensory details to immerse your readers in your destination.

Include Personal Reflections

Share your thoughts and feelings. Connect your experiences to broader themes and ideas. For example, 

“Standing atop the fort’s ancient ruins, I was amazed by the stunning views and intricate stonework. But as I gazed over, I reflected on the fragility of human achievement”.

Be Vulnerable

“Doubt crept in as I stood at the peak’s base. Could I make it to the top? But I pushed on and conquered my fear. The sight from the top was nothing short of spectacular”.

In the passage, the writer shares their fears and triumphs in a concise and relatable way.

Use Dialogue

Check out the following example. Here the writer uses dialogue to bring the woman to life and let her speak for herself. It adds depth and personality to your travelogue.

“An old lady chuckled as I haggled with a vendor over a silk scarf in Istanbul. She said, ‘You drive a hard bargain, but everything’s negotiable.’ We chatted about her travel stories as a young trader. ‘Those were the days,’ she sighed. ‘Now, I leave the traveling to the young ones like you.’”

Inspiring Travel Journal Entries to Ignite Your Wanderlust

Reading inspiring travel journals and memoirs is perfect for igniting your wanderlust. Here are a few examples to inspire your travelogue writing.

“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert: A memoir of the author’s journey through Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of balance and purpose. Vivid descriptions and inspiring encounters.

“A Year in Provence” by Peter Mayle: A memoir of the author’s first year in a French village. Witty observations and charming anecdotes transport you to the countryside.

“On The Road” by Jack Kerouac: A classic novel of freedom and self-discovery, chronicling the adventures of two friends on a cross-country road trip.

“In A Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson: A witty and informative travelogue about the author’s adventures in the land down under.

In ‘The Great Railway Bazaar,’ Paul Theroux invites us on a captivating train journey from London to Tokyo. Along the way, he explores the rich cultures and stunning landscapes.

Final Thoughts

Travelogue writing is a beautiful way to connect with your destinations on a deeper level and encourage others. 

• Take inspiration and learn from given epic travelogue writing examples.
• Use your own words – dont copy from examples or websites.
• Inject your feelings and make your stories conversational.

Unleash the beauty of your travel experiences through vivid descriptions and captivating storytelling. Make  Text Mercato your partner in this expedition and become a master of the travelogues.

1. What travelogue writers can I look to for inspiration?

There are several great writers you can look for motivation. Here are some personal favourites:

• Bill Bryson is a prolific travel writer with excellent humour and wit. His book, “A Walk in the Woods,” is a perfect engaging travelogue.
• Paul Theroux is known for his deep cultural and historical insights.
• Pico Iyer is known for introspective cultural pieces. For instance, his contemplative travelogue - “The Art of Stillness.”
• Jan Morris writes beautifully descriptive travelogues with her lyrical and evocative style.

2. What are some common themes in engaging travelogue writing?

• Cultural exploration: Write engaging travelogues by exploring the unique cultures of a place.
• Adventure: Discover and write about exotic locations or thrilling activities.
• Food and drink: Review local cuisine, which can be a cornerstone of local culture.
• Personal growth: Focus on self-discovery as you travel to new destinations.

3. How can I apply the techniques of great travelogue writing to my work?

• Have a keen  eye for detail and a strong sense of narrative.
• Take the time to  observe the people, architecture, and landscapes around you.
• Tell a  compelling story and  evoke emotions in your readers.
• Use persuasive language to paint pictures and challenge conventional thinking. 
• Use humor - add some fun to your writing to engage the reader.

Give your readers a  sense of closure .

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Matador Original Series

10 online literary magazines that publish great travel writing.

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, here’s a list of magazines to check out:

1. Frostwriting

This Swedish literary magazine—in English—is interested in cross-cultural experiences (especially as they pertain to Sweden, but they’re not picky) in the form of nonfiction essays, “postcards,” fiction and poetry. They also publish short essays about writing and the writing life.

When I was married we spent every carnival out-of-town, like any self-respecting carioca. Let the tourists have the run of the place with its beery crowds, urine-soaked sidewalks, noise, smoke, skin and general chaos; carnival is for deserted beaches. Carnival is for skiing in Colorado. –Julia Michaels, “Horrible Carnival”

Beautiful, easy-on-the-eyes site, and beautiful literary essays (or as they call it, “fact”), fiction, and poetry by established and emerging writers.

One time I was waiting in Madrid Airport to get the plane back when I was overcome by a sense that there was a space for me here in Madrid. A me-shaped space. And so we all came together in Lombardia Street and the space was filled. Then, when nobody really expected it, two years later another space opened up. A you-shaped one. —Donal Thompson, “Letter to Maeve”

3. Orion Magazine Online

Originally (and still) a print magazine, Orion is now available online. Many of the biggest names in environmental writing publish here regularly, alongside unknown and emerging writers.

Orion consistently keeps the big picture in mind, looking in depth at environmental and social issues the world over. Some of the best environmental reporting, social philosophy, memoir, and poetry (and more) anywhere in print or on the Web.

If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very popular….The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. —Jay Griffiths, “The Transition Initiative”

4. Apple Valley Review

This magazine focuses more on essays and poetry, with some essays thrown in. A good mix of voices (from gentle to edgy) and forms (from traditional to experimental).

In this story my grandfather does not die. He does not fall over while tilling the garden and my grandmother does not yell to my cousin to go get help and she does not sit by him, crushing the zucchini, while she waits for the medics who come too late. –Suzanne Cope, “The Story That Isn’t This Story”

5. Superstition Review

Produced by undergraduate literature students at Arizona State, this magazine can be hit or miss—but they find enough intelligent, witty writing and great storytelling to make up for the clinkers. Nonfiction, fiction, poetry, interviews, and art.

“You can sit next to me,” a young man says, startling me. It’s been days since I’ve heard English. “I’m American,” he adds and waits for my relief. –JD Riso, “Strange Bird”

Sub-Lit’s editors describe it as “daring in subject matter, form, or tone. Publishing should not be an academic circle jerk, or a realm where blandness is encouraged.” Their subtitle: “Sex, Literature, and Rock & Roll.”

I plopped into a metal chair that couldn’t have been less comfortable if it had leather straps and a couple of million volts coursing through it. The old man was wearing his good pants— a pair of Jordache jeans. Mom complained he only wore them when he was trying to impress somebody at the bar. –Joe Lombo,”Changing of the Guard”

7. Narrative Magazine

Consistently high-quality literary writing. One highlight: the “Readers’ Narratives” feature—short, self-contained stories from people’s lives.

The silent war between my parents permeated the apartment. My escape was the veranda. Lying on my stomach, I peered through an old pair of binoculars and watched the gray-blue waves of the Arabian Ocean as they crashed along Marine Drive, soaking young lovers on the seawall. I watched crowds walk along the dirty gray sand of Chowpatty Beach, the women lifting their saris before wading into the ocean. –Amin Ahmad, “Mumbai, November 1977”

Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and articles on a variety of topics, from the frustrations of the writing life to the secret lives of squirrels to getting high in India.

I purchased the bhukki and the ganja from a teen Punjabi bellhop named Krishan. He is my chauffer into extinction, but unlike his namesake he hasn’t revealed his universal forms or any silly stuff like that. –Joe Cameron, “Moksha”

9. The Literary Bohemian

A fun site specifically devoted to travel writing in the form of travelogues and “postcard prose” (short sketches). A bonus is the “Signs of Life” feature—photos of garbled English translations on signs from across the world.

In the water, a songbird thrashed. A small boat crept quietly up, its engine silent, the driver attempting to maneuver close enough to scoop the creature out with an oar. As I was doubly useless—non-Finnish speaking and netless—I returned to my son. –Susan Koefod, “Breakfast in Helsinki”

Reading Juked can be a slightly surreal, or deliciously confusing, experience: they feature nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—but don’t tell you which is which. Good, solid writing.

Now the cloud makes a sound like a school bus being dropped on a row house or two. Gerry is over stimulated. He tries to strike Victor with his broom. But Victor the fat corset maker knows a thing or two about broom fights. —Laura Ellen Scott, “Do You Know What It Means To Miss”

Community Connection

What are you favorite sites for great writing? Let us know in the comments.

Want to learn the craft of travel writing?

Sign up for Matador’s new Travel Writing School and get the skills you need.

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25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

A list of twenty-five of the greatest free nonfiction essays from contemporary and classic authors that you can read online.

Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot,  I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists  writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on  American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer  travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

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Center for Literary Publishing

Colorado review, a college of liberal arts center, travel writing tips and tricks.

By Colorado Review Associate Editor Michelle LaCrosse

We’re finally into spring and summer is right around the bend—it’ll be here before you know it! Travel can happen at any time, but I know many, even most, people choose summer to get away from their routines and see something new. Ahead of these vacations and staycations, let’s talk about the travel essay, where you can find examples of good travel essays, what else to think about as you plan your trip, what to bring with you when you go, and what to do once you’ve arrived. And if you’re going no farther than your neighborhood park or teahouse this summer, these suggestions are still for you! For the life of me, I can’t remember who said this, but the quote and the sentiment has always stuck: even a walk around the block can be a travel essay if you do it right. (If you know whose quote this is, please let me know in the comments!)

A craft book about structure that I find immensely helpful for my travel essays is Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. McPhee talks a lot about how to restructure a straightforward journey to make it more dynamic and he even includes diagrams! In the section helpfully titled “Structure,” he talks about sequencing events for effect, using a trip to Alaska as an example.

If we’re writing nonfiction, how do we make things more exciting if we have to stick with what actually happened? McPhee says, “You can’t move that bear around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.” If you’re thinking, What bear? you’ll just have to read the book!

Now that you’ve read some essays and gotten an idea of what you want to do, it’s time to get your tools! First essential: a small notebook and a pen/pencil. Done and done! If you’ve got a phone, sometimes it’s nice to record sample dialogue. In my opinion, writers have special dispensation to eavesdrop. You can also take pictures to serve as mental notes—to help you describe a person, the stone facade of a building, a visual reminder to look up what that flower’s name is.

I’ve used the tiny two-by-three inch notebooks before, but my favorite are the four-by-six inch ones with an elastic band to keep them closed. I use my pen as a bookmark, bending the covers around it, and steadily, the pages get filled with bus schedules, receipts, sticky notes or paper scraps with phone numbers and hours of operation. These are the detritus that writers need to fill an essay and make it more complete. After each trip, my notebook cover gets more battered, rounded, and stained, the book itself telling a story.

Use your notebook and camera also to take some time and notice what’s going on outside the tourist areas. What are the schools like? The hospitals? Are there any public parks? I want to emphasize that I don’t mean for you to judge or criticize. Just notice.

What else is going on? What do you see that’s just like home, or just the opposite? It’s important for a travel writer to look deeper and try to understand. Curiosity about the fullness of life is necessary, I think.

How are we affecting the places we visit? This is important. A Small Place definitely made me reconsider how I travel, and what kind of person I want to be when I’m not at home.

Thinking about structure, or at least considering it and taking a deeper look at the places you’re visiting, is a good habit to start. Instead of having many beautiful images with nothing really tying them together, you can make a point to notice specific themes and make notes that are actually helpful when you’re back home and sitting in front of your computer.

Hemley believes that “Immersion writing engages the writer in the here and now . . . shaping and creating a story happening in the present while unabashedly lugging along all that baggage that makes up the writer’s personality: his or her memories, culture, and opinions.” To me, this is what’s important to remember about travel writing. I can only talk about a place from my own perspective and, to be successful, I need to be aware of where my perspective comes from and how much of it I bring when I travel.

This is a little of what I’ve learned through reading and traveling, writing about traveling, and reading about writing about traveling, and I hope some of it helps. I want to leave you with this: Be still sometimes. Keep looking. Listen. Take notes. Investigate.

Thanks for reading.

PS: Comment below with your favorite travel essays that I can add to my list!

100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction

Hero Images/Getty Images 

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Essays , memoirs , autobiographies , biographies , travel writing , history, cultural studies, nature writing —all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction , and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so. They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Recommended Creative Nonfiction

• Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness" (1968)
• James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941)
• Martin Amis, "Experience" (1995)
• Maya Angelou , "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1970)
• Russell Baker, "Growing Up" (1982)
• James Baldwin , "Notes of a Native Son" (1963)
• Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (2008)
• Alan Bennett, "Untold Stories" (2005)
• Wendell Berry, "Recollected Essays" (1981)
• Bill Bryson, "Notes From a Small Island" (1995)
• Anthony Burgess, "Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" (1987)
• Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (1949)
• Truman Capote , "In Cold Blood" (1965)
• Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962)
• Pat Conroy, "The Water Is Wide" (1972)
• Harry Crews, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978)
• Joan Didion, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction" (2006)
• Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)
• Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood" (1987)
• Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (1974)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001)
• Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986)
• Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature" (1957)
• Ralph Ellison, "Shadow and Act" (1964)
• Nora Ephron, "Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" (1975)
• Joseph Epstein, "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002)
• Richard P. Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (1964)
• Shelby Foote, "The Civil War: A Narrative" (1974)
• Ian Frazier, "Great Plains" (1989)
• Paul Fussell, "The Great War and Modern Memory" (1975)
• Stephen Jay Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History" (1977)
• Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" (1929)
• Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965)
• Pete Hamill, "A Drinking Life: A Memoir" (1994)
• Ernest Hemingway , "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
• Michael Herr, "Dispatches" (1977)
• John Hersey, "Hiroshima" (1946)
• Laura Hillenbrand, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" (2010)
• Edward Hoagland, "The Edward Hoagland Reader" (1979)
• Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
• Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963)
• Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973)
• Langston Hughes , "The Big Sea" (1940)
• Zora Neale Hurston , "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942)
• Aldous Huxley, "Collected Essays" (1958)
• Clive James, "Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James" (2001)
• Alfred Kazin, "A Walker in the City" (1951)
• Tracy Kidder, "House" (1985)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts" (1989)
• Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962)
• William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" (1982)
• Bernard Levin, "Enthusiasms" (1983)
• Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" (1986)
• David McCullough, "Truman" (1992)
• Dwight Macdonald, "Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962)
• John McPhee, "Coming Into the Country" (1977)
• Rosemary Mahoney, "Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women" (1993)
• Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" (1968)
• Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard" (1979)
• H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing" (1949)
• Joseph Mitchell, "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" (1992)
• Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" (1963)
• N. Scott Momaday, "Names" (1977)
• Lewis Mumford, "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects" (1961)
• Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1967)
• P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
• Susan Orlean, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere" (2004)
• George Orwell , "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933)
• George Orwell, "Essays" (2002)
• Cynthia Ozick, "Metaphor and Memory" (1989)
• Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1975)
• Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (1982)
• Lillian Ross, "Picture" (1952)
• David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (2000)
• Richard Selzer, "Taking the World in for Repairs" (1986)
• Zadie Smith, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009)
• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1966)
• John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley" (1962)
• Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" (1970)
• Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell" (1974)
• E.P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963; rev. 1968)
• Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (1971)
• James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times" (1933)
• Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society" (1950)
• Barbara Tuchman, "The Guns of August" (1962)
• John Updike, "Self-Consciousness" (1989)
• Gore Vidal, "United States: Essays 1952–1992" (1993)
• Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates" (2008)
• Alice Walker , "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983)
• David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997)
• James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968)
• Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984)
• E.B. White , "Essays of E.B. White" (1977)
• E.B. White, "One Man's Meat" (1944)
• Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" (1979)
• Tobias Wolff, "This Boy's Life: A Memoir" (1989)
• Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own" (1929)
• Richard Wright, "Black Boy" (1945)
• Stream of Consciousness Writing
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• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• List (Grammar and Sentence Styles)
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
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• Definition and Examples of Formal Essays

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Finding Your Footing: Sub-genres in Creative Nonfiction

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Memoir is perhaps the “flagship” of creative nonfiction, the sub-genre most familiar to those outside of literary and academic circles. Most human beings lead interesting lives filled with struggle, conflict, drama, decisions, turning points, etc.; but not all of these stories translate into successful memoir. The success of the memoir depends on the writer’s ability to sequence events, to tell a story, and to describe characters in believable ways, among other things. Writer Carol Spindel reminds us that in the mid-2000s a scandal surrounding writer James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces erupted after he was forced to admit that large sections of his “memoir” were “fictionalized:” he’d embellished, made things up. A memoir that strays from the truth is not far removed from lying, because regardless of the writer’s intention, the story deceives the reader. Spindel writes that, unlike in novels, “The knowledge expressed in the memoir has the legitimacy acquired through first-hand experience.” Good memoir also provides reflection on the events that have happened to the writer, so it “can give readers insights into society, and even into the larger meaning of life itself” (Spindel).

The Braided Essay

The braided essay is a good tool for introducing writers—especially student writers—to the CNF genre. In a braided essay, the writer has multiple “threads” or “through-lines” of material, each on a different subject. The essay is broken into sections using medial white space, lines of white space on a page where there are no words (much like stanzas in poetry), and each time there is a section break, the writer moves from one “thread” to another. Braided essays take their name from this alternating of storylines, as well as from the threads the story contains; there are usually three, though to have four or two is also possible. Though there is not a strict formula for success, the form usually contains at least one thread that is very personal and based on memory, and at least one thread that is heavily researched. Often, the threads seem very disparate at first, but by the climax of the essay, the threads being to blend together; connections are revealed.

Topical Writing

Perhaps the genre closest to an essay or a blog post, topical writing is an author’s take on a given topic of specific interest to the reader. For example, nature writing and travel writing have been popular for centuries, while food writing is gathering steam via cooking blogs. Nature writing involves exploring the writer’s experience in a beautiful and thoroughly rendered natural setting, such as a cabin on a mountaintop. Travel Writing, as the name implies, details the writer’s experiences while traveling, whether by choice on a vacation or out of necessity due to business or serving in the military. Finally, contemporary food writing explores the writer’s connection to cooking and enjoying food of any variety. All three will occasionally step into the writer’s personal experiences via memories, but these episodes are always related to the topic driving the essay.

Whatever form a creative nonfiction piece takes, it must remain based in the author’s actual lived experiences and perceptions. Like academic writing, the piece must be accurately researched and the sources must be documented. Finally, the author must also always leave room to reflect on how their experiences have shaped them into the person they are now. It’s the reflection that makes the reader feel satisfied: it offers something to the reader that they can carry with them, a way of seeing the world.

Works Cited

Cokinos, Christopher. “Organized Curiosity: Creative Writers and the Research Life.” Writer’s Chronicle 42.7: April/May 2015. 92-104. Print.

Ironman, Sean. “Writing the Z-Axis: Reflection in the Nonfiction Workshop.” Writer’s

Chronicle 47.1: September 2014. 42-49. Print.

Spindel, Carol. "When Ambiguity Becomes Deception: The Ethics of Memoir." Writer's

Chronicle (2007): n. pag. AWP . Association of Writing Programs, 1 Dec. 2007. Web. 13

Sept. 2015.

Terrill, Richard. "Creative Nonfiction and Poetry." Writer's Chronicle (2004): n. pag. AWP .

Association of Writing Programs, Oct.-Nov. 2004. Web. 3 Oct. 2015.

Written by S. Kalekar January 16th, 2023

30 Magazines Accepting Creative Nonfiction and Essays

These literary magazines and other outlets publish a variety of nonfiction/essays. A few are looking for themed submissions. Some of them pay writers. Most, but not all, of them are open for submissions now. They’re in no particular order.

TOLKA Journal Their website says, “Tolka is a biannual literary journal of non-fiction: publishing essays, reportage, travel writing, auto-fiction, individual stories and the writing that flows in between. We are a journal for writers to express themselves beyond the limits of fixed genres, forms or subjects. … We encourage writers to test the creative boundaries of non-fiction.” They publish work by Irish and international writers, of 2,000-4,000 words. Pay is €500. The deadline is 22 January 2023. Details here .

Vast Chasm They publish “bold work that explores the expansive human experience, including flash and short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and other nonconforming work.” Pay is $50 for prose up to 5,000 words. They read submissions on an ongoing basis. Details here .

Porkbelly Press They read for their chapbook series in January – these can be creative nonfiction such as lyric essays & flash, poetry or prose poems, collections of flash or micro fiction, graphic narratives, sequential artwork, or combinations of the above (tightly linked by theme, image, voice, etc.). Please submit 12 – 26 pages for chapbooks. They are queer friendly and feminist. “Our catalog favors lit & poetry leaning heavily toward fabulism, folklore, & magic—often confessional or intimate poems or personal lyric essay. All work should be tightly linked.” For nonfiction chapbooks, “We particularly enjoy multiple short essays, but will consider a one-essay chap if the essay is just that good. We lean toward braided forms (narratives with 3 or more threads tied together), and also consider things like character sketches, travel narratives, and collections of vignettes.” See guidelines and Submittable pages for further details. Pay is author copies. The deadline for chapbook submissions is 31 January 2023. Also see their reading periods for works in other genres. Details here and here .

The Christian Science Monitor: The Home Forum This news organization accepts pitches from freelancers and writers, and submissions for The Home Forum , where they want “upbeat personal essays of from 600 to 800 words. … For time-sensitive material (seasonal, news-related, holiday- or event-themed), you must submit at least SIX WEEKS in advance.” Also, “These are first-person, nonfiction explorations of how you responded to a place, a person, a situation, an event, or happenings in everyday life. Tell a story with a point; share a funny true tale. Describe a self-discovery. The humor should be gentle. We accept essays on a wide variety of subjects and encourage timely, newsy topics. However, we don’t deal with the topics of death, aging, medicine, or disease. We do not publish work that presents people in helpless or hopeless states.” They pay $250 for these essays. Details here .

The Every Animal Project This is an anthology about courageous animals, and they also will publish work on their website. “Stories must be true (non-fiction). They must relate to non-human animals (of any species) and can be about your personal experiences/growth because of an animal, an issue threatening animals today, or other aspects of the human/non-human animal relationship. For the upcoming anthology, please weave the theme of courage/bravery into your story. We are particularly interested in spotlighting species less familiar to people, like insects, marine animals, and reptiles.” One writer will get an award of $300, another will be awarded $200, and other writers whose work is chosen for the print anthology get $50; writers whose work features online get $20. The deadline is 31 March 2023. Details here .

The Lumiere Review Their website says, “We are intrigued by the inextinguishable sparks of truth and connection, the effervescent meddling of narrative, and the luminous creations that expand on perceptions of genre, language, and form.” They have a call for BIPOC creatives on the Justice theme (deadline – 15 February 2023). For general submissions, they publish creative nonfiction (up to 3,000 words), fiction, and poetry. They publish quarterly, pay $10, and read submissions on an ongoing basis. Details here .

The Four Faced Liar This is a new print journal; they published their first issue in January 2023. They publish creative nonfiction (up to 4,000 words), fiction, poetry, and art. Pay is €200 for short creative nonfiction and fiction, €100 for a poem or piece of flash, and €100 for art. Watch for their next submission period on Twitter . Details here .

Gray’s Sporting Journal This is a magazine about hunting and fishing, and they publish articles on those topics. They also have a feature called Yarns, which is campfire tales – fact or fiction, of 750-1,500 words. They also publish some poetry. Pay is an average of $600 for Yarns, and poems pay $100. Features for the magazine pay more. Details here .

Narrative This magazine publishes work in various genres – nonfiction (including written, audio, and video), fiction, poetry, and drama. They charge a submission fee through the year but during the first two weeks of April, they offer fee-free submissions made specifically in the Open Reading category. They pay $100-500. Details here .

MudRoom Magazine Their website says, “our mission is to provide every writer, emerging and established, the opportunity to both see their work published, and engage with a larger literary community.” They publish essays, essays in translation, fiction, and poetry. Send prose of up to 6,000 words. Pay is $15, and the deadline is 25 January 2023 for their Winter issue. Details here .

The Fieldstone Review This is the literary journal of the University of Saskatchewan. They accept submissions of creative nonfiction (up to 2,500 words), literature & book reviews (of Canadian literature), fiction and poetry, for its 2023 issue. They are reading submissions on the Reversals theme. “Turning points. Twists. Changing fortunes and shifting gears. We want your clever, surprising and dizzying reversals––be it through character, plot or formal elements!” One contributor will get awarded CAD100. The deadline is 1 March 2023. Details here .

The Meadowlark Review This journal is associated with the University of Wyoming. “Based in Laramie, Wyoming, we’re inspired by the American West, but we love work that pushes against the traditional Western narrative, as well as new perspectives, unexpected twists, and pieces that have absolutely nothing to do with the West. We are especially interested in hybrid works and works that break the mold and push the boundaries of today’s literature.” They publish nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Send work of 10-5,000 words. The deadline is 31 January 2023. Details here .

The Forge Literary Magazine They accept creative nonfiction (up to 3,000 words, but can accept up to 5,000) and fiction. They open on the 1 st of most months for fee-free submissions, and close when the cap is reached. They pay $75. Details here .

fron//tera This is a bilingual print magazine, in Spanish and English. They publish nonfiction (up to 5,000 words), fiction, poetry, art, and submissions can be in Spanish or English; they’ll also publish a couple of short dual-language English and Spanish pieces side by side (see guidelines). They pay $25-50. They’re reading work on the Phantoms theme till 1 February 2023. Details here .

The Healing Muse This is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics & Humanities. They publish narratives, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and art, particularly but not exclusively focusing on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing. They accept prose up to 2,500 words. The deadline is 15 April 2023. They also have a poetry prize for medical students and physicians , of $250. Details here .

The Lascaux Review They publish creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry of literary quality, as well as essays on the craft and business of writing. “Creative nonfiction may include memoirs, chronicles, personal essays, humorous perspectives, literary journalism—anything the author has witnessed, experienced, learned, or discovered. Creative nonfiction should be written in a nonacademic style. For the Bistro (our blog), we’re looking for posts about writing, literature, agents, publishing, hangover recipes—anything to do with the craft and business of writing. Topics must be relevant to our audience, which consists of sophisticated journeyman writers and poets.” Submissions are open year-round. Details here .

The Paris Review They will reopen for prose submissions in March 2023. Currently, they are accepting poetry submissions; the Submittable cap is reached but they will read postal submissions, postmarked till 31 January 2023. They pay. Details here .

Nashville Review This magazine is associated with Vanderbilt University. They publish creative nonfiction (across the spectrum, including memoir excerpts, essays, imaginative meditations, of up to 8,000 words), fiction (including flash and novel excerpts), poetry, translations, and art. They accept submissions of art and comics year-round, and other genres are accepted in January, May, and September. Submissions may close earlier than scheduled if the cap is reached. Pay is $25 for poetry, and $100 for prose. The deadline is 31 January 2023, or until filled. Details here .

Porridge They publish a variety of genres, and are open for online and print issues occasionally. They are always open for their Comfort Food section – “The COMFORT FOODS series publishes creative responses to the relationship between food and culture, identity and cuisine, from people in diaspora or those from various marginalised identities. From eating away exile to 2,000 word philosophical treatises on biryani, we’re here for it. … We’ll accept creative non-fiction, food writing, poetry, and artwork on this theme.” Details here .

Electric Lit They are always open for detailed essay pitches. “Electric Literature’s essays examine books and culture through a personal and critical lens. … Pitches should describe the subject matter of the essay (which must be about books, writing, or narrative media like movies, games, and TV) and give a sense of the argument you plan to make or the story you plan to tell. We welcome thoughtful considerations of new releases, overlooked classics, childhood favorites—anything that can illuminate or be illuminated by the human experience.” They will open for other genres in February ( Recommended Reading – longer fiction, pays $300, open 1-12 February; and The Commuter – poetry, flash, graphic, and experimental narratives, pays $100, open 13-19 February 2023). Details here . Sojournal This is a travel journal, and their tagline is ‘One Image One Story’. “At present we only publish non-fiction travel stories that tell us about the black and white image you have supplied. We have a bias toward clear, concise, understandable work that communicates, surprises or disturbs – writing that bears witness to the world we live in.” Send work of up to 800 words. Details here .

Chicken Soup for the Soul They publish uplifting, true stories and poems. They regularly post themes they are accepting submissions on (currently, these are: Angels ; How stepping outside my comfort zone changed me ; Miracles ; and The power of positive thinking ). They pay $250 for work up to 1,200 words, as well as 10 contributor copies. Details here (also see tabs on the page – Possible book topics, Submissions FAQ, and Submit your story).

Unfortunately, Literary Magazine For nonfiction, “We’re interested in memoir/personal essays, feature articles, and any mix thereof. Shameless navel-gazing is fine by us.” Also, “Send us your work that’s too quirky, too dark, too queer, not the right kind of queer, too female-driven, too literary, not literary enough. Too much, too little, we want to see it all. Our only requirement is that you get your piece rejected elsewhere at least once before submitting to us.” They also publish fiction, art, and poetry. They read submissions in January, April, July, and October. See this Twitter thread to see the kind of work they’d like to see more of. Details here and here .

Miracle Monocle This magazine is associated with the University of Louisville. “For creative nonfiction, please submit one piece of 500-10,000 words. We’re looking for essays with aspects of personal narrative, reporting, and the lyric; we’re also interested in flash. Please do not send excerpts of longer works unless the piece can stand alone.” They also publish fiction, hybrid, poetry, art, and have an award for young Black writers , which pays $200 – for this award, writers must be 25 years old or younger and identify as Black. The deadline is 31 January 2023, or until a submission cap is reached. Details here .

Round Table Literary Journal Their website says, this is “an award-winning, historic print literary journal now in our fifty-sixth year of existence. We publish literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art once a year.” They are associated with Hopkinsville Community College. The deadline is 15 February 2023. Payment is contributor copies. Details here and here .

The Sunlight Press They publish personal essays (750-1,000 words), artists on craft series (up to 1,000 words), fiction, poetry, reviews, and photos. They pay $15-40. Details here .

Terrain.org This is a magazine that focuses on place, climate, and justice. They publish nonfiction (up to 5,000 words), fiction, poetry, and pay a minimum of $50. Submissions by marginalized creators are considered for an annual prize of $500. The deadline is 30 April 2023. Details here .

Motherwell This is a parenting magazine, and they take personal essays on parenting, as well as work on other themes and genres. For personal essays, “We are looking for evocative first-person narratives that have a unique focus, or take a novel angle, on a slice of the parenting experience. We are open to a range of styles and tones: the only requirement is that the essay works on its own terms—be it lyrical, humorous, research-oriented, etc—and conveys something fundamental about its writer. Up to 1,200 words.“ Some of the work they publish is paid, and some is unpaid (see guidelines). Details here . Masque & Spectacle They publish nonfiction essays, literary analysis pieces, and personal essay/memoirs of up to 7,500 words. They also accept fiction, poetry, drama, reviews, art, audio, and video submissions. The deadline is 31 January 2023. Details here .

The Sun This venerable magazine charges for online submissions via Submittable, but not for submissions by post, of essays, fiction, and poetry. Online submission of photos is not charged. Payment for regular essays starts at $300. And online submissions for themed short nonfiction pieces for the Readers Write section are fee-free – their upcoming themes are Idols , due 1 February, and Privacy , due 1 March 2023; payment for Readers Write is magazine subscription. Details here and here .

Bio:  S. Kalekar is the pseudonym of a regular contributor to this magazine. She can be reached  here .

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[ESSAY] [TRAVEL NONFICTION] [UP TO 10,000 WORDS] Oct 31, 2021: Preservation Foundation Essay Contest for Unpublished Writers (Writers whose work has never earned over $500 in a single year; no fee; awards $200 and publication)

Contest summary from Winning Writers:

Free contest gives prizes up to $200 and web publication for essays, 1,000-10,000 words, by unpublished writers, defined as those whose creative writing (as opposed to writing for freelance or salaried jobs) has never produced revenues of over $500 in any single year... October 31 deadline is for entries in the Travel Nonfiction category. The Preservation Foundation is a Tennessee-based nonprofit with the goal of preserving the extraordinary stories of ordinary people. "Since our object is to preserve these stories for future generations, not to put them up one year and take them down the next, all contest entries will be posted on our website and must remain on the site for as long as the Preservation Foundation exists."

Contest details

Sponsor: The Preservation Foundation

Category: Essay - Travel Nonfiction

Submission length: 1,000-10,000 words

Entry fee: No fee

Awards: ($200 and web publication)

Guidelines and submission information (Organization's contest page)

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Essay On Travel

500 words essay on travel.

Travelling is an amazing way to learn a lot of things in life. A lot of people around the world travel every year to many places. Moreover, it is important to travel to humans. Some travel to learn more while some travel to take a break from their life. No matter the reason, travelling opens a big door for us to explore the world beyond our imagination and indulge in many things. Therefore, through this Essay on Travel, we will go through everything that makes travelling great.

Why Do We Travel?

There are a lot of reasons to travel. Some people travel for fun while some do it for education purposes. Similarly, others have business reasons to travel. In order to travel, one must first get an idea of their financial situation and then proceed.

Understanding your own reality helps people make good travel decisions. If people gave enough opportunities to travel, they set out on the journey. People going on educational tours get a first-hand experience of everything they’ve read in the text.

Similarly, people who travel for fun get to experience and indulge in refreshing things which may serve as a stress reducer in their lives. The culture, architecture, cuisine and more of the place can open our mind to new things.

The Benefits of Travelling

There are numerous benefits to travelling if we think about it. The first one being, we get to meet new people. When you meet new people, you get the opportunity to make new friends. It may be a fellow traveller or the local you asked for directions.

Moreover, new age technology has made it easier to keep in touch with them. Thus, it offers not only a great way to understand human nature but also explore new places with those friends to make your trip easy.

Similar to this benefit, travelling makes it easier to understand people. You will learn how other people eat, speak, live and more. When you get out of your comfort zone, you will become more sensitive towards other cultures and the people.

Another important factor which we learn when we travel is learning new skills. When you go to hilly areas, you will most likely trek and thus, trekking will be a new skill added to your list.

Similarly, scuba diving or more can also be learned while travelling. A very important thing which travelling teaches us is to enjoy nature. It helps us appreciate the true beauty of the earth .

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Travel

All in all, it is no less than a blessing to be able to travel. Many people are not privileged enough to do that. Those who do get the chance, it brings excitement in their lives and teaches them new things. No matter how a travelling experience may go, whether good or bad, it will definitely help you learn.

FAQ on Essay on Travel

Question 1: Why is it advantageous to travel?

Answer 1: Real experiences always have better value. When we travel to a city, in a different country, it allows us to learn about a new culture, new language, new lifestyle, and new peoples. Sometimes, it is the best teacher to understand the world.

Question 2: Why is travelling essential?

Answer 2: Travelling is an incredibly vital part of life. It is the best way to break your monotonous routine and experience life in different ways. Moreover, it is also a good remedy for stress, anxiety and depression.

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What is creative nonfiction? Despite its slightly enigmatic name, no literary genre has grown quite as quickly as creative nonfiction in recent decades. Literary nonfiction is now well-established as a powerful means of storytelling, and bookstores now reserve large amounts of space for nonfiction, when it often used to occupy a single bookshelf.

Like any literary genre, creative nonfiction has a long history; also like other genres, defining contemporary CNF for the modern writer can be nuanced. If you’re interested in writing true-to-life stories but you’re not sure where to begin, let’s start by dissecting the creative nonfiction genre and what it means to write a modern literary essay.

What Creative Nonfiction Is

Creative nonfiction employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story.

How do we define creative nonfiction? What makes it “creative,” as opposed to just “factual writing”? These are great questions to ask when entering the genre, and they require answers which could become literary essays themselves.

In short, creative nonfiction (CNF) is a form of storytelling that employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don’t just share pithy anecdotes, they use craft and technique to situate the reader into their own personal lives. Fictional elements, such as character development and narrative arcs, are employed to create a cohesive story, but so are poetic elements like conceit and juxtaposition.

The CNF genre is wildly experimental, and contemporary nonfiction writers are pushing the bounds of literature by finding new ways to tell their stories. While a CNF writer might retell a personal narrative, they might also focus their gaze on history, politics, or they might use creative writing elements to write an expository essay. There are very few limits to what creative nonfiction can be, which is what makes defining the genre so difficult—but writing it so exciting.

Different Forms of Creative Nonfiction

From the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benvenuto Cellini, to the more experimental styles of modern writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, creative nonfiction has a long history and takes a wide variety of forms. Common iterations of the creative nonfiction genre include the following:

Also known as biography or autobiography, the memoir form is probably the most recognizable form of creative nonfiction. Memoirs are collections of memories, either surrounding a single narrative thread or multiple interrelated ideas. The memoir is usually published as a book or extended piece of fiction, and many memoirs take years to write and perfect. Memoirs often take on a similar writing style as the personal essay does, though it must be personable and interesting enough to encourage the reader through the entire book.

Personal Essay

Personal essays are stories about personal experiences told using literary techniques.

When someone hears the word “essay,” they instinctively think about those five paragraph book essays everyone wrote in high school. In creative nonfiction, the personal essay is much more vibrant and dynamic. Personal essays are stories about personal experiences, and while some personal essays can be standalone stories about a single event, many essays braid true stories with extended metaphors and other narratives.

Personal essays are often intimate, emotionally charged spaces. Consider the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” which means “to try” or “attempt.” The personal essay is more than just an autobiographical narrative—it’s an attempt to tell your own history with literary techniques.

Lyric Essay

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, but is much more experimental in form.

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, with one key distinction: lyric essays are much more experimental in form. Poetry and creative nonfiction merge in the lyric essay, challenging the conventional prose format of paragraphs and linear sentences.

The lyric essay stands out for its unique writing style and sentence structure. Consider these lines from “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.

What we get is language driven by emotion, choosing an internal logic rather than a universally accepted one.

Lyric essays are amazing spaces to break barriers in language. For example, the lyricist might write a few paragraphs about their story, then examine a key emotion in the form of a villanelle or a ghazal . They might decide to write their entire essay in a string of couplets or a series of sonnets, then interrupt those stanzas with moments of insight or analysis. In the lyric essay, language dictates form. The successful lyricist lets the words arrange themselves in whatever format best tells the story, allowing for experimental new forms of storytelling.

Literary Journalism

Much more ambiguously defined is the idea of literary journalism. The idea is simple: report on real life events using literary conventions and styles. But how do you do this effectively, in a way that the audience pays attention and takes the story seriously?

You can best find examples of literary journalism in more “prestigious” news journals, such as The New Yorker , The Atlantic , Salon , and occasionally The New York Times . Think pieces about real world events, as well as expository journalism, might use braiding and extended metaphors to make readers feel more connected to the story. Other forms of nonfiction, such as the academic essay or more technical writing, might also fall under literary journalism, provided those pieces still use the elements of creative nonfiction.

Consider this recently published article from The Atlantic : The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar by Lawrence Weschler. It employs a style that’s breezy yet personable—including its opening line.

So I first heard about Shimmel Zohar from Gravity Goldberg—yeah, I know, but she insists it’s her real name (explaining that her father was a physicist)—who is the director of public programs and visitor experience at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Common Elements and Techniques

What separates a general news update from a well-written piece of literary journalism? What’s the difference between essay writing in high school and the personal essay? When nonfiction writers put out creative work, they are most successful when they utilize the following elements.

Just like fiction, nonfiction relies on effective narration. Telling the story with an effective plot, writing from a certain point of view, and using the narrative to flesh out the story’s big idea are all key craft elements. How you structure your story can have a huge impact on how the reader perceives the work, as well as the insights you draw from the story itself.

Consider the first lines of the story “ To the Miami University Payroll Lady ” by Frenci Nguyen:

You might not remember me, but I’m the dark-haired, Texas-born, Asian-American graduate student who visited the Payroll Office the other day to complete direct deposit and tax forms.

Because the story is written in second person, with the reader experiencing the story as the payroll lady, the story’s narration feels much more personal and important, forcing the reader to evaluate their own personal biases and beliefs.

Observation

Telling the story involves more than just simple plot elements, it also involves situating the reader in the key details. Setting the scene requires attention to all five senses, and interpersonal dialogue is much more effective when the narrator observes changes in vocal pitch, certain facial expressions, and movements in body language. Essentially, let the reader experience the tiny details – we access each other best through minutiae.

The story “ In Transit ” by Erica Plouffe Lazure is a perfect example of storytelling through observation. Every detail of this flash piece is carefully noted to tell a story without direct action, using observations about group behavior to find hope in a crisis. We get observation when the narrator notes the following:

Here at the St. Thomas airport in mid-March, we feel the urgency of the transition, the awareness of how we position our bodies, where we place our luggage, how we consider for the first time the numbers of people whose belongings are placed on the same steel table, the same conveyor belt, the same glowing radioactive scan, whose IDs are touched by the same gloved hand[.]

What’s especially powerful about this story is that it is written in a single sentence, allowing the reader to be just as overwhelmed by observation and context as the narrator is.

We’ve used this word a lot, but what is braiding? Braiding is a technique most often used in creative nonfiction where the writer intertwines multiple narratives, or “threads.” Not all essays use braiding, but the longer a story is, the more it benefits the writer to intertwine their story with an extended metaphor or another idea to draw insight from.

“ The Crush ” by Zsofia McMullin demonstrates braiding wonderfully. Some paragraphs are written in first person, while others are written in second person.

The following example from “The Crush” demonstrates braiding:

Your hair is still wet when you slip into the booth across from me and throw your wallet and glasses and phone on the table, and I marvel at how everything about you is streamlined, compact, organized. I am always overflowing — flesh and wants and a purse stuffed with snacks and toy soldiers and tissues.

The author threads these narratives together by having both people interact in a diner, yet the reader still perceives a distance between the two threads because of the separation of “I” and “you” pronouns. When these threads meet, briefly, we know they will never meet again.

Speaking of insight, creative nonfiction writers must draw novel conclusions from the stories they write. When the narrator pauses in the story to delve into their emotions, explain complex ideas, or draw strength and meaning from tough situations, they’re finding insight in the essay.

Often, creative writers experience insight as they write it, drawing conclusions they hadn’t yet considered as they tell their story, which makes creative nonfiction much more genuine and raw.

The story “ Me Llamo Theresa ” by Theresa Okokun does a fantastic job of finding insight. The story is about the history of our own names and the generations that stand before them, and as the writer explores her disconnect with her own name, she recognizes a similar disconnect in her mother, as well as the need to connect with her name because of her father.

The narrator offers insight when she remarks:

I began to experience a particular type of identity crisis that so many immigrants and children of immigrants go through — where we are called one name at school or at work, but another name at home, and in our hearts.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: the 5 R’s

CNF pioneer Lee Gutkind developed a very system called the “5 R’s” of creative nonfiction writing. Together, the 5 R’s form a general framework for any creative writing project. They are:

• Write about r eal life: Creative nonfiction tackles real people, events, and places—things that actually happened or are happening.
• Conduct extensive r esearch: Learn as much as you can about your subject matter, to deepen and enrich your ability to relay the subject matter. (Are you writing about your tenth birthday? What were the newspaper headlines that day?)
• (W) r ite a narrative: Use storytelling elements originally from fiction, such as Freytag’s Pyramid , to structure your CNF piece’s narrative as a story with literary impact rather than just a recounting.
• Include personal r eflection: Share your unique voice and perspective on the narrative you are retelling.
• Learn by r eading: The best way to learn to write creative nonfiction well is to read it being written well. Read as much CNF as you can, and observe closely how the author’s choices impact you as a reader.

You can read more about the 5 R’s in this helpful summary article .

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Give it a Try!

Whatever form you choose, whatever story you tell, and whatever techniques you write with, the more important aspect of creative nonfiction is this: be honest. That may seem redundant, but often, writers mistakenly create narratives that aren’t true, or they use details and symbols that didn’t exist in the story. Trust us – real life is best read when it’s honest, and readers can tell when details in the story feel fabricated or inflated. Write with honesty, and the right words will follow!

Ready to start writing your creative nonfiction piece? If you need extra guidance or want to write alongside our community, take a look at the upcoming nonfiction classes at Writers.com. Now, go and write the next bestselling memoir!

Sean Glatch

Thank you so much for including these samples from Hippocampus Magazine essays/contributors; it was so wonderful to see these pieces reflected on from the craft perspective! – Donna from Hippocampus

Absolutely, Donna! I’m a longtime fan of Hippocampus and am always astounded by the writing you publish. We’re always happy to showcase stunning work 🙂

I like how it is written about him”…When he’s not writing, which is often, he thinks he should be writing.”

[…] Source: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/a-complete-guide-to-writing-creative-nonfiction#5-creative-nonfiction-writing-promptshttps://writers.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction […]

So impressive

Thank you. I’ve been researching a number of figures from the 1800’s and have come across a large number of ‘biographies’ of figures. These include quoted conversations which I knew to be figments of the author and yet some works are lauded as ‘histories’.

excellent guidelines inspiring me to write CNF thank you

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The best essay collections for proving how amazingly well-read you are

Hearing the word “essay” probably filled you with dread at school, because it generally meant you had to write one. Chances are, that’s changed. The best essay collections – by proper writers and critics, rather than students pulling all-nighters – aren’t just celebrated in the literary world. They’re kind of cool . The modern critic, dispatching sharp analyses of the social media age from their New York or Berlin flat, has become a cult figure.

Of course, the essay and the essayist long preceded the viral online article. The best writing in the tradition can be both inward- or outward-looking, but it has to have an inquisitive, speculative spirit – two of the books below have “suppose” in their title, after all. And, most importantly, the prose has to be faultless. Here’s our pick of the best essay collections, from undisputed classics to underappreciated gems.

For all Zadie Smith ’s talents and successes as a novelist, some in the literary world think her real strength is non-fiction. They have a strong case: Feel Free , Smith’s second essay collection, is full of superb writing. She’s razor-sharp at times, but also unafraid to confess genuine love and admiration for the subject at hand. The book and exhibition reviews are deft, but the highlights come with weirder subjects: a meditation on joy, in relation to ecstasy and British rave culture, and an improbable but brilliant comparison between Justin Bieber and the philosopher Martin Buber.

Glenn O’Brien – a friend of Madonna , Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a fixture of the Manhattan party scene for decades and surely one of the coolest men of the 20 th century. He also happened to be a phenomenal writer. Intelligence for Dummies is the only available collection of his work, which was published in a range of magazines including GQ . His acid, witty thoughts on politics, culture and style are still fresh decades after the events they describe. One essay on the Taliban blowing up religious images veers, masterfully, into O’Brien musing that America’s advertising billboards should be replaced with abstract paintings.

No essay list could omit the Sacramento-born master of literary non-fiction. Though Joan Didion’s books have become slightly overplayed signifiers of cool, their quality can’t be denied. The White Album , her second essay collection, is an obvious choice but the right one. All the cliches about the coolness and analytic power of her prose are accurate; so too is her reputation for getting to the core of 1960s counterculture, best seen in the masterly title essay.

Since its foundation in 2004, n+1 has established itself as one of America’s (and the Anglosphere’s) best literary magazines. This compilation, edited by the critic Christian Lorentzen, explains why that reputation is deserved. Highlights it picks out from the magazine’s early years include a polemic against exercise, a wry dispatch from the Miami party scene, and an examination of America’s warring literary cultures. The subtitle, “Say What You Mean”, sums up the dominant attitude of unpretentious intellectualism.

This compilation, co-edited by eminent New Journalist (and later novelist) Tom Wolfe, helped solidify the characteristics of The New Journalism: essentially, non-fiction with all the flashy prose and detailed characterisation of a novel. It provides a thrilling overview of the best magazine reporting from that era, and Wolfe’s introductory essay is very insightful too.

Along with Didion, the other obligatory feature for this list. Orwell is now best known for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm , but he spent far more of his writing career on non-fiction. This bulky complete edition of his essays is great to browse through. Sometimes Orwell’s wrestling with grand questions of geopolitics and English identity; other times, he’s outlining his ideal pub , or meditating on the tradition of rude postcards in England’s seaside towns. Though his style is famously unflashy, it’s never short of insight or humour.

‘Unflashy’ is a word not often in the vicinity of David Foster Wallace, though, whose essays are just as expansive as his novels. This is the first of his non-fiction collections, and it includes a few of his career highlights: an intense, borderline-hallucinatory account of his visit to the 1993 Illinois State Fair; an analysis of the life and philosophical predicament of a mediocre professional tennis player; and the title essay, his dispatch from a Caribbean cruise, which spawned an entire mini-genre of journalists going on cruises and being snarky about them.

This collection has a simple premise: each essay analyses a single sentence. The sources of those sentences range from centuries-old writers like Shakespeare and John Donne to modern ones like Hilary Mantel. Many of them are, funnily enough, from essays themselves, although one of book’s highlights comes when Dillon looks at a Vogue picture caption written by Joan Didion at the beginning of her career. (“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” Not bad.)

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, a couple years after James Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s since become one of the main books confirming his reputation as a pivotal 20 th -century writer. He’s eloquent and endlessly well-read, but the essays never feel airless – in fact, their dissection of race relations in America (and in Europe, where Baldwin spent much of his time) are often brimming with cold fury. Highlights include the title essay, about Baldwin’s dysfunctional childhood, and one about the very different cultural heritages of Black Americans and Black people in France.

Wonder why the cinemas are always filled with sequels and reboots? This book by the late Mark Fisher, one of the most influential cultural theorists of the 21 st century, explains why. Ghosts of My Life ranges over all kinds of terrain: Jimmy Savile, the electronic producer Burial, Drake , John le Carré, primetime British TV and more. Fisher’s overriding thesis – encapsulated in the term “hauntology” – is that culture has become too exhausted to imagine the future. Instead, we’re dogged by “lost futures” in the form of what old sci-fi imagined our world would look like.