Every traveler is a storyteller. Whether you come home with a journal full of observations and anecdotes, or a frequently updated blog, your words will carry the reader along for the journey. This Author’s Day (Nov.1), embrace the writer within and share those tales of adventure.
Create your own Wander-Writer’s traveling kit – Sharpen your Travel Writer’s Saw – And let these quotes about travel writing – from authors famous for taking us to new places – inspire you to keep on moving and recording.
1. “I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.” – Paul Theroux
2. “As Theroux famously said, it doesn’t matter where or how far you go – the farther commonly the worse – the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.” – Pico Iyer
3. “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” – Friedrich Nietzche
4. “Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we’re about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what’s going on when nobody’s looking.” – Tom Miller
5. “There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.” – Beatrix Potter
6. “Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar . . . for if a traveler doesn’t visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.” – Paul Fussell
7. “Good writing is like a windowpane.” – George Orwell
8. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in respect.” – Anais Nin
9. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde
10. “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” – Jack London
11. “And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.” – J.K. Rowling
12. “The travel writer seeks the world we have lost – the lost valleys of the imagination.” – Alexander Cockburn
13. “Just as a painter paints, and a ponderer ponders, a writer writes, and a wanderer wanders.” – Roman Payne
14. “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.” – Ernest Hemingway
15. “Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E.L. Doctorow
16. “E.L. Doctorow said once that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. this is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.” – Anne Lamott
~ Until the next adventure! ~ Kelli