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Travel Writing and Literature: Tips for Creating a Unique Travelogue
A travelogue is the detailed description of writer’s perceptions, impressions and comments about attractions of places, as they travel from place to place. It’s the journal which provides the insight of writer’s feelings, experiences. It can be of forms but with sole idea is providing glimpse of the events occurred or it can include a day-to-day description of experiences during the trip. A travelogue can also be termed as literature of recorded facts, literature of recorded impressions and feeling during travel.
What Are Travelogues?
Early travelogues were highly individualized, written on blank book or paper to chronicle the adventures of the traveler. Such writings only contained experience of a journey seen through the eyes of the traveler himself, containing anything encountered on the trip such as what a person ate, what a person saw, notable features, culture, civilization and monuments.
Travel Literature
From a literary point of view, it is a canon of literature forming a picaresque novel having element of adventure writing, exploration writing, nature writing and guide-book etc. but travelogues have more relation to history than to literature, since history is sometimes culled from travel records, owing to this prospect they have more value to history than to the literary values. Chiefly speaking travelogue can be just an occasional piece of writing with ephemeral nature with no just claim to literary value. This genre of writing serves as a receptacle of records for a certain place, its people, customs, ceremonies, providing the world with an account of the prevalent social milieu and extensive insight into their culture and habitation.
Travel Writing
Although human first wrote to keep account books, but by 2600 BCE, he started to inscribe his people’s tales in stone and clay, providing a stable, solid structure to narratives told loosely by earlier men. Change has always been a basic human urge which lead him to travel whether it is for adventure, out of curiosity, personal or political errands, diplomatic missions, pilgrimages and spiritual satisfaction, for business and trade and now days as part of multi-cultural immigration or emigration in jobs. Travelers with methodological minds recorded their kaleidoscopic view of facts of history, their experiences and observations, which later came to world as travel writing.
A Brief Look at Recent Travelogues
Recent travelogues not only contains the human expressions and feelings but also includes the score of modern technology in form of videos and pictures providing the subtle and more effective view of the writer experience. The tourism sector is developing and the globalized society is craving to know about different parts of the new world, travelogues provide an impressive platform to be an informer, adviser and a guide.
Importance of Travelogue in Modern Literature
Travelogue is a symbolic method to table the significant details of a trip. Since personal impressions might be for writers own eyes only, but the trend in chronicling a trip is now toward sharing this information in the form of book publications over the internet. Some prefer to use electronic instruments to record videos in spite of writing the feelings of joy, sadness, curiosity, happiness etc. during the course of their journey. Since travelogues contain sleek overviews about certain places, they are now becoming a very unique and brisk way for people to get information about a certain place. Tabling all the attractions, the ups and downs, the history, norms and cultures, monuments, exotic places in a certain article or a book is not an easy task. This form of writing has now become an important aspect of writing since it portrays an image of a certain area of the globe to the modern globalized society.
Since all the tourist places have their own cultures, religious norms, values and the religious destinations are mostly the places where people from different sects and religions interact and share their experiences, which results in to forming perceptions and feelings. Since an upgrade is always necessary to increase the beauty of anything, similar goes for travelogues these also require revisions and editing from the writer to make its messages clear and better. Travelogues are mostly considered that they do not have any literary merit or any artistic excellence and since there is no homogeneity in this form of writing though so it is surely a genre.
The purpose of writing may vary from writer to writer and from time to time, so as the degree of subjectivity in the writing. Therefore a travelogue, from the hands of imaginative-artistic writer charter a fresh region clearly demarcating, mediating, reconciling or harmonizing cultures through observation, understanding and mutual appreciation.
Types of Travelogue
Since human travel for various reasons around the globe some travel because of curiosity, some for adventure, some for personal and political errands, and some for business or trade similarly travelogue also changes with the nature of travel. This can also be narrated as what kind of audience is being addressed.
Promotional Travelogue
It is the most commonly used way of creating writing skill through which the writer induces a curiosity and interest to visit a particular area in to the reader’s mind. Modern tourism widely uses a term called advertisement which helps to persuade reader to visit a particular area. The writer’s main objective is to convince the reader, the recreational facilities or may be shopping. Brochures, Pamphlets, booklets etc. are considered to be a sample of this type literature.
Informational Article for Tourist
This type of writing is often used for advisory purposes for the travelers. Being an adviser the writer chooses the addressing tone which helps him convey his message in useful and effective way, those words are of chosen which provides a direct, comprehensive and honest account about the positives and negatives of the city as much as possible.
Important Tips for Writing a Travelogue
The best time to write a travelogue, it to write it while being at the destination to preserve the essence of personal satisfaction and feelings. Travelogues generally provide deep insight towards the attractions of the place so that masses get tempted to visit there on their vacations. People with good writing skills can charm the readers with vibrant details of their trip. Hence to portray his work in interesting and appealing manner the writer must follow certain guidelines, and play a multidimensional role of being a narrator, observer and reporter. Thus an exceptional travel writer must possess following characteristics:
- A travel writer is a combination of story-teller as well as an informer about the living experience and skills having the keen observance of being a researcher so that he can access facts and figures, a novelist so that he can provide an insight using attractive language skills and a reporter to share the facts and figures acquired by him.
- A travel writer must have the creativity and visual imagination, to live in past as well as the present to present a subtle and a communicative picture of the place.
- Being an informative article writer, requires a detailed reading about the about the place and also ask for an artistic way of putting the information in factually correct form and in informative manner. The facts about a certain place can be collected from pamphlets, brochures and booklets etc. A writer must possess the pre hand knowledge about history, geography, politics and culture about the place, helping the writer in making the writing naturally attractive by utilizing the historical landscapes of the place, its architectural styles, the racial types, demography etc.
- Good travel writer are keen observer, completely open-minded, well-informed and free of subjectivity and prejudice providing their writing the essence of neutrality and complete freedom to record the minute facts and details. Modern travel writers are keen to use the ever-expanding technological instruments to provide the reader with substantiated and adequate illustration and more serene picturesque and statistical touch. Since the travel industry is evolving with time and with ever evolving technology the travelogues are also evolving with them. The travelogue doesn’t need to be a descriptive essay but the readers now expect a concrete words and notions rather than abstract words, facts rather than opinions. The modern travelogues are necessary to contain knowledgeable explanation of the culture, craft, cuisine and customs and environment of the particular region. The dialect of the particular region has its own importance in a travelogue along with the peculiarity of the people with language and habitat.
- A writer must conclude few steps before hand of any writing which will help him make his points more clearly effectively and more importantly more interesting. Such few steps are listed as:
- Since writing style is the evident prospect of any writing so a writer should be very keen to decide what kind of audience he is going to entertain with his writing whether it is for himself, for a friend or for a magazine which will help him decide his writing style.
- A travelogue can contain even a minute fact about a place so it is necessary for the writer to record even a small detail as the taste of the local cuisine, local musical taste, local cultures, adventures, prices and transportation and entertainment etc.
- To increase curiosity the writer should keep revolving around a central idea which will serve as backbone of the whole essay.
- The difference of writer’s hometown and the place he visited could make an interesting point of interest.
- Life lessons learnt by the writer can also be a turning and main idea of the writers writing.
- Since people can experience the attractions of the place so the writer must try to explain the hardships he faced during his journey.
- Include some of the facts about the people living in the region their notable features, their habits, their cultural norms and values. Since a personal touch of a place is always necessary so to provide a deep insight of the travelogue as well as the place a pictorial description is of vital importance for that reason some pictures can also be added to travelogue.
The Bottom Line
In the end, the whole discussion can be concluded in a way that a travelogue is nothing but an interesting communicative interaction of writer to the place and to its people with a sole purpose of widening the horizons in precise manner.