JasonKoivu

Time and again Travel Writing beats into you the utter financial ruin you will be driving yourself towards should you choose this career. Making money at it is essentially a forlorn hope, says Don George. In this instance, you want to go against the grain of the sage advice "never trust a man with two first names" and listen to the man!

After college I went to work at one of the more prestigious papers in Massachusetts. The pay sucked. I was getting $20 a story IF the story made it into the paper. Even if everything I wrote was published, I would've been living on short rations. Facts is facts, publishing companies just don't pay their writers well. So I wasn't surprised when George delivered this depressing bit of info.

Nonetheless, my wife and I like to travel, I like to write, and so I thought about taking up travel writing. Then I read this book. No thanks!

George continually degraded my romanticized vision of travel writing by laying out the reality of the job. You take long flights to far off places, often on your own dime, only to get there and not be able to enjoy the sights. You're too busy running about trying to gather information, zooming from city to city sometimes on a daily basis just to gather up as much detail (and make sure it's 100% accurate!) in as little time as possible in order to stay on budget.

Bursting my bubble is not why I gave Travel Writing only 3 stars. No, what I didn't like about this is all the interviews. Yes, it does say on the cover "Expert advice on travel writing from the best writers and editors in the business," so I should've been ready for it, but Holy Moses there's a lot of them! Most of the bloody book is interviews! Maybe that wouldn't be so bad if many of the interviewees didn't give repeat answers to the stock questions put to them all. Essentially, as an example, George asks how does one make ends meet as a travel writer, and almost invariably the interviewee says that at the beginning they didn't make ends meet. Nearly 30 interviews often saying the same thing is tedious.

However, there is good advice here. I don't doubt any of it. So, if you are considering travel writing as a career and you think you've got the balls/ovaries for the job, this would be a good place to start reading up on the subject.