Flightster

A Postcard from Myself

• by Jools Stone
• on December 6th, 2010
• 11 Comments

The other day this postcard piffed onto my mat. It was from me and here’s what it said:

‘Dear Jools, you said that you were going to pitch 5 editors you don’t know by the time this arrived didn’t you?’

Oh dear, despite their less than stellar work ethic it looked like the Royal Mail had beaten me to the bell this time. Why had I sent myself this, did I conjure up the idea myself to boost my own productivity? Course not, I’d never have that kinda foresight, it was just one of the many by-products of attending the Travel Writing Workshop in London last month.

I’m usually quite skeptical of such courses. Just like there are seemingly hundreds of ‘make money travelling’ websites and ebooks, so too there are numerous ‘real life’ courses promising the moon on a stick for anyone with a passport and opposable thumbs.

This one caught my eye largely because of the calibre of its tutors: Dea Birkett and Rory MacLean. Both are seasoned travel writers with a score of travel books to their names.

Travel writers Rory MacLean & Dea Birkett

Dea Birkett

I’d read Dea’s essay on her time in Folkestone, Kent, in Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women’s New Travel Writing, a book she also co-edited with Sara Wheeler.

Her story is a sort of anti-travel narrative, exploring what it means to stay at home and see the minutiae of your everyday local area after you’ve lived away from it, in the same way you would a travel destination. Its contrariness struck a chord with me, reminding me of Jenny Diski.  Both seem just as interested in introspection as they are discovering the world outside.

Rory MacLean

The books of Canadian Rory MacLean are up there on the hallowed wood alongside the Brysons and Therouxs of my treasured travel library. His debut Stalin’s Nose was the one that sparked it all off for me. It reveals the beautifully moving – and surreally funny – story of his family’s fraught lives in Eastern Europe, written at a time when the Berlin Wall was still standing, just about.

Rory told us that his big break getting published came as a result of winning the Independent newspaper’s first ever travel competition. And this is where the third and final piece of our travel writing triumverate comes in. The editor who presided over that competition was Frank Barrett.

Guest Editor

Now Travel Editor at the Mail on Sunday, Frank joined us for a session in which we were invited to pitch ideas to him. In front of everyone, in a 30 second time limit, where you get ‘dinged off’ should you go over time or start to babble nervously!

Need you ask for whom the bell tolled?  As scary an experience as it was, it was certainly edifying to babble at a real, live travel editor and get a sense of what pushes his big red commissioning button. Think stories with hooks around major new film and book releases and art exhibitions, and make sure you pitch at least 3 months ahead of publication.

Aside from our nail biting interlude with Simon Cowell err I mean Frank, the day fell into two sessions led by each tutor. This formula works so well because of their very different, complementary styles.

Dea’s session

Dea got us kicked into gear in the morning with her fun, breezy, straight talking irreverence. She urged us to embrace the fiction in factual writing. Play around with places, dates and names until it reads less like an account and more like a story which demands reading.  She also stressed the need to put yourself into the story and reflect the world as seen through your own eyes, a theme which Rory later picked up.

While Dea’s session focused largely on making work fit for pitching to magazines and travel sections of newspapers, Rory took us on a mini journey into crafting longer form narrative work suitable for a travel book.

Rory’s session

His work is often intensely personal and the exercises he led us through were no different. We were asked to write a few paragraphs about a traumatic experience, first as it appeared to ourselves and then from an outsider’s perspective. His gentle, respectful teaching style meant that nobody’s personal stories were held up to painfully close scrutiny.

Both were excellent at critiquing narrative structure, tightness of expression and generally unpicking those typical traps and writing cliches into which we fall all too easily, all too often.

The need to create high impact moments of dramatic action was also highlighted, with Rory quoting film director John Ford’s maxim that you should ‘always start with a man riding into town.’  Both writers stressed the need to make travel writing personal. After all, Rory told us, when most of the world has already been discovered and documented many times over, the only thing truly unique you can bring to the writing table is a piece of yourself.

I’m hoping that the little piece of my mental jigsaw gets polished enough to fit into some travel editors’ niches before too long, and that the next 5 things plopping onto my doormat are comp copies of publications carrying my byline.

Write Away

Can’t make it to London or maybe you want a workshop with these writers which drops you slap bang in the middle of an exciting foreign city, providing you with the stimulus to start drawing on their teaching right away? You should check out their city break workshops, called WriteAway wouldn’tcha know it?

These give you the chance to hone your craft in a great range of inspiring destinations, such as Istanbul, Belgrade, Cairo and Marrakesh. Starting from as little as £199 including accommodation, they offer fantastic value to both learn from the masters in a relaxed setting and soak up the sights and sounds of some unbeatable spots. If that doesn’t get the ink flowing, nothing will.

Useful Information

The Travel Writing Workshops take place over a single Saturday throughout the year in London (various venues, mine was in Bloomsbury’s historic Arts Workers Guild) and Dublin. They currently cost £125 including drinks.

The WriteAway course takes place over 3 days throughout the year in various cities. The inclusive accommodation is provided in good quality 3 star hotels. They can also source preferential deals on flights and transfers. Prices vary and dates are subject to change, so check the website for details.

Jools Stone

Jools Stone's blog, He Thought of Trains, chronicles the highs - and occasional lows - of traveling by train in an age of budget flights.