Everyone thinks travel writing is a doddle. You soak up the sun for a couple of weeks and when you get home the words pour forth, dazzling the reader with wish-I-was-there images. Then you sit back and wait for the cheque to drop through the letterbox while planning your next safari or walk in the rainforest or flop on an Indian ocean beach, encouraged by bubbly travel PRs who tell you that the ‘views are breathtaking’, the food ‘to die for’ and the whole experience ‘the stuff of dreams’.
But there’s the problem. The vocabulary sucks. No form of writing is so riddled with clichés or lends itself so easily to the trite and outright banal as travel journalism. And forget a writer’s CV. I look after the travel pages at the Daily Mail and was chuffed to persuade a former Booker Prize-shortlisted author to write about his family holiday in Rome. All we needed was 1,200 jolly words. All we got was ‘a city of contrasts’ and a visit to the Coliseum that was variously ‘jaw-dropping’ or ‘breathtaking’ — I think there was even a ‘leaving the modern world behind’ in there somewhere. I didn’t know how to respond.
Dear Mr Rushdie,
Thank you for your piece but I wonder if you could give it a little rejig. It doesn’t seem to be up to your usual standards….
No, it wasn’t Rushdie, but you understand my dilemma. What I did instead was come up with a list of banned words and phrases, which I now send to writers whom I think won’t be offended and who might just be pleased. This list has become very long indeed and every week it gets longer. The latest offerings include: ‘spa heaven’, ‘nothing but the sound of waves’ and ‘bygone era’. Last week we added ‘chilled out’ and ‘pampering’.
Cesare Pavese once said that ‘travelling is a brutality’, which of course is nonsense, but what’s certainly true is that travel writing can be brutal. We all have our favourite horrors. Top of my list is ‘stunning’, followed by ‘nightmare’. I know there’s a school that believes you should try to write more or less as you speak but ‘stunning’ and ‘nightmare’ are two of the most overused words on the conversational circuit and they make my flesh creep. Everything beautiful or inspiring is now ‘stunning’. The girl you chatted up in the bar at the weekend was ‘stunning’. The view on your Sunday walk was ‘absolutely stunning’ and the painting you saw in a friend’s house was ‘simply stunning’. Conversely, the queue at the Paddington ticket office was a ‘nightmare’; sorting out your home insurance was a ‘complete nightmare’ and your date with the man from Knight Frank was a ‘total nightmare’ or just a ‘mare’ for short when you’re in St Trinians mode.
Travel writing is agony. There are only so many ways to tell readers the sun is shining ‘out of a clear blue sky’ or the water clean ‘as vodka’. And, believe me, the longer you leave it the harder it becomes. My own rule is that the 1,200 words has to be done and dusted by the time the plane lands at Heathrow — or, more likely, Luton.
Write about other people rather than yourself, is another little suggestion ‘nestling’ among the ‘winding cobbled streets’ of my travel-writing tips. Watching the fat Italian in speedos chatting up the blonde lifeguard who happens to be engaged to the windsurfing instructor is far more interesting than your own experience at the ‘barefoot luxury’ breakfast buffet with its ‘eye-watering local delicacies’ and the ‘attentive yet unobtrusive service’ from ‘smiling staff for whom nothing is too much trouble’.
I don’t have the answer. And I’m not sure that veteran travel writers like Paul Theroux have, either, when it comes to the leisurely read on a Saturday morning, when what the punters really want to know is whether Burma is the hot ticket or if they should play safe and book a villa on the fashionable northeast coast of Corfu again.
There are obvious omens of dreary things to come. The article that begins by quoting a languid taxi driver who’s picked up the writer at the airport is a shocker, but at least you’ve arrived in the country. Some scribblers are compelled to record events long before they’ve even packed their bags. ‘When I mentioned to a friend that I was going on a foodie cruise in the Baltics she looked at me as if…’
Holidays are indulgences. But writing about holidays should be nothing of the kind. It’s hard work. That must be why Italians don’t bother with prose at all on a postcard. ‘Ciao!’ they scribble, signing their names with a flourish and a kiss.
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