Has Yulia Denisyuk’s podcast interview inspired you to travel and explore a career in travel journalism? To be completely fair travel journalism is not an easy profession. Being on the road constantly, honestly documenting your experiences, keeping copious notes, writing a travel journal and taking lots of photos is just the start. Add to that pitching your story, managing the submissions, invoicing for your work, accounting, expense management and you can see how exhausting it can get.
Of course that is not to say that it cannot be rewarding and exciting. Two key elements to any sort of travel journalism is being about to document your travels i.e. writing a travel journal and taking good travel photos that accurately represent your experience.
Earlier we shared 12 tips to help improve your travel photography and also provided a free video e-course resource to help you improve your travel photography. Today we want to talk about how to effectively write a travel journal. Whether or not you enjoy writing, travel journaling allows you to experience your trip on a deeper level and remember it later. That being said, it can be tricky to simply begin the habit. So here are 5 tips to travel journal like a pro:
1. Done is better than perfect
Your travel journal probably isn’t intended for publication so stop worrying about making it neat, clean and pristine. It’s okay to scribble things out, jot things in random order or even draw things and experiences out. It’s okay if you don’t have perfect grammar or spellings. But at the end of the day, your travel journal is yours no matter how raw as it is. Eventually you may consider going back to edit and to form your thoughts into a complete story.
2. Share stories with details
Listing off what you did for the day is a place to start, but it shouldn’t be the end. Include your emotions, inside jokes, conversations, frustrations. When writing about a four day trip to Rome, it would have been easy to just list out the names of all the places we visited. Instead by including our thoughts, anecdotes, feelings and emotions, it was easy to translate that into a narrative with words that accompanied the story.
3. Collect items throughout the day
A travel journal should be more than just pen and paper. Get creative by including little pieces you acquire throughout the day like brochures, receipts and newspapers clipping. This helps tell your story in a bigger, more accurate way, and it also makes it fun to look back through. If packing a pair of scissors is not possible (depending on airline restrictions for sharp objects in carryon luggage, feel free to roughly rip out clippings etc. It just adds more texture and depth to the narrative.
4. Go with the flow of the day/story
Narrate exactly how the day unfolds so you can use that back in a blog and give a sense of how and what your experience were. This also means that writing or updating your travel journal should be a daily task that is completely before the night ends. This helps keep the story narrative going without too many breaks. Going back to #1, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to get done before the next adventure unfolds.
5. Use a multi-media approach to travel journaling
While we love the traditional pen and paper approach to travel journaling, we are loving the Day One app. This is a electronic journaling app that lets you do everything just like you would in a traditional paper journal.
With the Day One app you can:
- Take notes as you want. It has bold and italics and will auto-link website addresses.
- Upload images and video to your journal and add your thoughts and feelings to them in the text.
- Auto-capture the time, location and weather of your entry.
- Review your trip or life by browsing a timeline, filtering or using a map or calendar.
Travel journaling is an investment time and energy-wise, but it forces you to reflect on your experiences so that these memories live much longer than just your one-week vacation.
Do you journal? Do you prefer pen and paper or electronic journaling program? Let us know so we can share those resources with the community.
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