Tighten Up Your Writing
Start reading your travel pieces with an editor’s eye
Last week, soon after word spread about the death of the novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard, his clever, useful 10 Rules for Writing went viral, gaining a whole new group of fans and followers.
It made me think more deeply about the things I’ve learned from editing portions of hundreds of guidebooks, and commissioning and editing lots of other articles — both good and bad.
I can’t tell you how to get to the good that easily, but I can help you ferret out some of the bad.
Eliminate Empty Words
If you find yourself using the same few adjectives and phrases to describe places, see if you can figure out why that is. Do you not have enough information about them? Do they seem a little over-worthy and dull? Try to figure out the issue and address it —don’t just wallpaper over gaps by using generic words.
To get a broader sense of the sorts of words I’m talking about, I asked some friends and travel editors and writers what sorts of over-used words and phrases bug them — the terms they’d take the most pleasure in editing out. See the notes to the right for a sample, and feel free to add your own.
- General travel-writing clichés
- Food clichés
- Showy or cutesy words that have simpler equivalents
Skip the Falooda
Ever heard of falooda? It’s an Indian dessert, popular on Mumbai’s Chowpatty Beach and many other places. It’s usually got a rosewater-flavored, milky base, to which is added basil seeds, tapioca, and thin vermicelli noodles. It’s a bit of a mess. A delicious mess, but a mess. I recommend the drink, but the way in which it’s made, by throwing everything together, is a poor model for most nonfiction writing.
It’s especially easy to end up with falooda when you’re writing descriptions. Here’s an example:
Delicate white walls and overstuffed furniture are what you mainly see in the lobby of the Hotel Père Lachaise, which was built in 1859 and has had such famous guests as Elizabeth Taylor,Pierre Trudeau, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
See the problem? The sentence rushes through the lobby to get to the hotel’s construction date, and then cozies up to some random celebrities who once stayed there. Better to separate the hotel’s origins and name-dropping from the more useful facts about the description.
Kill Danglers
Dangling modifiers — words or phrases that aren’t meant to modify what they actually modify — may also crop up when you try to make a sentence do too many things.
Less frenetic than other parts of town, Belleport’s nightlife doesn’t have much to recommend it if you’re over 25.
In this example, the first phrase should go with “Belleport,” but things got cockeyed because you actually wanted to get to the bars. To fix sentences like this, it’s usually best to just start over, rather than tying yourself in knots trying to make the dangling modifier work.
Avoid False Ranges
Imagine a bunch of things that run from A to Z, from head to tail, from Chaplin to Fey, from a penny to $100, from soup (starting the meal) to nuts (after dessert). In other words, things that have a start and a finish. Ranges like that are all legit.
A false range occurs when you use the same construction to list a bunch of things that don’t really have much in common. Here’s an example:
The museum holds an extensive collection of everything from ornately designed armor to liturgical vestments to Navaho blankets to Japanese erotic art.
We get it, the museum has a lot of stuff. But there’s evidently not much of a through line in its collections, so you might be better off just listing what it has and leaving it at that. It’s confusing to pretend that there’s order when there isn’t much of any, and also that random things somehow amount to having “everything.”
Don’t Repeat the Same Old Tired Stories
It’s a little embarassing: travel articles and guides often have a certain amount of questionable history, dicey statistics, and sketchy facts of all sorts. Don’t add to the problem by repeating something colorful you read or heard without at least nosing around a little to see if it’s likely to be true. This goes double for any tidbits that confirm your own biases and assumptions, whatever they may be.
These days, it might seem as if learning how to write well about travel is about as useful as knowing how to program a Betamax to record a sitcom. True, paper guides are getting more and more rare, but there will always be a need for careful, detail-rich writing that describes the places you saw — whether you’re writing an email to a few friends, a post on Medium (cool!), or working with an outside editor or publisher.
On their own, these tips won’t turn you into a paragon of taut writing, but I hope that they’ll at least help you get to the point more quickly and avoid confusing your readers for no good reason. And that’s a skill worth earning, whatever you’re writing about.
Thanks to Mark Sullivan, who helped edit this, as well as the many other editors and writers who have taught me over the years.
Subscribe to Medium’s travel collection:
