Sunday, December 21, 2014

Writer's Digest on How to become a traveling writer or travel writer-literary nomadism

I am reading and digesting Writersdigest.com in the last few months. I like the way this publication covers such a plethora of writing topics, and it does offer some great free articles, such as: http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/how-to-become-a-travel-writer this great article on travel writing.   I like the suggestions and resources found in the article along with the introduction:
"Each person in the audience fights the bull along with the torero, not by following the flight of the cape, but by using another imaginary one that moves differently than the one in the ring."
Federico García Lorca, Poem of the Bull
"Nearly everyone loves to travel, and many of us wrote a really great story in Junior High, so often people feel it would be easy to become a travel writer. But to me, it is like entering the ring in Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas to face a raging bull, waving, instead of a cape, Hemingway’s “truest sentence you know”.
All good travel writing moves the reader twice: it transports him to a place, and moves him emotionally"(Klem).
I don't think any post on travel writing is complete without a quick anecdote from the Tim Cahill, in a recent interview I read at the following blog: "In Coversation with Tim Cahill" via Amy Gigi Alexander's Blog
I like the sample part of the interview below, as I have some Frederick Remington prints in my work space, and I have the "Trapper" print Cahill references in this response:

AGA: Do you have private space for writing, a Tim-habitat, if you will?

TC: Sure. I have an office. On the wall above my desk are all sorts of awards I’ve won. A friend did that for me when I was traveling. I used to have an old Remington Rifle poster up there. It showed an old trapper sitting by a fire in the snow in the evening. In the surrounding woods were gleaming eyes and the shadows of wolves. The trapper holds a Remington rife. The poster said,“Big Enough and Strong Enough.” That’s how I liked to see myself vis a vis the various publishers and editors I for whom I worked. And yes, I support wolves, don’t see them as threatening campers and don’t like the idea of shooting them. It’s a metaphor.

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