“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London
“Write with a blank wall in front of you. Always leave time between your experience and your writing of it. Never research before you go. Find the hook and base your story around that.”
— AA Gill
“I set aside at least a half hour every day and plant myself somewhere – a café, a market, a museum – and write only about the world immediately around me. What I’m seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting–and thinking and feeling. Months later, these words become a precious portal into the heart of that far-off experience.
The benefits of travel writing have to do with coming to a better understanding of the world and of oneself, of learning and more sharply defining what one can appreciate about home, and what one is lacking there, of being able to see life as a pilgrimage and journey in which no answer is ever final and one is really moving from question into deeper question, from one way station to the next.
I can’t repeat this enough: Focus; focus; focus. Look for the telling little details that capture a taste, a person, an experience–the small truths that illuminate the larger truths. And, almost more importantly, write them down!”
— Don George
“Write drunk, edit sober.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.”
— Lev Grossman
“You should travel to see people, you should never imagine that you’re going to become a local, and you should go with as few preconceptions as possible; they’re the death of travel. Also, never underestimate the power of simply sitting and watching; that’s pretty much what I do.”
