Some Practical Writing Tips

Writing about a journey gives you a head start over a lot of other writers because you already have your narrative drive in place. You have a beginning and an end and a journey that that takes you from one to the other.

Leave it out!

Deciding what to leave out is probably the hardest task. I’ve been sent the odd chapter or two by people and the biggest problem was that they included every small detail. One guy sent me a chapter on one small part of his journey in Mali and it ran to 50 pages and detailed boiling up a cup of tea.

It’s a problem I still face. My last book was about buying an old Vespa in Italy and riding it from Milan to Rome. I had a fantastic scene where I go and visit an old Vespa mechanic in Sydney. He has a great workshop with old posters, little old Italian guys hanging around a beat up coffee machine. But I couldn’t use it without slowing down the whole narrative. So I had to cut it free. It’s like movies. A lot of scenes end up on the cutting floor. A boring all day bus journey can be easily pared down to ‘By evening we were in Esfahan …’

Dialogue. Dialogue. Dialogue

I can’t stress how important good dialogue is. A lot of people think that travel writing is about describing people and places. But you can do that a lot easier with dialogue. It shows people rather than tells them. Makes your story more of a story, gives it a more professional feel.

How do you get good dialogue? Just listen. You’ll be amazed by the things people say. When I’m asked if I ever make any of my dialogue up I always answer that I’m not creative enough to make up the things that have been said to me. In The Wrong Way Home, for example, the guy who came up and told me Australia was safe in the event of a nuclear war.

How do you remember it? Write it down! How you keep notes on your journey is a personal thing, but I keep a small notepad in my back pocket and write things down when I hear them. I don’t take dictation. I let situations play out and then duck around a corner and scribble it down!

If you have started writing something and it hasn’t got much dialogue, try and re-write it using dialogue. You’ll be amazed by the difference it makes.

Getting Published

There are two approaches to getting published. Submitting your idea directly to a publisher. Or securing the services of an agent.

Direct to the publisher
This is becoming more and more difficult. In fact, some publishers, like Random House, for example, no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. If they do, they will want it presented in a particular way. Most will have outlines of what they expect on their websites.

Even then your manuscript will be placed in a pile with the other 3,640 manuscripts most publishers receive each year. It is called a slush pile and chances are it will sit there until the work experience kid is told to have a look through it. If they find something they like they pass it up to the next person up from them and so on. Harper Collins only get through half of them on average every year, and publish only three or four.

Not very encouraging odds, are they?

Get an agent
Publishers these days use agents as a filtering device, so if you have an agent you are already taken a lot more seriously. They also have personal contacts. They know which publishers are best suited for your work. And they can negotiate a much better deal for you that you could. But they charge 10 –15% for the privilege.

Your local writer’s centre will have a list of agents and will probably be able to direct you to someone appropriate.

Improving your odds

There are things you can do to improve your odds. Here are a few of them.

A professionally put together marketing proposal
Publishers and agents don’t have the time to read every manuscript sent to them. And frankly, if they aren’t hooked by the first chapter they won’t go any further. That’s why it’s a good idea to put together a proposal to make their life easier.

A proposal is made up of three parts. The first part is a marketing proposal and includes an overview of the book, a bit about yourself and who you see the book appealing to. The second part is Chapter Outlines, a paragraph or two about what will happen in each chapter. Thirdly, two or three sample chapters that give the agent or publisher a taste of your writing style.

Put it together in a plastic folder, or spiral bind it. The more professional it looks the more professional you’ll look. Also, it will help you proposal stand out from everything else in the slush pile. Bright colours to attract the attention of the work experience kid.

Also, note that this proposal will be used by all different departments during the life cycle of this book. Your agent will use it to sell to a commissioning editor. The CE will use it to convince the financial director to cough up the cash. Marketing and PR will use it. Parts may even end up on your press release.

Get a name for yourself
When I was first trying to get published I kept being told I wasn’t famous enough. It seemed that in order to get a book deal back then you had to get trapped up on a mountain with a Mars Bar and have Sixty Minutes do a story on you. Publishers, like all businesses, want to make sure they can get a return on their investment. Lion Heart , by Jessie Martin, is the classic example of that.

But it’s the old Catch-22, isn’t it? You need to get published to have credibility, but you can’t get published before you have credibility.

There are a few ways you can get around this.

- Articles in newspapers and magazines.
- Local newspapers/radio.
-Travel writing competitions in newspapers and magazines as well as ones organised by Tourist Boards. (I won the South Korean Tourist Board travel writing competition before I was published.)
- Internet. Travel websites are always looking for contributors. Not many of them pay but at least you get the chance to build up a portfolio of published work. Vagablond.com, for instance, are always looking for new contributors.

Perserverance

I can’t stress this enough. You could be lucky and get picked up on your first attempt. But chances are you’ll build up a healthy pile of rejection letters. But don’t despair. Sooner or later you’ll get your break.

It was five years after I first tried to get published that my first book was accepted. When I was told I wasn’t famous enough, I went away and wrote a few articles and entered travel writing comps. Then, when the web was young, I used the 1 mb that came with my dial-up account to create No Shitting in the Toilet, the web site. It became well-known, won a few awards and I approached publishers again. It wasn’t exactly the kind of book I wanted to publish (I wanted to go on grand journeys and write about them) but it got my foot in the door. With the book came credibility and I got asked to write articles, appear on JJJ etc. Then I started writing the books I wanted to write.

There will be sacrifices. I used to own a house in Sydney, but I sold it to pursue this crazy dream. I’d be sitting on a gold mine now! I paid for my early trips myself, which put me in the good position I am today where I use the advance of a previous book to fund the next one. And it was tough on relationships. It’s only now that I’m in a healthy one!