Chick Flit – discovering my style of travel writing
17 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Writing Tags: british guild of travel writers, chick flit, cookbook, food blog, melissa hales, notting hill, polly evans, rosemary bailey, sarah tucker, travel book, travel bookshop, travel writing, writing
Last night I went to another of the Festival of Travel Writing talks at the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill (http://www.thetravelbookshop.com). The two previous talks had writers who focussed on train travel and forms of publishing (focussing on self-publishing).
I was greatly anticipating last night’s event as it was a “Chick Flit” focussed event with three female travel writers - Polly Evans, Rosemary Bailey and Sarah Tucker – talking about their experiences writing their different styles of travel books or articles (http://www.timeout.com/london/books-poetry/event/200323/904328/festival-of-travel-writing-chick-flit)
Rosemary was up first and talked at length about the many different books she had written all based on a monastery she had purchased in the Pyrenees region in France. She had lived there up until quite recently over a lengthy period and had kept finding bits and pieces of history about the town and the people who had lived in the monastery and had written numerous books about it. She also discussed that she could have kept on writing books about the town and place as the longer she lived there and kept researching the more stories that came out. I really liked the concept that she referred to as “place writing” as it showed that you don’t need to traipse around the world to a thousand different cities to get a good story. If you sit still and rest in once place for long enough the stories will start to appear for you.
Sarah Tucker was up next and she has had several books published, including a few bestsellers, and she spoke wonderfully about how she had really taken travel writing into a new style of fictionalised writing. She had some great tips about what to do if you were using parts of a story that were true (it’s all about advising the editor up front that parts of it are true!!) and that basically you can say exactly what you want to say without fear of repercussion in fictional travel writing. She had also gone to great lengths to find out from her two main publishing houses (Mills and Boon and Random House) what they were looking for in new fictional travel writers and had some wonderfully helpful tips for new writers starting out.
I really enjoyed her descriptions of how some of her books came to her and the key is to be passionate about the topic and area that you are writing about. It got me thinking about the book I’m starting and I’d already had some advice to write a fictional novel rather than an autobiographical one and this confirmed for me that not only was it possible but it’s actually something that I can see myself doing rather well.
Polly went last and she was frankly bloody hilarious. Polly has done longer term trips and written books about those (I think she’s written 5 books in total – 1 about riding a bicycle around Spain, 1 about riding a motorcycle around New Zealand, 1 about touring China via public transport with a recommendation that no one tries it! and her most recent book about learning to drive dog sleds in Alaska) with great success. She talked a little bit about what it meant to her to be a female travel writer who travels solo for her book research and what some of the key differences and advantages were to being a solo female traveller. She had some hilarious stories about her travels and really opened my eyes as to the possibilities of what you could do with adventure-style holidays and writing about them.
All up it was a fabulous evening, put on by the British Guild of Travel Writers, and one of the best parts of the 3 nights we’ve been to is meeting Melissa Shales (the Chairman of the Guild) who has claimed Bel and I as groupies and honorary Guild-members given we faithfully attended all three evenings. It’s the first year the Guild has put on the travel writing festival and I do hope they continue. Melissa was invaluable as she was able to tell me what the Australian Guild equivalent was (I’m unable to join the British Guild as I’m not a Brit and I’m not going to stay living in England. If I was staying or I come back I can join then 
) and I’m going to get in touch with them when I get home.
I came away all inspired with new ideas about what I could do with some of the travel and food writing I want to do. The book I’ve started is going to take a slight turn of approach after attending last night so I’m going to spend much of November/December working on the manuscript and I’m going to be starting a new food based blog (with a travel twist). It’s something that I hope I can eventually turn into a travel-based cookbook and have published but for now I need a name for it and may be coming out to some of you as volunteers to be interviewed and published on the blog.
More details on that over the coming weeks as I land on a name for it and start the first couple of posts!
And to top of a perfect day, my parents are in town for a few days so I get to enjoy them being in London until Tuesday next week.
Happy writing peeps.
GG
For future reference, I’m a writer. Ok?
31 Jul 2010 2 Comments
in Writing Tags: creative writing, food, freelance, journalism, julia cameron, London School of Journalism, novel writing, The Artists Way, travel, writing
So I’ve started the book. You know the one I’ve always been talking about writing. The one most people always talk about writing – they say everyone has at least one book in them. Truthfully I’m hoping for a few more than that!
As I was travelling in Europe and sending little updates to some people I care about I was struck by the vast number of people who were urging me to blog, freelance or write a book. I’d been doing Julia Cameron’s “The Artist Way” for about a month and a half before I left to go travel and I finished it in Europe. Amongst other small things like giving me some life, energy and spirit back (not huge wins clearly) I also got in the habit of writing morning pages. Basically a stream of consciousness, brain dump activity the minute you wake up. Write whatever is in your mind for 3 pages long hand. At times a tiring activity, an extremely fruitful one overall. Lady Business herself was born from the morning pages and so was the realization that I was going to write and finish this book instead of endlessly whining about the fact that I wish I COULD write a book.
So – I decided that I would try to find out if I could actually do this once and for all. Two days after I returned to London I enrolled in the Creative Writing course I’d been eying off for months through the London School of Journalism. It’s distance education but that works for me as I still get awesome tutors (my tutor has had several books published successfully now over her long and illustrious career) and pretty good support from other LSJ attendees both online and in the London area but can balance full-time work with writing time. I’ll let you know how that works out for me in a few months time!
I get emailed lessons in advance and then find out what assignments I have after reading the course notes. I think I have something like 14 lessons in total with multiple assignments within. There seems to be no timeframe within which I should complete this but it does state that on average most students take between 9-15 months to do so. Being a girl who traditionally needs a timeline to actually complete anything this should be of concern to me but for once I’m actually convinced that I will finish this, under my own steam in my own sweet time when it’s ready to be finished.
About two weeks ago a massive milestone was achieved as I submitted my first two assignments from Lesson One. And last week I got my first lot of feedback from my tutor. The first two assignments were pretty easy as it just required that I write a short piece about myself, my ambitions as a writer and any experience I had thus far plus a synopsis of the novel I was hoping to write. The feedback was surprisingly useful (I’d been dubious admittedly about what could come back from that small piece of work) and actually it’s helped me clear up exactly what genre of book I’m going to write about. I was also encouraged by the camaraderie shown to me by the tutor and in some ways felt like I was being drawn into somewhat of an exclusive circle.
See I thought I was going to write about the fabulous life of GG up to this point with some witty anecdotes about working in corporate HR for large branded organisations and with some useful business coaching on what not to do etc. But having mulled over the feedback I think I’m actually going to write a novel – using some of the original ideas as food for thought but I’ve basically completely changed tack from the original plan. I have it on good authority from the LSJ peeps that this is not uncommon throughout the life of the book and it’s extremely rare for someone to finish with an end product that reads the same as their original synopsis.
Buoyed by the experience of some positive feedback I started dipping my toes in the water about the Freelance Journalism and Travel Writing courses I’d also been eying off. This is something I think I’ve wanted to do even longer than writing this book but I’ve never felt like writing is something I could seriously do. I guess I always imagined that writing would be left to the people who could write and I would just continue away writing mildly witty email updates to friends and family.
I do believe now though that I can also do some freelance work and so am shortly to enrol in the Freelance and Travel Writing course, also through LSJ, and have a ton of useful reference books about the writers market, how to get published and the various publications globally so will be playing around with that for the next 6 months attempting to get some short features published in areas of interest to me (likely travel and food!).
My goal I suppose is to be able to freelance and submit work when I feel I have something good to write about – not to submit work when I think I need to get paid again. I want to stay true to my creative brain and let it create when it is ready to create.
For now though I’ve made an important switch in visualisation and positioning. I’m referring to myself as a writer. I figure if I don’t believe that I am one then no one else has a hope of believing it. So that’s it, I’m a writer. Coming to a publication near you very, very soon.
GG
