Travel Writing is a 10-week workshop, which includes lectures, exercises, and the critiquing of student projects. It’s for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals. Farther down, you can view a syllabus for this course.
Travel writing lets us traverse the world on page or screen, journeying everywhere from the cobblestone streets of Amsterdam to the brilliant-white beaches of Zanzibar. Reading about travel can provide the inspiration and information to set us in motion, or it can transport foreign locales right into our homes. Spin the globe to anyplace you like.
Travel writing requires you to pack a sense of adventure, a journalist’s eye, and a storyteller’s flair. Here you will learn about the full spectrum of travel writing—articles, memoir, essay, blogs, guidebooks—as well as writing craft and how to market your work.
Whether you seek to write about places near or far, we’ll show you how to turn the world into words.
Please Note:
Gotham only offers Travel Writing at Level I. After that, if you want to continue working on travel pieces, you have these options:
- Memoir I or II – for travel-related memoirs
- Essay & Opinion I or II – for travel-related essays and reviews
- Article I or II – for travel-related articles
This course gives you a firm grounding in the basics of travel writing gets you writing a short piece (or two) or a book.
Course components:
- Lectures
- Writing exercises
- Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)
Online classes
- Week 1
- Introduction to Travel Writing: The reality of travel writing. Types of travel writing. Which type and place for your own work? Angles.
- Week 2
- Destination Articles: Exploring destination articles. Structure—lead, nut graph, body, kicker. Moving parts—sense of place, people, facts, opinion, hed/dek. Outlines. Variables—point of view, length.
- Week 3
- Travel Memoir & Essay: Exploring travel memoirs. Aspect. Story—structure, theme. Scene and reflection. People and place. Exploring travel essays. Moving parts—viewpoint and personal experience, structure. Blurred boundaries in literary travel writing.
- Week 4
- Roundups & Guidebooks: Exploring roundups. Types of roundups. Writing a roundup. Writing tight. Exploring guidebooks. Guide to guidebooks. Writing guidebooks.
- Week 5
- Description/Voice: Description techniques—sensory, specificity, creativity, clichés, modifiers. An eye for details. What is voice? Personal voice. Publication voice. Finding your voice.
- Week 6
- Blogs/Photography: Types of travel blogs. Blog content. Reasons to blog (including making money). Setting up a blog. Building an audience. Photography advice.
- Week 7
- Travel News: Hard news. Feature articles. Advice articles. The seven “news values.”
- Week 8
- Travel Planning & Research: How to plan travel to find stories. Research. Resources. Traveling cheap or free. PR and ethics.
- Week 9
- Pitching: Selling books. Selling short pieces. The publication landscape. Homing in. Query letters. Sending out/hearing back.
- Week 10
- The Travel Writing Pro: Working with an editor. Building a career—money, relationships, self-promotion. Your view of the world.
Note: Content may vary among individual classes.
About
- The Online classes bring students from all over the globe to Gotham—New York City’s most famous writing school.
- The Online classes happen asynchronously—not in “real time.” You can participate in class any time, day or night, but the classes advance week-by-week, and certain things should be accomplished within that week-long session.
- You can take an Online writing class from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. The majority of our Online students are located in the U.S. but we also draw students from practically every country in the world.
- Tech support will be available.
- Aside from the convenience of time and location, you have a record of everything that transpires in class, which you can print out and keep for future reference. (The material is text and image, not video.)
