I’m psyched to announce that I’ll be teaching an 8-week, online Intro to Travel Writing class with Media Bistro, from June 7 – August 2. Here’s the skinny, from their website:
Travel the world and get paid for it? Yes, it’s true! Whether a long weekend in Mendocino or a long walk across Nepal, there’s a market out there for your stories, and a proven path that successful travel writers follow. In this course, you’ll learn how to grow your freelance writing career by mastering one of its most adaptable, engaging genres: travel.
Travel writing is a conduit to many parallel genres, from food to art, politics to technology, and the skills and experience you’ll gain covering travel can be applied to all your writings. In week one, we’ll fully assess the travel writing market (magazines, newspapers, guidebooks, websites, blogs, and more) and set individual writing agendas for the duration of class. In following weeks we’ll reveal the inner workings of the field, showing how travel editors think and what they want from their writers. We’ll diagram the many different styles of travel writing, study the critical role of pitch letters, analyze key components to strong travel writing, and show how and why you can use travel writing as a springboard to other genres.
Throughout class we’ll extensively workshop your pitches and articles, and you’ll graduate with a series of solid pieces ready for you to sell. You’ll also create your own blog, develop a mission for it, and learn the opportunities that exist for publishing online.
In this class, you will learn:
- How to break into travel writing
- The rules of reporting, interviewing, finding sources, and local color
- What kinds of stories make good journalism
- What travel editors look for, and how to get them to notice you Read the rest of this entry »
