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Over the centuries people have gathered around campfires, in town squares, over meals and in other places to tell there stories and these gatherings have become central to the shaping of cultures and communities. In more recent times some people have lamented that the art of story telling has been lost amidst the rise of different technologies. -- Digital Photography School
Circumstances have me doing some more than transitory reading of the travelblogs lately. For starters, in a direct ripoff of the wildly popular BlogHer Community Keynote, I'm helping (along with funny guy Mike Barish) curate the Travelblog Exchange Community Keynote. Secondly, in a fit of either inspiration or laziness, I decided to throw open my own blog to 29 days of guest posts and was immediately awash in submissions. Thirdly, well, this is nothing new, really, but I've been thinking about storytelling, and how little of it makes daylight, how much of what we see in travel is practical advice or trip reports (went there, did that) or top ten/best of tip sheets. Your mileage may very, but to most of that stuff, I say; yawn. I want to read a good yarn. Or at least be captivated, for a moment.
While taking a drive through Provo Canyon today, I had to catch my breath more than once as my eye caught yet another striking glimpse of this beautiful land. There was an array of different animal tracks pressed into clean snow. People that seemed to be about the size of Lego men were ice fishing on the frozen water alongside the highway. And the sun played off of clouds and mountain tops in a display that I don't think I've ever seen a painting or photograph capture.-- A Well is Hiding
And, I like to read stories that are real. There's lots of travel porn -- the sand is soft and the sheets are expensive and the food is delicious and cheap and oh so of the place. It's not that I dislike romance -- and that's what this is, really, it's the romance of a perfect place, it's that I don't believe it. It's why I'm a fan of the blog Road Junky, even while sometimes, it makes me want to tear my hair out.
The age of political correctness serving up paper-thin stories of travel and world culture for mass consumption sickened us. We wanted to shatter the two dimensional picture of the world that the travel industry had put into a neat frame by telling the stories that didn’t fit politically correct dimensions. To present images and voices that were harder to swallow, harder to grasp because they didn’t meet the single story many have only heard until now.--Road Junky
When you're deep in the logistics of planning a trip, it can be fun to flip through guidebooks and how-to stuff, it's part of the excitement. But once you're there, or when you're just dreaming about what's next, why not hurl yourself directly into the place by reading the writing that's from there or somehow a reflection of that place. I loved reading Traveler's Tales Hawaii on my last trip there, I loved reading The Crystal Frontier just before I went to Mexico, I loved reading Schlepping Through the Alps after returning from Austria, because all of those reads were of the place - written to take you there.
It's ages ago that I wrote How to Make Me Read Your Travelblog. I pulled it up again recently to help me think through what, exactly, I was looking for when I clicked those blog links. Most of the rules -- your mileage may vary, they're my rules, after all -- still hold true, but when it gets down to it, I just want to read a good story. Tell me a story, won't you?
What makes a good travel story for you? In the comments, please.
Nerd's Eye View
@nerdseyeview
