Travel, travel and travel

For a travel writer flight, hotel room, jungle camp, train, cruise is more like a home, a comfort zone as he is mostly travelling. It has no other substitute. You can’t write about a place in a good manner unless you have experienced it yourself. You will miss out many points if you have not been through that. So just, go out and experience the world. Know folks, culture, cuisine, customs, and lifestyle of a place. Even if you don’t understand their language, you can get hold of its pulse.

A new perspective

Write from a new perspective with fresh findings. As most of the places are talked about, written about in all travel magazines and portals it’s difficult to find a new place altogether. Instead you may find something new about the same place and write from a new point of view altogether. As for example, you may do research on tribes of a particular place and talk about their origin, lifestyle and attachment with the place. You may trace origin of a city’s road construction history and write on the same in a vivid interesting way.

Travel reporting

Remember, a travel writer is different from a tourist. Travel writer is doing travel journalism, but in a creative manner. While you travel and visit places take notes, ask questions to the local folks and supervisors of places, know expenses of places, observe lifestyle, check public transport, taste food, know climatic conditions. You may also quote a person in your writing. The more real is your writing better travel writer you are. Learn to capture sight, sound, smell – in a nutshell essence of the place in your writing.

Read extensively

You can’t write well if you don’t read much. Start reading. Read other travel writers to know what sells, what makes a travel write up popular and a masterpiece. Pay attention to the style of writing, technical aspects of writing etc. Apart from travel books, read history, geography.

Start writing. Start travelling.

So obviously the first step to earning more money from your writing, is to write more.  Writing as much as possible is the truest way to get better, and to create enough content .  By writing more, you create more opportunities for yourself, by being more available.  The presence you make online is the most important factor at being a successful writer.  The more renown you have, more jobs will become available, and they will pay higher rates.

Take all the opportunities you can to read others writing.  Especially writing that’s in the same field as yours.  See what the competition is doing, and where the trends are in writing.  By participating in these, and using them to influence your topics and style, you stay current.  Staying current in an ever changing medium on the internet, is paramount. Especially if you hope to be successful.

Write outside your comfort zone to develop your skills.  By writing about topics, or in styles that you’re not familiar with, you grow as a writer.  This way you can use what you’ve learned in your own work.  You’ll be a more solid writer because of it, and your writing will reflect that.  There’s really no better way to find your own unique voice than to attempt everything you can.

Invest in yourself.  This means time and money.  Have faith that your hard work will pay off.  That’s why you are a writer, because you know where it can take you if you work hard.  So keep on going to that end.  You never know how far the road will take you, if you’re too afraid to invest the necessary efforts to get there.

Something that people are usually able to write about at any time, is an issue that bothers them.  Whether a story in the news, or in your personal life, write about something you dislike.  This can be a useful exercise, as it’s easy to let yourself rant.  Once the words start flowing about something, they’ll start flowing about everything.

If you have a personal blog, which all writers should have, try writing about something different.  If you mostly focus on your current daily life, try writing about your past.  Think about the way things were before you are now.  Confront some hardships, or an aspect of your life that you miss.  Anything that moves you, to get those creative parts of your brain moving and working.

Try to challenge yourself.  Write outside of your comfort zone.  Anything that forces you to think outside of your normal box.  That’s a useful activity to help you constantly see scenarios in different ways, so that you’ll always have new ideas.

The more you can force yourself to write about different things, the  more you’ll be able to write.  Part of writing is letting yourself write content that you aren’t confident about.  You don’t always have to submit that work for someone else’s approval, but progress is progress.  At least getting something out will make you feel better, and less stressed for the next time.

You have to realize that in most cases the fear, or anxiety that you feel could just be a fear of the unknown.  You haven’t put yourself out there and been rejected, so you don’t know how it feels.  Having that unknown component can make rejection seem worse than it actually becomes.

Try to combat this by writing within your strengths at first.  You’ll be more likely to produce content that you actually like by writing on subjects you know about first hand, or are in general very knowledgeable about.  Plus you’ll be able to write more effectively concerning information you’re already comfortable with.  Don’t push yourself outside your comfort zone in the beginning.

Get all the creative criticism that you can find, and take all of it into account.  This is a good step to help you really put yourself out there.  Try starting small, with friends or family.  Or even if that seems to embarrassing at first, try a writer’s website, where you can retain your anonymity, but still receive feedback.  This way nobody knows the writing is yours, or even who you are, and you can get the feedback you need to take into account, to grow as a writer.

From there, when you feel you’ve fine tuned enough, it’s time to take a deep breath and submit that first piece.  Whether it’s a story, or an article, etc.  The only way that you can get past your fear, is to jump headfirst into submitting your content.  Remember that you’re going to get rejected, it’s a fact.  Even the greats have gotten a huge portion of their work rejected in the past.  You’ll be no different.  Rejection is a huge part of the job, just learn to deal with being rejected, and move on.

Most importantly, don’t let rejection stop you.  Being a successful writer is more about how you deal with rejection than anything else.  So don’t let your fear stop you, because it’s hard to become a writer if you never put your ideas out there.

Writing group

Join a writing group in your neighborhood. Make sure it is not very far because distance works as a deterrent for many new writers. If you could not find a writing group in your neighborhood, form one.

Book reading club

Become a member of a book reading club. This will help you refine your existing ideas, and it will also help you get new ideas. Reading is the best advice that can be given to a writer. A writer who does not read cannot produce a good quality work for long. If there is not any book reading club in your neighborhood then form one.

Socialize with writers

Talking to fellow writers will help you unearth many hidden issues, and it will also help you find answers of many unasked questions as well. A practicing writer can become a better guide in telling you how to write, how to use different writing tools, and how to keep your writing simple yet powerful.

Meet someone who is not like you

Meeting a person who is not like you, and who has different point of view, desires, values, etc., will give you a good understanding in human nature. Meet a person of such standing and reflect on the experience you have by meeting him, and the experiences he or she shared with you.

Leave your couch

This is important. Your couch has become your comfort zone, or is it your chair that has become your comfort zone? Challenge yourself and break free. I am asking you to leave your comfort zone, and try meeting new people, and experiencing new things. The more experience you will bag, the better accomplished writer you will become.

Preparing for the worst is never a bad idea, and that’s especially true of your job.  Try to keep that in mind as you brave the networking world, despite your shyness.  It’s rough, but try going to professional networking events around you.  Whether it be seminars in your field, or any other gathering of the like where other professionals are likely to be found.  Or if it helps don’t think of this as just job related, but rather a chance for you to meet more people in the same area as you are.  Developing professional relationships with others that know what you’re going through is always a good thing.

Now you just have to battle the route cause of your tendency to be shy in public gatherings.  If you fear that you don’t have anything interesting to say, prepare for that beforehand.  Because a professional atmosphere is much different than a regular social gathering, just being knowledgeable about your industry is a good start.  If you’re good at your job, you’re already well prepared.  Just make industry related insights, and you can make connections either with people that share those thoughts, or those that are intrigued by such thinking.

Finally, it’s always a good strategy to bring someone you know to an event, so that you have a partner.  You may feel more at ease by bringing a colleague, or friend that you have in the same industry.  Anything that helps you feel relaxed and casual.  Stay courteous and positive, and you’ll find networking to be pretty easy.  You just have to extend your hand so someone else can take hold.