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What are good websites to learn about writing?

travel writing

  • Good Travel Writing - i'd like to learn how to write better. Not for professional submission, just for me. Any suggestions of good books? (Besides the Best American Traveling Writing that's released annually) Good websites with advice or excerpts?

  • Answer:

    Read William Least Heat Moon. Blue Highways is the standard roadtrip book, but also make sure you read PrairyErth, which is the opposite of a travel book - he stays in one place and writes about the microcosm of a county in Kansas. Just gorgeous stuff.

jare2003 at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Rolf Potts has a good blog/website geared towards travelers and travel writers alike. http://www.vagablogging.net. His http://rolfpotts.com/writers/index.php sounds like something you're looking for. He interviews other famous travel writers, and gives tips for people interested in jumping in the business. He's also got a great http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812992180/qid=1128107592/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5117962-4520954?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 while you're at it.

nitsuj

np, Civil_Disobedient ... I hope that didn't sound snarky, btw :)

redteam

not some obscure, mysterious Crighton that no one knows about. Man, I knew I was spelling his name wrong. Thanks.

Civil_Disobedient

I second Twain's Innocent's Abroad. Here's a great excerpt that, if nothing else, proves that the phenomenom of http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34198 and calling their dorm rooms "flats" is nothing new: “We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can ‘show off’ and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our own untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off...The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.”

Ian A.T.

Alain de Botton has a book called http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375725342/, which isn't so much travel writing as meditations on travel(liing). VS Naipaul (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375708359/) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060011602

shoepal

Civil_Disobedient means Michael Crichton, not some obscure, mysterious Crighton that no one knows about.

redteam

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060509058/qid=1128125706/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0748026-5573614?v=glance&s=books&n=507846, by Michael Crighton (yes, that Michael Crighton). It's an autobiography, but I loved the way he handles travel story-telling.

Civil_Disobedient

You must, must, must get a copy of Abroad by Paul Fussell. It's a great meditation on travel/tourism in general (http://www.vagablogging.net/archives/001101.shtml) that focuses on British literary travel between the wars. Or skip straight to one of the better books he touches upon, The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron.

Vervain

kirkaracha

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