Travel and Writing: Interview with Lauren Carter
Lauren Carter: A professional travel writer based in Canada.If interviews on TravelBlogs are anything to go by, it seems that a love for travel is often accompanied by a love for writing. Julie Schwieter, Randall Wood and Scott McNeely are three examples of travellers who love to write about the places they visit.
Lauren Carter is another one to add to the list. She’s a professional travel writer living in Canada with her husband. TravelBlogs caught up with her to talk a bit more about her love for travel and writing – and also to see if she had any tips for aspiring travel writers.
When did you first start traveling?
My parents took my siblings and I on lots of camping excursions and road trips. When I was 12 or so, we traveled by train from Cochrane up to Moosonee, on James Bay, the first experience that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of exploring place. A First Nations guide brought us over to Moose Factory in an old aluminum fishing boat and I remember clearly the sense of being outside myself as I absorbed this foreign landscape – the wide, brown river, the man’s shiny black hair falling over the shoulders of his jean jacket, the clapboard mission church coming clear as we approached. When I got older, I became really interested in my dad’s family. His father had immigrated to Canada from England, so that whole side of the family was still over there in that unknown land. One of his cousin’s had done a family tree which we received a copy of and on it was the name of a cousin of mine, one year older, living south of London in a small village. I started writing to her, a pen pal kinda thing (this was in the ‘80s, way before e-mail!), and the summer I was 16, I got on a plane by myself to go visit for three weeks. That was my first overseas trip.
In your non-fiction writing, you focus predominantly on travel. Why travel? What is it about travel that inspires you as a writer?
Much of the time I travel alone and that experience of moving through the world as a solitary individual always makes me watch more, take more in and notice the details.
There are a lot of aspects of travel that appeal to me. Much of the time I travel alone and that experience of moving through the world as a solitary individual always makes me watch more, take more in and notice the details. I’m also a poet (one collection, Lichen Bright, published) and poetry is all about taking those sensory details and connecting them with larger pictures. In a way, travel writing is the same. When I’m walking or passing through a foreign landscape I always find myself thinking about who was there before, what kind of history it carries. Travel writing allows me to write about these questions – both the asking and the answering – and weave them together with all those lovely images – the gravestone of tango singer Carlos Gardel covered in lipstick kisses, the heady scent of sage along a hundred-year-old wagon trail still carved into the earth.
Does the act of writing about a place deepen the way you experience that place? In other words: Does writing improve the quality of your travel experience?
While traveling, the process about thinking about what articles I will write pushes me to look deeper, ask more questions, attempt to understand the place and the people who live there and that does deepen the experience, in a way. But there are other times when I would rather fade into the background and experience things more quietly. Then, being a ‘reporter’ can sometimes actual stand between me and the place. I think, in order to get a true perception of a place, it’s important to somehow balance both. As a side-note, as a travel writer, I find it becomes impossible to just take ‘a vacation’. After a couple days, I’ll be quietly jotting notes and picking up a few brochures ‘just in case’…
When did you get your first break as paid writer?
When I first decided I wanted to write freelance, I did what everyone should do when they want to enter an industry: I studied. I got books out of the library (this was 1996, before I’d discovered the Internet), read the Writer’s Market handbook and figured out that the first step was to learn how to write a good query letter. So I wrote, revised, redrafted and finally sent one to Adbusters, pitching an essay. A couple weeks later I came home to a message: the editor of Adbusters called. That was pretty exciting! They took the piece and, after lots of working on edits with a different editor, it was published. A few weeks later, an essay I’d sent to the Globe and Mail (Canadian version of the New York Times) about dumpster diving was also picked up. It felt like an auspicious beginning.
When I decided I wanted to do more travel writing, I took a course at my local community college. It cost $180 or so and was the best career investment I ever made. Soon after it was over, having recently been laid off from my day job, I decided to go to Argentina for a meeting of the Humanist Movement, an activist group I’m involved in. After doing some research, I put together a pitch about tracking down authentic tango in Buenos Aires. The Toronto Star, a major Canadian newspaper, expressed interest and after my return home – and lots of hard work – the story and three of my photos appeared on the front page of the paper’s travel section.
What advice do you have for aspiring travel writers trying to get a paid gig?
While traveling, the process about thinking about what articles I will write pushes me to look deeper, ask more questions, attempt to understand the place and the people who live there.
Learn how to write a solid query letter – targeted clearly to the publication (and the section) you want to write for. There are countless resources for this both on the web and in your local library and bookstore. I’d also strongly recommend taking a course. They are taught by people who know the industry and can often show you how to do things in a way that makes you look like a professional, even though you’re starting out (and will always include a section on writing that damn query letter). I also take huge issue with writing for free. Professionals don’t write for free, unless there is some pay-off (ie. publicity). If you want to be a professional writer, put work and time into finding markets (even ones that pay $0.10 a word are better than nothing) and then put work and time into sending them a pitch they can’t resist. Writing for free weakens the market and ultimately makes it tougher for anyone to survive in this highly competitive field that is already way too undermined by the proliferation of people who write just to see their name in print or because of the false idea that it will get them somewhere. Putting energy into making money in this profession right from the get go is very good training and makes you, out of necessity, become better. I know there are many, many arguments for and against writing for free, but this is where I stand.
Where are you going for your next holiday?
I’m heading to Arizona for a press trip in February – definitely not a holiday as press trips are hard work, but it will be warm! And my husband and I were just talking about the possibility of March Break road-tripping to Florida (or Boston or the U.P. or Ottawa or just a weekend snow-shoeing in Haliburton…). We’ll see!
You can read more of Lauren’s writing on her blog, WriteAway.
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Posted by Eric Daams on January 15th, 2008 in Interviews.
