I usually cover defence/conflict related stuff in a narrative way – human interest stories and stories with more nuances than usual.

Then I came to think – when I travel to Afghanistan or other conflict areas – why not write stories for the adventures people?

I hate, really hate, travel stories that takes you on a “then we did this, experienced this and had so much fun, and then we did this” kind of stories. They are boring and I don’t want to read them myself.
Basically I’m not interested in what YOU did. I’m a traveller. I want to form my own opinion and be inspired when I read. I want to know what you THINK.
So I did a story on Oman (in Danish). I wrote about ghosthouses and how the Omanis work (or don’t), and a few bits that showed the contrast to what you’d think was a Middleeastern country.
It seemed that people like to learn something they can’t read in the guide books when reading an article. Something that takes them behind the facade of what you would normally experience on a trip.
Yes there are camels in the Middleeast. But isn’t it more interesting to know that Oman has more road accidents than most other countries?
I believe in show don’t tell. When describing the ghosthouse, I wrote how the taxidriver reacted to the house; “Don’t stare up at it, you’ll go blind” to show his fear of the unknown. Because who would have thought of a haunted house on a hill in Muscat when writing a travel clip?

I want to know what YOU can find out with YOUR background and knowledge (education, background etc) – not that you drove out to a silly spot that everyone and their mother knows about. Show me you and show me somthing that I never in a million years would have thought of. Then I’ll be inspired. And read.

While it all sounds a bit like a college admissions essay, I’ve always felt conflicted about the role of travel writing. As several of the other comments hint at, writing is, in itself, a selfish act. As perhaps it has to, travel essays privilege the writer’s experience of a destination. Successful travel writers rely on their distinctive appraisal of a road that (for the most part) has already been well traveled. While these pieces might inspire a reader or raise awareness about some issue, those are collateral effects. For the writer, its about writing itself, committing your thoughts and experiences to paper.

At the same time, I find a lot of travel pieces I read irritate, instead of inspire with their abundance of adjectives and cliched tugs at the traveler’s imagination. If I read one more travel article about Hanoi or Bangkok or (insert any city in the developing world) as “bustling” “vibrant” or “at the crossroads of modernity and tradition”, I’ll hit someone with my knock-off Japanese motorbike.

Travel writing, at its best, allows both the writer and the reader to better understand the world and their place in it. Some of the comments bring up the consequences of travel and social responsibility. This is something that I think travel writing, as an industry, has to start addressing more. To be relevant to readers, our writing has to answer the question, “Why should I care?”

How to reconcile this notion with writing a piece on the “best budget hotels in Dublin” to pay the rent, I must say I’m still trying to figure it out. Perhaps developing niche markets for our writing on the internet is part of the answer? Or at the very least, we should refuse to grab that thesaurus when writing a city profile!

If writers do yearn to write pieces which – in their opinion – have more depth and meaning (and I attach no value judegement here), then I think it’s possible to do that along with the bread-and-butter that pays the bills.

As for advancing the genre, it seems constantly to be evolving. With Internet publishing, writers can produce whatever sort of content they want, and build an audience around it.

As many others have said, for more eloquently than I could, it’s all about why you are writing, and who you are writing for.

I love your energy, Josh, and can resonate with your search for “meaning”. Who knows how things will develop? To a certain extent, it’s in our own hands.

Perhaps it depends on what type of writing you do – guidebook or magazine writing, I’d say what matters most is that you enjoy what you do – writing! And if you do, your readers can feel it too, and they in turn enjoy what you write. Let’s put all that thoughts aside and just soak in our love for travel writing!

That impact is easier when it’s local travel. I’m not expecting people to make a 16-hour flight somewhere and stay for several months. I’m urging them to look at some petroglyphs in a canyon 200 miles from our town or drive an hour to go cliff-jumping.

I like reading travel accounts for the narrative unto itself. But it actually has to BE A NARRATIVE, with a conflict and rising and falling action. Describing some teahouse poetically does not a narrative make. There must be some sort of protagonist with interests at risk for me to read an essay about a place I do not want to visit myself.

I recently wrote an article about bike riding in outback Australia & I happened to show my sister in passing. She was so inspired by the article that within a few days she’d planned a similar trip for us to do in 2010. This may not seem remarkable, however my sister has three young children & she’s never spent more than a night away from them (even though her husband is quite capable of looking after them). This is a really big step for her & I’m quietly pleased that it was my writing that inspired her.

There’s a quote I really like, but I can’t remember who said it: “If you write to satisfy your soul you satisfy your reader”. This is true for me. I write because I love writing. But if I can inspire others to travel this also makes me happy because I know that travel can be life-changing (as it was for me).

On the other hand, does my writing matter to my readers? Probably not. I get far more comments on our photography than on my writing. But, I get more emails about my writing than about my photography. So, I don’t know what matters in the end.

#1 Accuracy / age of the information – for travel it’s critical to find the useful
#2 My constant struggle for relevant travel writing

And this is why I write, post, and send out information in all forms of media. As people have mentioned such writing is relevant for everything from an online diary to keeping friends in the loop, but I care about #2 even more and the apparent void in reaching it.

My writing/media/posting is drawn out of not finding the information I specifically want before travelling or my trust in old information being appropriate.

I’m serving back what I didn’t have.

On reflection I don’t think this type of writing has a finite space from which to feel jaded. If we write about culture, trends and discoveries wrapped within adventure how can such editorial ever be irrelevant or not an indefinite source of cross cultural communication?

Travel has its consequences. As does how we portray our travels.

what are these consequences and how can we address them?

Travel writting isn’t going to stop the arms race or put an end to world poverty. In fact no one thing can do this.
‘Meaningful to the comunity at large’ can only come from personal motivation and the actions that follow.
I’m not a writer and am struggling with getting my point into words so i hope these quotes sum it up; “We can do no great things, only small things with great love” Mother Teresa
“Be the change you want to see in the world” Mahatma Gandhi

I think ultimately you are looking for greater fufilment from writting when it must come from within. Questions of whether stories matter or not and what our goals should be are circumstantial with no right or wrong answer. What matters is a motivation of love.

I have lately shared this question, expanding it in my life to whether a particular trip is a valuable life experience (rather than a PR jaunt), which has cut back the number of trips I’ve made this year.

I get paid to write about a lot of things that don’t matter to me at all. But getting feedback from readers that an event or venue I recommended “made their trip” shows that this content I consider fluff, can make a big difference to someone planning a trip. And most of the people who find our work online are planning or contemplating a trip. So I guess as long as you’re authentic about what’s really worth recommending in a destination piece, it matters at least in some small way.

I would much rather be writing great adventure tales and analyses of successful sustainable tourism practices in emerging markets, but that’s much more of a niche readership, with too few paying assignments for all of us literary social scientists who’d like to have that gig.