Freelance writer Sharon Hurley Hall has just posted an article entitled
How to Write a Travel Piece and Stay at Home. It has some great tips for writing about travel, and writing well... even if you've never been to the destination about which you are expected to write. I love Sharon's emphasis on good research, along with the tips about how to do it. She really knows what she is doing, and is always so generous in sharing her tips.
Silken has also left a comment there about her very interesting blog called
Places to Go, where she blogs about places she's never been, but would like to see. Silken and Sharon are both excellent researchers, and I think these blogs show how research can go a long way toward good writing. I enjoy reading a good travel piece about one's own experiences in/of a place. But when it comes to getting good information about a place, nothing replaces good research. Even experience can quickly become outdated, or can reflect too subjective or one-dimensional an opinion. Research, whether of a place one has been to or not, goes a long way in fleshing out one's perceptions of a place, and help to make travel writing solid and useful to the reader.
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