6    Subjects and treatments

Grasp the subject; the words will follow. (Cato the Elder, 234–149 BC)

You get a sharper insight into publications when you see how differently a particular subject is treated. There follows a list of subjects with mileage, indicating varied treatments, and making some comparisons among publications. Keep in mind that subjects and types and formulas and magazines are constantly changing to meet the demands of the time. To repeat: magazines are born to reflect new interests, and die when their remit is out of date.

Journalism is all about what you can find out rather than what you happen to know – what you can find out in what’s published or on the Internet or by the legwork of reporting, but also what’s in people’s heads. You may want to do one or two contrasting interviews – an academic expert, perhaps, plus one of the streetwise kind. You then need to take time to think out, in the end, how your original attitude to a subject has been changed by your exploration, and to decide where you want to take your readers.

Make sure you come to an agreement on such expenses as hotel accommodation and travel when you have a proposal accepted. If your feature is going to provide valuable publicity for an organization, it may provide you with a ‘freebie’ – for example, free or discounted hotel accommodation, meals, travel.

A word here about illustration. If you are sending photographs with a script find out whether the publication wants black and white or colour, and if colour whether transparencies or slides. How many pix do they want to select from? Give each picture a reference number and attach a printed caption to the back. Provide a separate list of captions.

LIKELY TARGETS

My matching of subjects and treatments, therefore, though valid at the time of writing, needs to be modified by what you can discover from current marketing guides and current and recent issues of the publications mentioned. If you’re planning a piece on any of the subjects listed below you may also want to consult (under the subject headings) a directory of publications (see pages 399–400) and an index or two of articles to discover how and where the subject has been covered in the past year or so (see page 404). Do some surfing as well.

Digging out the relevant articles may be part of your research: you’ll be able to ensure that your idea and treatment are fresh, and you’ll see what sort of material needs to be updated. If you’re planning to write about crime you will probably want to get the latest statistics from the Home Office and to contact one or two of the relevant agencies (see Directory of Organizations, page 399).

Develop your own preferences too. In your capacity as a freelance would you prefer to write for Cosmopolitan or Glamour, New Statesman or Spectator, The Guardian or Daily Telegraph, Active Life or The Oldie, Woman or Woman’s Own? Deal with a manageable number of subjects and publications.

Develop a keen sense of the preferences you detect in what different publications demand. They each want a certain kind of subject, treatment, language. Nevertheless, note that one of those preferences is for something original, something different from the general run of what they publish and yet which fits.

Occasionally make your own particular demands. As well as writing for the publications that have commissioned you, sometimes find publications for the features you have written. You need to impose yourself on your material in your own way, develop your own style, sometimes take the risk that a feature won’t come off or will be rejected. Put it away then and try rewriting it later on. Furthermore, use your familiarity with an audience courageously on occasions, to put across truths you know it may find unpalatable.

You will find your own way of studying how different publications cover subjects you’ve marked as your own. The list that follows, provides, I hope, a useful formula. It contrasts the varied approaches of different publications to a particular subject. It points to the pitfalls inherent in dealing with the subjects listed. And it suggests how to vary your own approach when selling a subject/idea to different editors.

CELEBRITIES

Journalism has been awash with feature articles within and about the celebrity culture for some years. You may deplore the obsession with celebrity and the vacuousness of gossip magazines, and you may believe that the vicariousness encouraged by celebrity culture has replaced the real values once provided by religion and political convictions.

You may, on the other hand, note that the culture pervades all social levels and consider the above attitude elitist and verging on the absurd. Cosmo Landesman in Prospect magazine believed that ‘for most people celebrity culture is escapist fun. You tune in to celebrity soap operas – Robbie and Geri or Posh and Becks – and you tune out and get on with life’.

Different approaches

Between these two viewpoints there are many complexities to explore. There is cynical pandering to low expectations. Way back in 1996 Richard Barber, editor of OK! magazine, interviewed for The Guardian by Andrew O’Hagan, summed up his market of C1 and C2 women between 25 and 44 as ‘a fairly bog-standard female audience in terms of who they are and where they live. Well, their biggest form of entertainment is clearly the television sitting in the corner of the living room, isn’t it?’ I note that there have been two or three changes of editor since then.

The colour pictures of these magazines leap off the page while much of the writing assumes a captive audience. An article in Heat about the domestic arrangements of David and Victoria Beckham following an alleged kidnap plot ends:

… More often than not, the homebodies stay in, put some R&B on the stereo while David cooks Victoria her favourite salmon dinner. Or, if neither can be bothered to cook, an Indian takeaway. ‘They really are normal,’ reveals a close friend of the couple. ‘A perfect day for them is going to Sainsbury’s, coming back, making dinner and watching a DVD.’

Reader’s Digest joined the club in October 2001, adding pages of celebrity interviews and a lifestyle section in order to attract readers aged 35 plus to its then core readership aged between 40 and 60. They are upbeat accounts, in that magazine’s wholesome manner. Meg Grant finds Pierce Brosnan (‘Bond Unbound’) ‘a superstar in his role of family man … compelled to provide for his children the childhood he never had’.

Newer celeb mags do that balancing act perfected by the populars of giving the wicked as well as the wonderful. Here! makes a point of reflecting the complexity of our (or if you prefer, its readers’) fascination. There’s prurience and envy mixed up with love and admiration, and the insults and the accounts of celebs’ excesses and misfortunes can be funny and occasionally thought-provoking. Further upmarket, writers can probe greater depths and these are given space in Chapter 16.

The Internet is less regulated. An example is Popbitch (satirical music gossip). It was started by Neil Stevenson (who became editor of The Face) because he was frustrated by the way celebrities are overprotected by publicists. A welcome change from vacuity, perhaps, or as media pundit Stephen Glover called it in the Daily Mail ‘an open sewer running with lies’. If you haven’t already, have a look and see what you think.

Pitfalls

PR companies, studios, record companies and their clients put pressures on editors and writers. They may want to make such editorial decisions as which writer, which photographer, the length, the date of the issue in which the celeb interview will appear. Editors of newspapers and general consumer magazines can learn to negotiate with some success, but editors of celeb magazines have less bargaining power.

Your approach

Writers clearly have to work closely with editors when making arrangements to interview a celeb, especially when there’s a demand by the interviewee or agent for copy approval. See John Morrish’s Magazine Editing on this and other editor–writer collaborations (especially Chapter 5, The Right Words).

Celebrity can be shortlived these days and any enduring talents are soon overexposed. To fill the gap reality TV in the Big Brother and suchlike shows produces a kind of processed celeb out of would-be celebs without any particular talent, and they get into the papers and the mags as well. Yet another complexity for the writer to come to terms with, to come up with the right attitude for the target chosen.

Competition of course is fierce. Apply with your idea by phone or fax initially. Hello! says they are ‘interested in celebrity-based features with a newsy angle and exclusive interviews from generally unapproachable personalities’.

To sum up, if you’re going to start writing about the celebrity culture you have a wide spectrum: where would you fit in, where do your sympathies lie?

CHILDREN

Writing about children looks easier than it is. You may be a parent, a teacher, social worker or child psychologist: that will be a great help. What is essential is that you have an imaginative insight into children’s worlds and an ability to establish a rapport and to interpret what they say.

Different approaches

Current themes are illiteracy at various levels, with much of the blame accruing to computer games or too much television, lack of discipline at home and school, the increase in truancy, drug use and too early sex, and the dangers from paedophiles. On the positive side, it is said that interaction with computers has raised IQ levels, that listening to them more than was the habit in the past has helped children to grow into more confident and more enterprising adults. It is also said that more imaginative parenting is prevalent today, requiring much more effort than the parenting of the past, that this is commendable and that children’s general behaviour speaks of self-expression that should be encouraged rather than bad manners.

A Guardian article deplored the fact that too many schools concentrated on cramming in order to keep up with the National Curriculum. British children were bombarded with tests, and compared with American children lacked confidence and powers of self-expression because too little time was devoted to their encouragement.

On the other hand, self-expression can be overdone. There are horror stories of women teachers brought over from Australia, Canada and Jamaica, accustomed to well-disciplined pupils, being subjected to streams of bad language and threats of rape. Their sojourns can be brief. Why are the children so badly behaved? ‘Boring,’ the children sometimes say. Sometimes they are justified in this. Too many temporary (stop-gap) teachers can mean a bewildering lack of continuity.

A Tatler article on dyslexia and associated conditions in children by Jonathan Margolis dispelled ‘the myth that a learning difficulty equals failure’. This was followed by an article about his own dyslexia by the prolific columnist A. A. Gill.

An article in She by Paul Keers (‘Hero today, gone tomorrow’) analyses the effects on children of their heroes disgracing themselves, of athletes taking drugs, for example, or footballers or boxers taking bribes. This was based on case studies, with a large section in the middle containing the comments of a child psychologist at London’s Tavistock Clinic.

Pitfalls

Pension-book holders must take care to avoid thinking (too often): when I was a child we were taught how to behave. If you’re just out of college, you may be tempted too often to discount the views of anyone over 40.

Your approach

Interviews with experts together with case studies and your own experience make a common combination. If you have no children of your own, get to know some and learn from them.

CRIME

Crime is compelling story, drama, conflict, passion, and in its aftermath are inspirational messages, triumphs over adversity. The media are swamped with crime; the papers, the magazines and the broadcast media (documentaries, docudramas, series). There are the thrillers, the many feature films. All this means that there’s plenty of information and well-informed audiences. There are pros and cons in this situation for the writer. The facts have to be separated from prejudices, passionate convictions backed up by good evidence. The territory is a rewarding one for the experts, who include ex-senior policemen, sociologists, psychologists and fiction writers. If you’re not an expert, it’s a good specialization as long as you can keep up.

Different approaches

In the London Evening Standard Paul Barker, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Community Studies, under the title ‘Send the police out alone on the beat’, wondered why police so often work in pairs. While street crime was rising in every London borough and the London Metropolitan Police pleaded lack of resources, this was a waste of resources he said. If they were on their own we would be ‘twice as likely to see one of them in action’.

He talked to Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan branch of the Police Federation. The problem was diagnosed as ‘our public services’ paramount (and paranoid) safety culture’. Recent changes in safety legislation have ‘undercut thorough policework … The NHS is riddled with the disease known as defensive medicine, whereby consultants throw every possible test at a patient to cover themselves legally. The police, in their pathetic pairings, are going in for “defensive policing”.’

This is a good model of an Op Ed piece carrying a strong point of view on a controversial subject and ending up by proposing a solution. It aroused interest and provoked different points of view, and inspired a continuing debate in the letters pages.

As well as including personal experience, an expert’s pronouncement and the evidence of a safety culture, the author backed up his thesis by reference to an American police novel, the Health and Safety Executive, the TV police series Inspector Morse, and statements made by the Home Secretary and the head of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

Features dealing with the social problem and human interest aspects of crime regularly appear in general interest magazines. They draw on the research sources of such organizations as NAPO (the National Association of Probation Officers), the Howard League for Penal Reform, NACRO (the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) and Women in Prison. Some of the statistics and brief case studies are put in boxes.

Pitfalls

You have to be careful with the statistics. There’s vastly more awareness of crime than there used to be, which can lead to false assumptions. The number of people in prison has greatly increased, prisons are overcrowded, more are being built. But with the increase of telephones and computers more crimes are being reported and recorded. Detection is aided by much media coverage and hampered by some.

The facts have to be separated from the prejudices, passionate convictions backed up by good evidence.

Your approach

If you’re not an expert, it’s essential to base your writing on interviews with experts, case studies and legwork, and to check and check again.

EDUCATION

The subject is riddled with controversies and arguments are constantly raging. At the time of writing there is a drastic shortage of teachers in state schools (see the Children section) and heated discussions on how the greatly increased numbers entering higher education are to be funded. But there have been unresolved problems since the Education Act of 1944, with each new government trying various ruses, seemingly bereft of a coherent policy.

Different approaches

An article by Jenni Russell in the left-wing New Statesman (‘The Secret Lessons’, 8 April 2002) revealed the absurdity of the league tables of schools being distorted by the increase in private tutoring. The league tables of test and examination performance are supposed to reflect the quality of the teaching in the schools. But the tutoring ‘disadvantages working-class children and undermines any pretensions to a comprehensive school system’. The problem is compounded by parents moving house to get their children into better schools, including selective ones. The mother of a 10-year-old, when she asked a teacher why the class rarely had maths homework, was told, ‘I don’t tend to give homework any more, because I know most of the children are being tutored’.

Rachel Johnson in the right-of-centre The Spectator, following up, scored points in ‘A Private Affair’ (6 July 2002) by juxtaposing some of the Labour brass condemning Conservatives for their reliance on private schools and private tutoring with the Blairs and other brass making use of such topping up.

She had to be sympathetic (she did it herself): ‘Why should [the Blairs] be subject to the doctrinaire requirement that the offspring of Labour Party top brass receive their education entirely at the hands of the state?’ Yet she brought up the disadvantaged working-class children again and ended up on an apologetic note: ‘Wouldn’t it be better and fairer if we (me included) just let the schools get on with it without the intervention of parents and tutors?’

Pitfalls

Again, as in the subject of children, it’s easy to pontificate, to get involved with abstractions. Talk to different kinds of parents with children at different kinds of schools, especially if you haven’t any children.

Your approach

If you are a teacher or lecturer in Further Education and have offspring being educated at various levels, you might well make education a specialism. If you want to dive in occasionally, get up to date with the Education sections of the national broadsheets. There is also the weekly Times Educational Supplement and The Times Higher Educational Supplement.

HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Specialist features written by medical professionals are discussed in Chapter 19. There are not enough of these experts, however, to cope with the great interest in the subject, so here we are concerned with the non-expert who wants to write about various aspects. There are many non-experts who write well – some particular experience or unusual angle will make acceptance easier.

Different approaches

Science, and more specifically biotechnology, constantly invades the subject so that new ideas are not hard to find. Angela Wilkes had a fascinating account in Sainsbury’s The Magazine of the prospects for effective treatment of common disorders via pharmacogenetics. This means tailoring drug treatments to our genetic profiles. A box (‘Gene Talk’) explained in jargon-free language the meaning of genes, genome, genotype and the DNA spiral.

Articles about illnesses need case studies. Teenage anorexia victims have been well documented. A Marie Claire article by Deborah Holder tackled more unusual cases: a 12-year-old girl whose weight went down to 3 st. and a 42-year-old woman (2 st. 9 lb). The interviewees spoke for themselves: the girl and her mother, the woman and her husband. A panel of information explained the help available from the Eating Disorders Association.

The popular women’s magazines draw largely on case studies and question-and-answer pages giving expert advice. Judy Kirby’s Here’s Health section in Saga keeps that mature audience up to date with health matters. A typical monthly content covered articles on NHS patients going abroad for treatment, on a radio producer’s experience of various hearing aids, how keeping a dream diary can foretell illness, dangers detected in some electric toothbrushes, and how listening to baroque music has helped cancer patients.

Alternative medicine is getting increasing space, with sections in the newspapers and popular magazines, and the launches of specialized magazines. Lisa Howells, the Features Editor of the monthly Here’s Health, says they want pieces on ‘alternative/natural health and living and related therapies’.

While many alternative medicine practices such as hypnotherapy are recognized as valuable by the orthodoxy, readers should be kept aware of the dangers of going for treatment to people who are inadequately qualified. It is reassuring to list within articles one or two dependable organizations which can supply the names of properly qualified practitioners. Many articles about alternative medicine are written in-house or by qualified therapists who fill a regular slot. Check this out by market study.

Pitfalls

If you get into questions of diagnosis and treatment a minor inaccuracy of yours could have woeful results for your readers so you must get it right. That means a good medical encyclopedia on your shelves, a good biology textbook, study guides for the aspects that particularly interest you, and the ability to locate the necessary experts. For such contacts you will need at least ready access to the General Medical Council’s Register and The Medical Directory, which gives the background and experience of doctors. Some aspects, such as dieting, though covered widely, must be regarded as specialist: careful checking with the experts is essential. Obesity: has there been enough on eat less and exercise more? Please.

Your approach

Where will the ideas come from and where will you sell them? As with most specialist subjects that lend themselves to popularization, a good principle is to go downmarket for the research and upmarket with the idea (see the specialist chapter) or upmarket for the research and downmarket with the idea. That way your audience will not be too familiar with the material on which your article is to be based.

Thus you will get ideas from the medical-specialist The Lancet and the British Medical Journal that you may be able to shape for general interest magazines and more than one popular magazine – among the men’s, the women’s, the parents’, the teenagers’, the elderly’s. When, for example, an article in the British Medical Journal said that female sexual dysfunction was ‘the corporate-sponsored creation of a disease’ to profit from the drugs manufactured to treat it, there was follow-up far and wide. The over-prescription of drugs in orthodox medicine continues to have mileage.

OLD AGE OR RETIREMENT

Around 12 million people have at the time of writing reached retirement age: formidable ‘grey power’, as the advertisers were quick to recognize, that an increasing number of magazines and feature pages have to cater for. People are ‘retiring’ at 55 (or taking company pensions then and starting another life, some of them a writing life) and living to 85. This is a wide age range to accommodate. Furthermore, some retirees are comfortably off, have paid off their mortgages and enjoy a substantial income, while other retirees suffer from the dwindling value of the inadequate state pension. Some ‘oldies’ are very active, physically and mentally, others are bedridden. Articles for most targets have to be multi-purposing enough to interest this spectrum.

Different approaches

Contrast the following magazines: Choice, Active Life, The Oldie.

Pitfalls

You may want to watch for fashions in nostalgia: there are sudden revivals of the tastes of the 1940s or the 1950s. But of course the revivals are shortlived, so the timing has to be just right.

You are of course most often addressing the elderly/retired directly. You’d be unwise to have a picture of your 85-year-old grandad or grandmother in your sights, however active they might be, when many retirees are aged 55.

Your approach

A few practical points when making comparisons between then and now. Be specific and accurate. Do the necessary research. Get some names (who was Prime Minister at the time?). Get dates to pinpoint periods exactly. Make price comparisons only after you have calculated the effects of inflation.

TRAVEL

Travel belongs to a huge market full of opportunities. True, and therefore it gets the lion’s share of the space here. But because so many writers want to get into it, it’s a tough, highly competitive area too. To specialize in it is hard work. If you don’t specialize, you’ll probably need to become skilled at multi-purposing.

Readers of travel magazines and the travel sections of the papers have vastly different interests, so that your readership analysis needs to be at its sharpest. How much have they got to spend, what rank of hotels/restaurants should you be talking about, how old are they, how adventurous? Is it two weeks at a beachside resort for a family or a month in the Borneo jungle for a twenty-something between jobs? Is it a package holiday in which much practical advice about insurance, health risks, etc. will be provided by tour operator or travel agent, or will you need to provide it? When most of your readers are going to be armchair travellers, you have to bring something extra out of the bag – try to make the piece entertaining in its own right, try to recreate the experience instead of merely describe it.

Different approaches

Travel articles can be classified under:

1  Destination pieces, the readers practical, probably planning to go there on holiday.

2  Evocative pieces, readers including tourists but also armchair travellers.

3  Exploratory pieces, which may be written by writers who are trying to understand and describe a country or countries in some depth (and perhaps themselves and the human condition at the same time). Some of these writers also produce books. Most readers will be armchair travellers. Both evocative and exploratory articles may be more concerned with the travelling than the arriving.

The above is of course a drastic oversimplification but it does help me to get through this section. The three kinds overlap, and there are numerous sub-sections. Consider the factors of time and money available to the readers aimed at: age, sex, single or married, with or without children, mode of transport, and so on. Not every reader wants to ride on a yak.

A completely honest account of a trip of the more unusual kind with a mixture of suffering and exhilaration can be refreshingly unpredictable. Stephen Pile on an adventure holiday in Peru (Sunday Times Magazine) describes how the group tasted the Indians’ beer, made from chewed yucca and women’s spit. ‘“It’s a script between somebody’s home-brew and gone-off yoghurt,” said the couple from Leicester …’

The Leader asked the Indians if they were worried about losing their traditional ways when a road was built into the jungle. ‘“No,” came the reply. “We’re going to open a restaurant.”’ (If you’re going down this road, however, make sure the experience hasn’t already been done over a few times and is no longer so unpredictable.)

More off-the-beaten-track in both content and style are the travel articles in the men’s magazines. (Contrast Esquire and Loaded.)

Pitfalls

Accepting ‘facilities’ from organizations, which means certain expenses paid or discounts on air fares and hotel bills, otherwise known as ‘freebies’, can be restrictive. If you tell the truth about deficiencies in a generous company’s services, your relations with that company and even with an editor may be soured. But you are right and they are wrong to expect you to turn into a publicist. That principle holds for all journalism. If you’re writing travel articles for a prestigious expensive glossy magazine, they may prefer to pay all expenses so that you won’t have to accept free trips and be tempted to bias in what you say.

Avoid brochurespeak, which is a strong temptation if you’re doing a destination piece to be written after a short visit with a pressing deadline. Clichés are fewer than they used to be and you won’t get away with them. Make a note to avoid those that still slip through the net. What does ‘authentic cuisine’ mean?

Avoid stretches of description unless the scene is extraordinary and remote. Bring a scene to life with new facts, action, revealing dialogue, anecdotes that add drama.

Your approach

Build a travel article round a theme: finding a good title can be a good start. If you can’t find a theme, try to sum up the place or the journey in a pithy sentence. Will that do as a theme? Often a theme can be turned into action – a story with a beginning, middle and end. Whatever the theme, be careful to keep the readers’ needs uppermost. What will they particularly enjoy in the places described? What will they want to avoid?

Do the necessary research in guidebooks, travel books, perhaps novels, then put your notes aside when you write. If you’re going to a resort, using a travel agent, ask to see that voluminous directory they keep under the counter that tells the truth about building work round the hotel or problems with air conditioning or central heating. When you visit anywhere for any length of time, read the local papers if you know the language or get someone to translate such news as how tourism is polluting the environment or how local people have recently been ripping off or mugging the tourists. If you send up the tourists, include yourself among them.

On the other hand, follow E. M. Forster’s advice (about the best way to see Alexandria): ‘wander aimlessly about’. Be on the alert for serendipity. Dig out the unexpected, see what other people haven’t seen or probably won’t see, and you won’t end up sounding like your guidebook. Be knowledgeable with a light touch. Don’t be a bon vivant or come out with foreign phrases to impress. Please allow me that one.

Avoid stretches of description unless you can astonish. Find action, new facts, revealing dialogue. Use fictional techniques.

Use a camera or take a sketch book. Your photographs or sketches will help you to be precise in your descriptions. Don’t use the camera as a crutch. Note your impressions as they come, otherwise your photographs, a day or two later, may gaze back at you blankly, or freeze your imagination instead of stimulating it and reminding you of precise detail.

If you are a good photographer you will sell many features on the quality of your pictures. If you have a camera with fully automatic equipment and a good eye you don’t have to be an expert to satisfy many markets. But find out whether a publication prefers to use its own picture library or a picture agency or its own photographers.

For longer trips it’s a good idea to take a tape recorder as well, for notetaking, interviewing and for recording the sounds of a seedy night club in Bangkok or the croaking of frogs outside your hotel window. You may also want to take a laptop computer, and an AC adaptor and converter.

Bring back menus, brochures and leaflets that you pick up during your stay. Note striking reactions as you go to capture the edges of fresh reactions but it may be best to leave the writing up until you get back.

See Chapter 2 on expenses in general. Travel is expensive and the fee for an article may fall far short of the cost in time and money. You may be able to make use of freebies if you can avoid the pitfalls mentioned. They are not so easy to obtain these days though. It will help if you have been commissioned.

Freebies come in various forms. You may want to get on a press trip or obtain tourist-office hospitality. On press trips you are highly organized in a group. They are tiring but you can benefit from the opportunities to network with the other writers, some of whom will be travel magazine or section editors. Tourist-office hospitality can involve free hotel accommodation and meals, and sometimes help with air travel as well. But don’t accept freebies with conditions that curb your independence in any way.

If you’re lacking help with expenses, you may be able to sell the same article to several markets. Make the most of any trip by making notes on various aspects of the place to be written up into various articles. Read any English language publications and the local ones if you know the language. A trip to Milan might find you visiting art galleries, old churches and rundown estates as well as La Scala, talking to drug addicts and illegal immigrants and one or two British expats as well as getting businessmen’s views on what the EU does for them.

Think of the publications you read, and write for. What would their readers want to know about Milan? A woman’s magazine might want to know how Italian families cope with two parents working, a men’s magazine a contrast between London and Milanese nightclub bouncers, and so on. See the Multi-purposing section below.

Destination pieces: readers looking for holiday ideas trawl the travel pages in newspapers for holidays they can afford and they want the prices of everything. Use charts or boxed information where appropriate. Indicate where readers can get further information, about excursions and so on.

Evocative pieces: work out which approach works best for you. Are you the traveller with personality, perhaps some eccentricity, concerned to express your reactions to what you find, whether humorously or painfully? To study this technique have a look at Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo and Bill Bryson. Are you, in contrast, the traveller who succeeds in blending into your surroundings, so that the scene comes vividly and purely to life and the reader is transported. (Read the travel books of Norman Lewis.)

Exploratory pieces: the epic dimensions of the quests of the renowned twentieth century travellers are lacking today, but one can learn some valuable techniques from reading Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens Van Der Post, T. E. Lawrence and Gavin Maxwell. There may be no more lost worlds or forgotten tribes to be discovered, but there are evils to be unmasked and glories to be unearthed.

The disruptive effects of industrialism and tourism on some cultures can make a serious exploratory theme. The attention paid to this issue by Geographical Magazine has been mentioned, but it’s covered by the more escapist travel articles as well.

Books

Sampling the great travel writers listed in the Bibliography will be worthwhile whatever your market, but essential if you aim to write books. You may want to write as a contributor among several for the books that approach the subject through design, diagrams and striking illustrations rather than through words. See Dorling Kindersley’s series and the Insight Guides, for example. Wonderful tasters, but you may be frustrated by the need to hone your piece down to 30 words when you feel it needs a hundred.

The book with your byline, depending on your writing skill rather than illustration, may be your aim. As with many other subjects, if you pull it off you then have more chance of getting commissioned for features.