While recently chatting with my sister, she casually asked if I’d been traveling at all. You know, as a travel writer, aren’t you supposed to be constantly traveling?
At first, I wasn’t sure why she was asking, but I completely understood why she had to ask. Most of the content I’ve been creating and publishing recently has been Sweden-based. All organic local content.
After all, I am a married expat here, slowly transitioning into full-blown Swedish residency – learning the language, playing by the legal rules, fully integrating as best as I can, carving out my new home and lifestyle.
Her question left me pondering a bit. The last time I was out of Sweden was just two months ago, and I’ll be traveling abroad next month too. Within the last two months, I’ve been moving around Sweden a bit as well as exploring and photographing Stockholm’s tight corners.
But the word “travel writer” propagates a (false to me) image of constant travel, exquisite experiences, and a breakneck speed lifestyle that some people still salivate at. The “tough” life of a travel writer has been argued to death on various travel blogs so no need to instigate it here.
This also brings me back to one of the key focus areas of Matador Network – place. As writers who document the experience of travel, we also need to understand that by stripping away all the glamorous-sounding bits, all we have left is “place” as it is.
And we can certainly celebrate place and listen to it as honestly as we can. Writer and editor David Miller does a fantastic job of this.
So, as I slowly clear and prioritize my work plate, I want to balance writing about expat life in Sweden (my home now) and garnish it with occasional summarized travel reports and dispatches from other places. And that means finding the right work<->travel<->life ratio that works for me and my husband.
If you’re a fellow expat as well as a writer who primarily writes about travel and place, how do you balance it all? Integrating locally while still keeping a healthy travel balance (whatever that means to you)?
@Julie – Thanks so much and it really is crazy that there’s this undue pressure that one must travel every month. I’ve been enjoying researching and writing deeper cultural articles for the Swedish Institute and can’t wait to get even deeper beneath the culture and become fluent in Swedish one day.
@Angela – Thanks for your comments. I absolutely agree with you – being both a semi-insider and foreigner gives us a unique advantage. One of which is a certain level of objectivity.
@Kristin (Camels & Chocolate) – Thanks so much for stopping by! Always love it when you do. You’re also a fantastic example of that balance – traveling when you need to, staying put to complete pieces, as well as balancing it all with married life. And I think for each writer/expat that does similar stuff to what we both do, we just have to find that personal balance that works for us, all the while making sure our spouses are also well taken care of in the process.
Though I’m not an expat, I know the feeling well! There’s a couple month stretch every year where I have to turn in the manuscripts for Frommer’s California, Los Angeles and San Francisco back to back–within a month of each other!–and during which, I stay put and don’t travel. (Well, around California a bit, but if I don’t need my passport, it’s not traveling in my mind!) In fact, when I go to Canada in July, it will be my first time using my passport since last October, which is probably a record for me! I usually use it every month or two.
I think even what you write about Sweden is to be considered travel writing. The first advice they gave me in university was to write about my hometown because it was a place I knew better than anyone else, and now Sweden is your home. Your advantage is that is both your home and you are also foreigner, so you can understand both locals and describe well their culture and what can be of interest for tourists.
I’ve been an expat for 6 years, and sometimes I too felt that writing about my new hometown was not “travel writing” but in fact I stay longer to each place for the very reason of getting to know them better.
Lola-
Just last night, in the MatadorU online travel writers’ reading group, we were discussing the question, “What is travel writing, anyway?”. For me, the answer is that travel writing isn’t just what mainstream media have come to define as travel writing- ie: selling me on a destination, but about anything that’s entirely rooted in a sense of place. You’re definitely a travel writer in that sense!
@Michelle
Loved your statement here -> “So if you experience Sweden and write about it it isn’t ‘travel writing,’ but if I come visit you and do the same, it is?.” So true. Grabbing opportunities as they come as well as devoting adequate time to learning and absorbing the local nature where one is based is the balance I need to find. I feel honored that one of your longest blog comments is here 🙂
@Mikeachim
Thanks for chiming in. Yes, finding one’s own balance in terms of travel and expat life is extremely important. That’s where I am right now as well. It also raises the question of all eggs-in-a-basket. What if writers no longer have the opportunity to travel? Do they know their backyards well enough to still produce quality content and sustain their lifestyle? Do they have other skills they can tap into? I certainly hope so. Food for thought.
@JoAnna
I completely agree. Was wondering how fellow writers balance it as well. I feel extremely blessed to be able to get consistent work both in Sweden and through other international outlets as both a writer and photographer. It really is about getting underneath and fully experiencing the place as well as carving out time to learn the local language and fully integrate as well. If I’m traveling every two weeks, that can’t happen for me and it will always feel like a start-stop reentry scenario every time.
@Pam
I absolutely know what you mean and you’ve also hit something I’ve always told some of my Swedish friends here. An expat is the ultimate observer and that’s why I feel it’s easier for expats here to write objectively about life in Sweden than local Swedes.
Thank you guys for chiming in with your thoughts!
I did some of my best writing about place as an expat. I had the time to really observe, but I was never a true insider. That leisure, that ability to take a long hard look at a place through outsider eyes, but without the rushed schedule of the writer on a short trip, let me really explore the landscape, the people, the way things were, to unravel little mysteries about my adopted, temporary home in a much sharper way. It took me five or six trips to Hawaii to start to write about that place the way I really wanted to write about it. I think that one can be a “travel writer” without getting on a plane and going somewhere far far away, and that expats are uniquely positioned to be really freaking good at it. Though I prefer, lately, to call myself a writer. One who travels when I can. And I like to write about places. The travel, it’s how I get there. Know what I mean? I suspect you do.
A big part of my travel writing is based on my hometown. I happen to live in a place where there’s a lot of travel-related stuff going on, but when I teach travel writing classes, I always tell people that there are stories in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas. In fact, sometimes the best stories are those that no one would ever think to find because they aren’t hot on the travel radar. Staying close to home doesn’t make a person a weaker travel writer; I think it makes him or her more in tune to the details that really make a place interesting and different from others.
Ahh, this topic torments me, Lola. 😉
Fact is, I’m a writer who writes about travel a lot but doesn’t often get further than the outskirts of his own city. However much I know that miles don’t equate to quality travel-writing, it has eaten at me. There’s a natural balancing point that each of us aspires to, different in every case, and I’m out of balance right now.
So there’s all that (guilt?) lurking in the back of my mind as I agree with you, and say that travel-writing is the art of fresh perspectives on places and people, and they are skills you can hone *anywhere*. What matters is how good you are at digging into the world, using words.
The image of a travel-writer who constantly travels is a reality, but surely only as the wildest exception. To have your writing siustainably fund your travels means you have to be established. The usual way you get established is by putting stupid amounts of hours in (while not travelling). The exceptions to this rule are few and far between, from what I can see. There are lots of continuous RTWers – but a very, very small number of them are professional travel-writers. That’s the myth that needs busting, frankly.
The glamour of travel-writing should be the thrill of finding new ways to express new understandings of the world. To stretch and to learn. That’s the most satisfying Why. That’s the one that makes you happy when you look back in later life. I feel this very strongly…
YESYESYES.
Remember that link we (at Matador) discussed months ago, about a man who had clocked a million miles of travel (or something equally ludicrous)? He had some derisive things to say about places he’d been and travel in general.
I feel like I’m more of a traveler when I walk across the street from my apartment to the market then that guy is in any ‘exotic’ location. Every place is ‘exotic’ to someone, right? So if you experience Sweden and write about it it isn’t ‘travel writing,’ but if I come visit you and do the same, it is? No way!
I’m not an expat at the moment, though I have been in the past and will be again probably starting next year. But if travel really is about place – and to me, it is – I don’t feel like I need to go far away to travel. Honestly, I always thought about expatriatism as a form of travel, like slow travel.
So I suppose my balance is grabbing opportunities to visit other places when I can, but really experiencing where I live fully while I’m here – learning new things about it, finding new restaurants and things to do, and of course, writing about them.
This might be the longest comment I’ve ever left on a blog post! 😛 Thanks, Lola, for a great topic!