The Journey of a Story

Partly because I wrote Lonely Planet’s guide to travel writing and partly because I’ve been a travel writer for 30-plus years, people assume that travel writing is easy for me. It isn’t. It’s painful. And exhilarating. But it almost always begins with pain. For writers who despair when a story doesn’t start smoothly or when the words don’t flow, I thought it might be helpful to relate the journey of my most recent story, which was about a one-week stay i…