People, people, people

Patrick Forsyth looks at the part others play in your travel writing

he phrase travel writing encompasses a number of things – it includes describing events, places (from a town or country to a building) and people. People most often go alongside something else, but equally they may play and contribute a major role.

The first person to consider is yourself. Are you writing in the first person – is your experience, opinion or advice a key element? Or do you stay in the background as it were? There is a place for both, and your choice should reflect your intention for whatever you are writing.

But what about other people? For example:

Offering advice or experience; you may speak to people then quote or paraphrase them in the way that a hotel manager or the guide in a stately home or on a guided tour may add information

If you meet others along the way then your interactions may provide a way of describing things around you, either by quoting your conversations or just because what occurs fuels your own description, whether you mention the conversations themselves or not.

Sometimes people other than yourself can add firsthand information that you do not have (and might not want to have). For example, you might describe bungee jumping in New Zealand, resolving to avoid doing it at any cost, but chatting to participants might allow you to add the feeling of real experience to your description. Information gleaned in this way may not only be factual, but descriptive too.

Certain people can reoccur, as might a fellow traveller on a trip or someone you meet repeatedly, eg as you both stay in the same hotel; the more closed the environment the more likely this is to happen. You may be able to make the most of this by introducing a progression: someone initially has a minor role, then as time passes begins to contribute more and more to the situation you are describing.

Other people may play only a fleeting role, but still add significantly to your total content. For example the following is from a piece I wrote about the hazards of who you may sit next to on planes:

Some fellow passengers are bizarre: I once spent eleven hours sitting next to a terrified undertaker on his first flight, as his nervousness rendered him unable to stop talking about his grizzly profession and the air crash bodies that had passed through his premises – I charged the full whack even when much of them was missing, he said – as I wondered where this would lead by the time the flight ended.

Such a description might even be fictitious, or exaggerated on occasion –though in the case quoted above my undertaker was all too real.

TExperts: Fellow travellers: