The Renegade Writer Blog

Eight years ago, with no qualifications other than desire, Ellen Barone traded a successful 12-year career teaching high school mathematics for freelance travel writing and photography. Her articles have appeared in The Oregonian, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Texas Monthly and other magazines, and her photographs have appeared in such magazines as National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Condé Nast Traveler, Islands, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Travel Section, and Spa.

How did you get started in travel writing?

In the beginning, writing was purely a means to an end: I wanted to travel. Without a trust fund, I needed to find a way to finance my wanderlust.

Originally, my focus was on photography and selling my images as stock to travel publications. I soon realized, however, that the best way to create a need for my images was to sell the story too.

Today, it is still the story that sells the pictures, but the challenge of writing to propel the reader through the sensual experience of place and people, has become as rewarding and important as the travel itself.

What’s been your favorite travel writing experience so far?

Boy, that’s a tough one to answer. There have been so many favorites. Sleeping beneath the stars in the Moroccan Sahara was a memory I’ll never forget. Sailing across the Atlantic, another. Then there was the day spent with a Burmese mathematics teacher who asked if she could hang out and practice her English while I wandered around her village taking photographs. Here we were, total strangers from opposite sides of the planet, yet I sensed immediately that we were kindred spirits. We were of nearly identical ages; she was a high school mathematics teacher; I’m a former math teacher; we both had an insatiable curiosity about the other. We spent only a few hours together, but it was an experience that I’ll always treasure.

Traveling as a writer has forced me to pay closer attention to the experience, the sensory details, the people I meet. And I’m the richer for it. My passion is my profession. Can it get much better than that?

What has been your scariest travel writing experience?

Mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies. I really don’t like heights and yet I knew that rappelling, for the first time, down a 9,000-foot mountain would make the story that much more interesting, so I roped up, put myself in the safe hands of experienced guides, leaned back into the void and let loose. I have never felt so afraid, yet so alive.

Here’s a question I hear a lot: Should you sell an idea and then go on the trip, or go on the trip and then sell the idea?

Unless it’s somewhere I just really want to go without an assignment hanging over my head, my goal is always to sell the idea — as many times as I can — and then go on the trip. But, that is a financially driven decision. I simply cannot afford to take the trip and hope that it will sell. I need to know I have something lined up ahead of time.

That said, I know plenty of travelers with day jobs, spouses with day jobs, or independent means, who take the trip, write it up, then sell it to top name publications, usually large circulation newspapers, which pay very little, but feed the ego and help make a name for the writer quite nicely.

Do you have any dos and don’ts for aspiring travel writers?

Just do it! Be bold, brave and doggedly persistent. Never stop writing or telephoning or e-mailing editors and sending new ideas.

Remember, the publishing pond is big: Newspapers, magazines, guidebooks, and online markets all use travel in many variations: service stories, destination articles, how-to advice, short trends and front-of-book pieces, specialty travel, personal essay, etc. Do what works for you, what fits your style and interests.

Don’t promise more than you can deliver. And, don’t confuse a destination for a story.

I see that you also offer photography to magazines. Does this give you a leg up on selling your articles?

Yes, I think it does, because the photography helps give editors — and subsequently readers — the entire picture. Providing images unique to my experience not only enhances and enriches my words, but also helps to make an editor’s job that much easier. In fact, many tighter-budget magazines rely on their writers to provide photos.

Does an aspiring travel writer need a fancy camera set-up?

Not necessarily, especially if the photographs will be published in a newspaper where image quality isn’t as a big an issue as it is for a glossy magazine. My recommendation would be to buy the best equipment your budget can accommodate. These days, that would probably be a digital camera, either a higher end all-in-one or SLR with interchangeable lenses. The better your photos, the better your chances of being published.

Have you broken any rules to break into magazines?

In the beginning, it was more a case of ‘too dumb to know better’ than being a renegade. I queried every publication I thought was a fit, simultaneously. I learned very quickly that most editors are slammed with work and that responding to queries is last on their ‘to-do’ lists. I just couldn’t see waiting for a response that might take months (or even years) before sending the idea onto the next publication. All I needed was one “yes, we’ll take it” and I was off and happily running.

Later, once I knew more about the conventional rules and practices and had ongoing relationships with editors, I found myself becoming more conservative in my approach to querying. In fact, eventually knowing the rules better began to hold me back.

Today, thanks to books like The Renegade Writer, my goal is to shoot high, tailor my pitches and story angles to fit the interests and needs of a particular publications and reading audience, and to follow the rules that make sense to me and respectfully break those that don’t.

My new motto is to be ‘bold, brilliant, and brave.’ Brilliant might be stretching it a bit, but you get the idea. I plan to crank my career up to the next level and to have fun doing it.

[LF]