The Renegade Writer Blog

I’ve been pulling together my travel writing workshop, and happened to be preparing my materials on ethics, when a lovely little travel writing ethics scandal conveniently popped up in the news.

You’ve probably already heard about the fracas surrounding the new tell-all travel writing book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism, by Thomas Kohnstamm. In it, he apparently admits to committing plagiarism. (Although in this World Hum interview, he says that was simply a bad joke.) He also says that he had sex with a waitress in a restaurant after closing time –for which he rewarded the restaurant with a review noting its friendly table service. (Perceptive Traveler’s Antonia Malchik is tempted to call this sort of thing “pointless male dick-waving”, and I’ll succumb to that temptation).

There are other confessions Kohnstamm makes, but what’s getting the most traction is his acknowledgment that he wrote a Lonely Planet guidebook about Colombia without ever visiting the country. This is what he said: “They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating—an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

So it seems the question isn’t whether travel writers go to hell , but whether they actually go anywhere at all. Can you credibly write about travel without leaving your desk?

The idealist would say, no, of course not! The writer’s physical presence in a destination is an essential part of the implicit contract between reader and writer –the reader is going to go on this trip, the writer must go too. And preferably first.

The pragmatist would set aside the hypothetical contract between reader and writer for a moment, and look at the actual legal contract between writer and publisher. The publisher did not give this writer enough time to go, pay this writer enough money to fund his own travel, didn’t pay his travel expenses and oh yes, also didn’t want him to accept “freebies” from hotels, restaurants, airlines, etc. So really, what’s he to do? If he wants the assignment, and isn’t independently wealthy, he can either do the work from home, working the phone and the internet –what journalists call relying on secondary sources –or he can accept freebies (most commonly in a don’t-ask, don’t-tell arrangement) and check things out for himself.

Okay, to do a good writing job you obviously need to do more research than chatting with the intern chick you’re dating. But when it’s done right, I’m not so sure that secondary-source reporting is quite so bad. Take this out of the world of travel for a moment. In most national magazines, features are routinely reported over the phone. Most of the successful full-time magazine writers that I know never –and I mean never, ever — leave their desk in the line of duty. They’re able to vividly bring you to the moment of a woman finding a lump in her breast, or show you the scene of an Iraqi soldier in combat, or take you to the moment of discovery in a scientific lab, all through really really good interviewing techniques. Good deep research, is good deep research, and not all quality information is gathered first-hand.

On the other hand! The more information that you have, the better you’ll be able to write. Travel writing demands a sense of place, and it take an awful lot of work to get the texture and richness and feel of a place right if you haven’t been there yourself. You will need to talk to a lot of people. You will need to do a lot of reading.

If you do your research well, you should be able to produce a factually accurate story. But if you don’t go to a place yourself, there’s very little chance that it will be the best story you could write. It’s the difference between recording your own original reactions to a place, and stitching together the reactions of others. You go from a story that only you can write, to a story that could be written by any decent writer with a phone and an internet connection. And let’s face it: sometimes editors are only willing to pay for the merely competent and not the sublime.

The question is what happens when readers expect more than mere competency –as well they should. In the tiresome debate over the ethics of travel writers taking “freebies”, this is a point that so often gets overlooked: readers don’t always necessarily lose when a writer accepts subsidized travel, if it means a writer can go to a place that they would otherwise only write about at a distance.

It’s obvious that that accepting comps has its ethical implications, and complicates a writer’s web of obligation. I think most of us would agree that in an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen. But if a writer refuses to accept “freebies”, and, from the comforts of home, taps secondary sources instead, is the reader really better served? –Alison Stein Wellner

Share This