Let's get practical: how to hone your craft

Want to be better at travel writing? Lottie says you need to become an editor.

It’s all very well talking about what makes good (and bad) travel writing, but actually improving at the craft isn’t as simple as knowing and understanding what that is. When I did my journalism degree, the single most-touted writing tip wasn’t really a writing tip at all: to become a better writer, my tutors said, I first had to read. Read as much as possible, as widely as possible.

This advice, in my opinion, is a bit basic. While it’s true — the more you read, the more your own writing will mature — I don’t believe it’s as simple as just digesting as much as we can. We have to do more than just read if we want to improve our own writing — we have to become editors. That’s what happened to me. I began my career at Rough Guides, working on the website’s features section. Within weeks of starting my new job, fresh out of university, I was thrown into editing stories by some of the finest writers (in my opinion) in our industry. (This one by Shafik Meghji always sticks in my mind, and this piece by Kiki Deere.)

Initially, it was hard. Their writing was, by all accounts, far superior to mine, so I struggled to make any worthwhile edits or comments on the articles they had submitted. I corrected a few grammatical errors or switched up a spelling to match our house style, and fired it off to my editor for his approval. Inevitably, the articles would often come back to me with his suggestions for improvements — perhaps a little structural reshuffle or a rework of a sentence or paragraph to make it more digestible for our online audience — and I’d feel stupid for not spotting it myself.

But gradually, I learned to read with the critical eye of an editor and just a year later I was promoted and left to edit more freely on my own. As I regularly critiqued my esteemed colleagues’ work, I began to shed some of the bad practices that had crept into my own writing and started to mirror the stuff that worked. At the beginning of my career, my own work would be sent back by my editor via Google Docs with tens of comments in the margins and major rewrites required. Within a year or so, though, those comments dwindled to just a few here and there, and my first drafts got closer and closer to the final piece. My writing improved drastically in a short space of time and it’s because I wasn’t a writer, I was an editor.