Travel Journaling: How to Write Extraordinary Travel Diaries
What you'll learn
- Bring destinations to life with rich details.
- Splash those details quickly into your pages so journaling doesn't gobble up your precious vacation time.
- Find times to write that don't compromise your opportunities for exploring.
- Weave together your "outer" and "inner" journeys, using unfamiliar places as backdrops for self-discovery.
- Elude your "Inner Censor" and write with confidence.
- Explore alternative journaling techniques that add an extra dimension of creativity to your travel diaries.
- Learn how to recall details you thought you had forgotten from past trips, and bring those memories back to life with your words.
- Use your "rough draft" journals as a springboard for writing more polished travel tales. (A follow-up course on how to write travel tales for publication is coming soon!)
- Gain a deeper awareness of the world around you so that journaling enhances your travel adventures rather than seeming like a chore.
- Discover how to write extraordinary travel journals that keep your experiences vivid in your mind for a lifetime.
Requirements
- A passion for travel
- A desire to remember all the rich and colorful details of your adventures
Description
Taught by a bestselling travel author, professional writing and life coach,
and former website editor for Rick Steves' Europe!
The stories we collect when we travel are some of the biggest tales of our lives. We get to keep those stories for a lifetime – if we can remember the details. Journaling about them in a travel diary, helps keep our memories vivid.
Most travel diaries fizzle, however. By day six of a big trip, people struggle to recall what happened on days three, four, and five. They return home with mostly blank pages, or bland writing that fails to capture the full spirit of their travel adventures.
What’s the tool most people use to document their travels? A camera. Nearly everyone brings a camera of some sort on their vacations. Yet there is so much we can't frame in a photograph that we can capture in a well-written travel journal – all of our senses, the unique emotions we experience in unfamiliar places, the tales we hear from people we meet, challenges we overcome, that sense of wonder we feel as we travel through foreign environments, and so much more. You can also journal in tandem with your travel photography to tell the stories behind the photos.
So if travel journaling is such a powerful tool for remembering our trips, why is it a struggle for so many people? There are two common frustrations many travel journalers express:
It’s hard to find time to write in the middle of an exciting vacation.
Their writing falls flat. They are having some of the biggest adventures of their lives, yet their words are merely step-by-step accounts of their days. Their writing fails to capture the full scope of their adventures.
This course will help fix both of those problems.
You’ll learn how to splash bold and vivid details into your travel journals – quickly – so you maximize your time for exploring and your writing won’t gobble up precious vacation time.
You’ll also discover writing techniques that enhance your experiences, making you more aware of your surroundings as you travel. And you’ll learn fun and efficient ways to write, so that travel journaling doesn’t feel like a chore in the middle of an exciting trip.
This lively and informative workshop includes 75 minutes of video lessons and set of supplementary readings. Best-selling travel author and humorist Dave Fox teaches you how to write boldly and adventurously as you explore the world. You'll write vivid accounts of your trips, gain a deeper awareness of your surroundings, and keep your memories alive and bright for years to come.
This course is for you if:
You've tried writing a travel journal in the past but you want to do it better
You've never journaled about your travels before and want to do it right the first time
You haven't managed to get much written on previous trips and want to write more – in ways that bring you deeper in touch with your surroundings and make your journeys more exciting
You haven't journaled about past journeys and you wish you had. (There's still time to write about trips you've already taken – even if you think you can't remember the details. This course will show you how!)
You're an aspiring travel writer who needs help spotting and collecting the "raw footage" that will make for great travel tales later. (My follow-up course, “Travel Writing: Explore the World and Publish Your Stories,” teaches you how to transform your on-the-road travel journals into tales for others to read.)
Your travel plans have been cancelled due to Covid and you want to relive your past adventures.
So sign up today and get ready to write, and travel, like you never have before – with an enhanced awareness of your journeys and an ability to write about those trips in ways that will keep your memories bright for years to come.
“Dave Fox understands how journaling can help that great trip become a candy jar of memories that you can dip into for the rest of your life."
-- Rick Steves, PBS TV host and author of Europe Through the Back Door
Also check out my other courses on Udemy:
Travel Writing: Explore the World and Publish Your Stories
Deep Travel: Have Adventures No Guidebook Can Tell You About
Professional Humor Tricks for Writers, Speakers, and Other Misfits
The Writing Mind 1: Defeat Writer's Block & Write Confidently
The Writing Mind 2: Overcome Distractions & Get More Written
Who this course is for:
- Travelers
- Writers of all skill levels
Featured review
Instructor
- 4.6 Instructor Rating
- 3,836 Reviews
- 21,284 Students
- 6 Courses
Dave Fox is on a mission to help people tell scintillating stories. He's a professional travel and humor writer, a writing and humor coach, a chronic storyteller, and the author of two bestselling books. Dave thrives on stepping outside of his cultural comfort zones in search of adventures and misadventures. He also makes really good sandwiches if you ask him nicely.
Originally from the United States, Dave started travel journaling at age seven when his family moved to England for a year. During that time, he developed an obsession with foreign cultures, which eventually morphed into his travel writing career. He also developed a British accent, which eventually morphed back to a mostly-American accent, but he respects your right to spell "humour" with that extra "U" if it makes you happy.
Dave's love for humo(u)r writing evolved in early adulthood when he discovered office memos didn't have to be boring. He fled nine-to-five life in 2001 on a mission to expand beyond office memos, and published his first book of travel-humor essays three years later after winning the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop Book Proposal Contest. He has been teaching writing workshops for more than 20 years. He has been making sandwiches even longer.
Dave has worked as a Public Radio news anchor, a tour guide for Rick Steves' Europe, an international cruise ship lecturer, and an iguana groomer. (Okay, not really an iguana groomer. Iguanas get cranky when you try to groom them.) His work has been featured on the History Channel, Channel NewsAsia, and national radio broadcasts in the US and Australia. He has also been an opening speaker for Princess Märtha Louise of Norway. (True story: When the princess told Dave he spoke excellent Norwegian, Dave replied, "Thank you, Your Majesty. So do you.")
For 16 years, Dave guided tours around Europe for Rick Steves' travel company. He has lived in the US, England, Norway, and Turkey and Singapore. He currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he works as the Vietnam correspondent for TTG Asia and freelances for a variety of other publications including the Straits Times of Singapore, and Singapore Airlines' magazine and website. His work has also appeared in books by Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, Travelers' Tales, and the 2014 Moon Guide to Burma.
Dave's own books, Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad, and Globejotting: How to Write Extraordinary Travel Journals (and still have time to enjoy your trip!), have both been Amazon travel bestsellers. He is currently working on a new book, The Ghosts of Bui Vien Street, about modern life in Ho Chi Minh City.
Dave shares his travel tales, humor essays, and writing advice on his website. (Please see below for the link.) He is available for one-on-one writing and life coaching via Skype, phone, and in person.