A thread, because I am procrastinating & annoyed, on #travelwriting—yeah I know, in this era who is doing that? With attention to food, how it generally works in a travel guide context, plagiarism & whatever else to avoid writing what I am supposed to be writing

Warning, broad strokes & subtweets follow.
Generally speaking a solid travel writer will know where they are writing about well—but they need not be an expert in all fields. What is important (at least to my mind), is they’re well travelled in the country. They know how it works.

They also have an eye for what may appeal to our readers. Obviously a writer for Travelfish may have a different eye to someone with an eye to 6-star resorts or whatever. They should, and do, have context. Context is everything.

In practice though, a writer may be in a second tier provincial capital for just a day or so—other publishers, well less than that lol, if at all—but the scope of business by order of priority is basically:
1) How to get there
2) What to see
3) Where to stay
4) What to eat
etc

I’m zooming in on (4) for this. If you’re in a town for two days, you have max: 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 2, dinners and 2 boozing sessions. Ok you can graze & booze in between, but generally it shakes out something like this.

Don’t believe me? Go pick a guidebook from any publisher, and look for a 2nd tier town & see how many eateries are listed. Will be 4-6 max.

The thing is, half the ones the writer tries might be crap so they need to find somewhere else. Time, money, lost. Kilos gained.

Good writers will have a field of contacts to try and reduce this roadkill, but it is inevitable. Every town has a few crap meals. Likewise, while we’d all like to find the “best” meal, in practice, not all towns have one + is an infernal hellhole of subjectivity.

Rather, you’re looking for somewhere that will be good, sometimes excellent, but also attuned to a foreigner who may not have a handle on the language (or food) but wants to try stuff. Who hasn’t been there? Do I want a pizza in Phongsali? Hell no.

My point is, that this is difficult to get right. We’ve got it wrong a tonne of times, mostly on my ticket. It is time–consuming & expensive, but at end of day a good result for the reader is a list of “a few good places worth trying”. May not please all, but, well, I had 8 hours

Not only is this stuff difficult to get right, but it is also difficult to fake. Desk updates, internet researching, calling it in, are all commonplace now in guide writing. Publishers are broke or near to, with no budget to actually pay a writer to go research, well, anything.

I get that. Hell I’m broke! But I say it is hard to fake, because when you are a well known, high profile US blogger and you list ten places to eat in a city in Southeast Asia which I know, for a fact, you have not been to for at least three years, and ...

Of the ten places you list, all ten are a part of the dozen we list to eat there, and not only that, we had the same dishes. Far out man, that is an amazing coinkidink. Especially the place that closed two years ago. Anyway, well done you.

To everyone one else, well, for obvious reasons, Travelfish is not getting updated at the moment, save photos & captions, but you know, 100%, without a doubt, if we have written about a place, we’ve been there.