Competing for the Win

Traveling writing is a league all of its own.  It’s true life: The World through a Traveler’s eyes.  Every piece of writing is unique and is filled with fear, laughter, adventure, reflection, and most importantly detail.  The most important part of travel writing to the readers is the thrill.  They want to immerse themselves into your writing and ride the wave of your adventure right alongside you.  They want to feel the thorns pulling at their own skin as they walk through the humid jungle with you.  They want to feel the frost bite nipping at their noses while they are trying to sleep, in what is left of your tent, with you. These thrill-seeking readers are looking for the next best travel that they can get their hands on.  Is this making the travel writers take it to the next level? Are they competing for the next most outrageous trip?

Competition is in our lives daily.  We compete for jobs, for grades, even the best lunch seat in the Scherv. I think that there is a thrill in travel writing for both the readers and the writers.  Looking back in time, the first travelers such as Lewis and Clark, Christopher Columbus, Herodotus, to name a few, are not only known as travelers but as renowned pioneers in history.  Every traveler after them was trying to find the next best destination.  Is this something that we are just programmed to do? History is showing us that the next travel experience will always be better than the last. 

I do think that competition is good for us as writers and as readers.  It allows us as writers to develop new techniques of writing, new ways of traveling, and new ways of reflecting to “one up” our competitors.  As readers, it allows us to push our beloved travel writers one more step to show us their thrills and it allows us to keep searching for that next article that will finally fill that need for adventure.  This brings up one more issue, is this bringing travel writers to push the envelope and try dangerous trips.  I don’t think so.  Although these writers are travel junkies, they are about what they can gain from their experience and what a particular trip brings to them.  I think they are more concerned with the idea of reflection and awareness of where they are in a particular moment of traveling.  According to Dave George in his article The New World of Travel Writing, “This world was a reflection of me, of course, and of my thinking about my readership—but my desire to engage, inform, and inspire that readership was what fueled my editorial decisions each day.” We, as readers are what drive these writers to continue their work, but their reflection of the world is what keeps them traveling.