Write Great Adventures: 6 Methods for Immersive Travel Writing

Kia ora,

Way back at the start of the year I said I was putting together an adventure writing guide. After many rewrites and layout changes, it’s here! Hooray! Write Great Adventures: 6 methods to bring your readers along for the ride.

It’s 18 pages, and it outlines six methods you can use to make your travel and adventure writing more immersive and really bring out your experiences so your readers feel like they’re there with you.

I’ve included examples from published books so you can see the methods in action. Watch out for these methods in your own reading too.

Each method ends with questions that aim to draw out more of the story and get you thinking. These are the types of questions I leave during an edit to help bring that immersion and depth to scenes that need a bit more oomph.

I’ve put it up on my shop page, but I want to offer it to my newsletter subscribers for free to thank you for being here. I’m also hoping for a cheeky favour: can you help me test the checkout experience? Go to the Write Great Adventures guide shop page and enter the code WRITE at checkout to get it 100% off.

If you run into any issues or spot anything funky, please email me and let me know. This side of running a website and shop is new to me, so letting me know of any issues or sticky points will help me out a lot.

Bonus points if you spot any typos in the guide! I’ll update my file for future editions.

I’m super excited about the guide, and I really hope you find it helpful. I’ve drawn on my editing experience to put it together and pulled on all those little threads that I see working so well in the adventure genre. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Deborah

PS: Last week I posted a new blog post: Using real people’s names in your adventure memoir. Writing about the people you meet is another big part of the travel and adventure writing genre. We want to know who you met and what their stories are, too!

PPS: The WRITE code is valid through to 22 September.

PPPS: The most entertaining election of the year is open: Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Year. Go and vote for your favourite New Zealand birds!

📚 What I’m reading

I finished Silverland by Dervla Murphy. Now I’m onto another Russia-related book. Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe by Rory Maclean. Rory is retracing, but backwards, a trip he made from Berlin to Moscow in 1989. Loving it so far. He’s got a way with describing people that at times is delightful, and at other times a little unsettling. But it works!