Each and every one of you have opted to participate in this Pitchapalooza for different reasons.
Some of you are new to travel writing and looking to get those first pitches out the door. Others have been blogging for some time but feel like writing for magazines is a glass ceiling you’re not sure how to break through. And others still have been freelance travel writing but not getting the volume of the type of work you’d really like to be doing, the work you took up this job to do.
This program is designed with all of these levels in mind, because so much of what we do, whether in my daily email missives or in your post-reading activities is designed not to be a sort of “Travel Writing 101” to cover all the same bases, but rather practical lessons that will reach you where you are and move you to the next level for you.
What We Will Be Covering and What Your Should Plan to Do
Each day you’ll get an email from me (the lesson will also be posted in the online program website if you prefer not to receive the daily emails) with a little bit to read and an activity. If the reading is long, the activity will be shorter, and vice versa.
Many daily activities ask you to produce something and post it in the forum it to inform your future assignments or to get comments and feedback from me.
In order to make sure we can all keep up and together, I will try to keep the combination of each day’s reading and lesson between 30 and 60 minutes. If you are having trouble keeping up, I know many, many tricks for making all aspects of travel writing and pitching more efficient and quick, but different ones work best for different people, so let me know what you’re struggling with and we’ll get you sorted before anything feels too onerous.
Our Week-by-week Schedule
Each week will have lessons and activities that build open the previous week but have their own focus. For your reference and planning, here are the lessons and activities in overview; I’ve got something assigned for each specific day already, but I might move specific topics around based on people’s needs.
- Week 1: Lessons and activities designed to change the way you look at magazines, what is published in them, what is an article “idea,” and how to generate ideas from your own trips.
- Week 2: Lessons around the make-up of magazines in terms of article types and articles themselves. Activities familiarizing ourselves with specific magazines and creating the building blocks of our pitches accordingly.
- Week 3: Lessons on article structure, tone, and style options, including narrative arcs and the use of description and characters, and how to choose the best for each piece. Writing activities around choose scenes and details from your experiences to include in your pitches.
- Week 4: Lessons on the most common issues I see in queries from unseasoned pitchers and how to spot and fix them in your own writing. Polish your pitch sections generated the previous week and add the final headlines and paragraphs for this week’s activities.
- Week 5: Lessons around the next steps once the pitch is written, from finding the right editor to negotiating rates, as well as laying out the ideas you will pitch in advance for your next trip. Activities around making your pitching a regular part of your writing life after the At-Home Pitchapalooza Program has ended.
This program is designed to help you build your skills, and part of that is being able to write great pitches without me or anyone else looking over each one before it goes out the door.
Following the medical-school-style approach of “see one, do one, teach one,” it is integral to your own learning and ability to pattern the lessons in the Pitchapalooza program to chime in on the assignments of others and flex your muscles seeing what works and what doesn’t in other people’s pitches–when your own ego isn’t at stake.
That’s why commenting on others’ submissions is just as much a part of the program as completing the assignments yourself, so make sure to do so, or it is only your own learning curve that is the poorer for it.
In that vein, it should go without saying, but keep all sharing, critiquing, and commenting in the forums civil and constructive. Anything overly emotive or unprofessional will be removed and the contributor reviewed for their ability to constructively continue in the program, just as we would if one individual is creating an unsafe environment limiting the learning of others in a live program.
That being said, I have only ever seen supportive, constructive, and eye-opening shares in our online programs in the past and am sure that your contributions will be the same!
Your Task(s) for Today
When we hold weekend events in the Catskills, on Friday evening, over dinner at a huge candlelit table, we discuss the plan for the weekend as all the guests slowly get to know each others backgrounds, current circumstances, and best travel stories.
While it’s very hard to replicate those convivial conditions for everyone, it would be a great help to me, and to my reviews of your work, to start to build up that kind of context with each of you.
So, as part one of your activity for today, please take just a couple minutes to reply in the Day 1 Assignment part of the forum and let us know:
- if you plan to commit to working through your lesson each day or working through each week over the weekend due to the constraints of other full-time employment
- where you are with your travel writing (craft/writing-wise)
- where you are with your travel writing (getting paid-wise)
- where you would like your travel writing to be (more/full-time income, clips from big magazines, allow you to leave your job/become nomadic)
- a bit about the type of traveler you are (or if you’ve lived abroad or have a similar area of expertise)
Seeing your free-form answers will also help me get a feel for the flow of your thoughts and writing and how you naturally express yourself, so I can help bring that back into your pitches (which often take on a certain formality that mangles effectiveness in an editor’s eyes when they’re looking for voice).
For the second part of today’s work, please find one (or two or three if they’re not too long or you have extra time), travel features that strike you and read it with an eye not toward reader as a consumer of travel text, but as an author of such words. Read to learn something.
I suggest paying attention to one of the following:
- the use of the first-person
- the inclusive and development of local characters
- the interplay of “present” travel experience and history/political /background information
- the amount and type if descriptive language
- what narrative or descriptive elements contribute to the sense of place
- what the writer uses to create an emotional response in the reader
Some good places to find inspiring magazine travel features include:
- issuu.com/cerealmag/docs/volumeone
- www.magazinecafestore.com/oak-street-magazine.html (paid)
- itunes.apple.com/us/app/lodestars-anthology/id911270809 (paid)
- www.wanderlust.co.uk/
- http://www.afar.com/magazine
- www.saveur.com/
- http://www.coxandkings.co.uk/compass/issues/
- https://www.audleytravel.com/traveller
- http://traveller.easyjet.com/emagazine
- www.cntraveler.com/
- www.cntraveller.com/
You can always choose one to start and read it again with an eye to a different element, but stick with one per pass or you won’t get an appropriately deep reading.
If you have some thoughts from your reading, especially anything that stood out to you that you feel you need to work on, that you’d like to share, feel free to post in the section of the forum for today’s assignment.