You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.
The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.
Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.
The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.
I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.
For many years I thought my job was to go to places where it would be difficult for most of the readers to ever get to. Now, in the more than 20 years I've been doing this, the concept of adventure-travel trips or expeditions by groups has sprung up. The places I went 20 years ago now have adventure-travel trips.
For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.
In my life outdoors, I've observed that animals of almost any variety will stand in a windy place rather than in a protected, windless area infested with biting insects. They would rather be annoyed by the wind than bitten.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
Adventure travel existed before I started, I just didn't know it.
