Nowadays, travelling is easier than it has ever been. Travel is so affordable for so many people to so many places that you can foreseeably find a way to travel somewhere different every year of your life. Journaling your travels can serve a lot of different purposes.

For some people, especially if they travel a lot, it can simply be as a way to record and remember their travels, to read on a later day. For other people, it is a career.

Travel writing is a potentially lucrative industry to be in and many people’s whole source of income comes from travelling and writing or vlogging about their trip. Whatever the case is, it’s worth making it good. So, let’s take a look at 5 steps you can take to put together a really engaging travel journal.

Journal In The Build Up To Travelling

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Partly, this is useful because it gives you a chance to get into the swing of things. If you aren’t already someone who journals their daily life, embarking on a trip, when things are likely to be much busier than they normally are anyway, it’s quite possible that you will find it hard to get into it. Journaling in the build up to leaving gets you in the practice of entering in a few thoughts as you go. Secondly, you might find that you actually put down some really interesting thoughts. It’s more interesting knowing what sort of a frame of mind you were in before you left so that you can compare how the trip has made you feel and how it has changed you over the course of it.

Make Sure It Doesn’t Become Simply A Daily Schedule

If you’re not naturally a writer, it can become easy to slip into the habit of simply making your entries descriptions of your daily schedule. “Good travel writing, or journaling requires elements of what it takes to write creatively. It’s not fiction, but in order to avoid it being a sterile breakdown of your daily activities, you need to inject some creative flair. Try and describe the way you feel and make connections between what you see and experience”, advises Laura Weintraub, travel writer at Revieweal. There isn’t an issue with also keeping a record, it can be a really useful thing to have. But that’s not really the point of a journal.

Write Well

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Because why not? This is especially important for you if you are a travel writer by profession, but it’s also relevant even if this is merely for personal purposes. You might as well get it right so that, if someone else ever does read it, then you will have it in good order. This can be a lot easier said than done, especially if you are writing as you travel which can be tough, so here are a few tools to help you with it.

Write As It Happens

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You don’t want to leave gaps which are too large between the events of your travel and writing down your thoughts. It will not only affect the level of detail but even the excitement with which you write. It’s important that you remember that a travel journal ought to be an ongoing piece of writing rather than a memoir of a holiday. Focus on sights, smells, tastes and sounds as really intense ways to enhance how vivid your recollections are.

Journal Freely

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The biggest mistake you can make is to not write from the heart. Writing with the worry about how it will sound or seem to other people is a surefire way to produce something that you won’t really associate with. Write what you want, how you want.

Conclusion

Journaling is a fantastic way to enhance your experience of a trip and ensure that it stays with you forever. It can be of great interest to other people too, but either way it ought to be something personal for you and something that you can always look back on.