A former freelancer of mine recently sent me a travel story she had done for her journalism class in college. When I was a newspaper travel editor I occasionally published students; they had a fresh way of seeing things, and their stories had little of the yawning predictability that is so often evident in the work of so-called "professional travel writers."
If they had managed to avoid journalism courses, that is. The story my former freelancer sent me was not at all like the stories she had done for me. It lacked a personal voice, a point of view, humor, imagination, insight - all the elements that give a travel story life. There were people in the story, but they weren't characters whom the author had spent some time with, they were passers-by she had gotten obligatory (and not very interesting) quotes from. The story told me about the place instead of showing me - through the author's experience and her distillation of it - the spirit of the place. And what it told me was nothing new.
At college, she had learned to jettison all the qualities that had made her stories stand out. I can understand (sort of) non-academic writing workshops that emphasize the standard, more marketable types of travel stories. People take them with an eye toward selling their work. But shouldn't our universities strive for excellence and originality in writing? Why pay all that money to learn how to churn out pieces that - even if eventually published somewhere - just repeat what has already been written?
Perhaps this partly explains why newspapers are so boring. (Too many of the people writing for them graduated from journalism schools.) It definitely explains why the Lowell Thomas travel writing awards are so suspect. (The judges are professors at journalism schools.)
