What I learned from NYT Travel

It's always the angle of a story that makes it stand out

This is another article on writing, included in Casey’s Catch “Beyond Argument” section.

While I was an editorial writer for The New York Times, I also wrote freelance articles for the Times’ Travel section. One would think that it was quite the cushy gig, all ocean views and airy articles about hiring the right guide to hike the Salkantay Trek to Macchu Picchu. It wasn’t like that, though.

Many travel themes repeated themselves in mundane ways - airline snags, beaches, hotels, rinse, repeat. Precisely because of the potential for repetition, the Travel section approached the angle of any article with great creativity, a willingness to drill down and, always, a focus on details. It made the stories seem new even if the subject had been covered before.

The result? Whenever I wrote a travel article, the brainstorming needed for the right angle made me feel like I was participating in an endless writer’s workshop.

I loved it.

Alcatraz Island. Photo by Brigitte Werner.

It also showed me that there are few truly unique stories, only infinite versions of the same themes, with ever-changing takes on what would otherwise be the same old tale. Through brainstorming the angle of the story, the old could become new again, no matter how often it had been written before.

It’s true for any writing, really. Think of how often romance stories are told. Marital breakups. Broken hearts. Conflict between siblings, as old as Cain and Abel. But a creative angle is what makes writing pop.

The emphasis on the right angle applies to more than travel writing. My desk at the Times was next to the Oped page staff and I often listened as the editors filtered the unending torrent of unsolicited opinion pieces that came across their desks. Brilliant writing couldn’t revive an article if the premise was boring. But if a commentary had a completely fresh take on a subject, the editors would get excited, even when the writing didn’t stand out.

Times editors are some of the best in the business. They can always improve dull writing. But a boring, repetitive angle to a commentary piece usually landed, with a thud, on the enormous reject pile.

Given how important is the angle of a story, I learned to ask questions before pitching an editor on an idea. Here are a few.

Research: Was this covered before? If so, what was the slant of the article? What was missing? What was overlooked? Is it still relevant, or is there something different the readers need to know?

Breadth: Does the article have a universal point? How many people could relate to this? Is it relevant for a specific population or age group?

Depth: Does it represent a trend? Is it happening elsewhere? What’s the history? Is it worse, better? What’s new? What’s surprising?

Finally, travel writing is detail-oriented to an excruciating degree. While on assignment I would constantly grab copies of menus, pamphlets, business cards, tourist maps and write down everything I could see, smell or touch. The details helped stories come alive during the writing process. On the other hand, nightmares could and did occur if, say, I lost track of the name of a memorable pub (which happened after I came home from Ireland and sat down to write the story). Or if I didn’t remember, or have written down, the name of a remote village that was key to an article. Near-disasters taught me to be relentlessly organized on the road.

Still, the angle, to me, was everything.

Case in point: One year I traveled to San Francisco to judge a journalism contest and before going, I discussed whether there was anything left unsaid about the Alcatraz Penitentiary tour. My brilliant editor, Barbara Ireland, said that the tour had obviously been written about before, but an article might work if I also toured the historic Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and wrote an article comparing the tours of two prisons. So I did.

But while I was writing the story, Barbara asked me to call other states to see if prison tours were common. Here’s what I found: Nearly every state had a prison tour. From my state of Connecticut to Hawaii, jailhouse tours were, indeed, a thing. So the angle of the story changed dramatically, going from a pedestrian Alcatraz tour, to a more interesting comparison of two different prisons, morphing to an article about an unnoticed and somewhat bizarre tourist trend.

The article appeared in The New York Times under the headline, “In the Big House, Just Visiting.” Prison tourism. Who’d have thunk it?