Once a travel blog has been around for a while, it takes on the aspect of a personal journey. This doesn’t mean you have to rebrand your blog and try to do something different. It simply means that your writing no longer reacts to the place but is starting to express something that exists between trips.
We start to develop a personal journey when our writing repeats itself with consciousness. We start to pay attention to the same things in different places, and we ignore other things. It’s how we can tell what we’re actually writing about. It may be about traveling alone, or transitioning, or culture shock, or age. But being aware of these things means that our blog can transcend individual posts and become a body of work that makes sense and has direction.
It also means that our relationship to place changes. Place becomes the situation instead of the subject. Instead of writing about where something happened, we write about what we learned there. This doesn’t mean that place becomes less important, it means that it serves a greater purpose. Travel writing is compelling when the reader can tell that the journey was important, beyond the place it took them to.
To cultivate a personal journey we have to be honest and disciplined. Not every trip will serve the work, and if we try to make them fit, we’ll sound like phonies. But if we let the work emerge, then it will be genuine. Over time it will develop its own continuity, and will feel organic instead of contrived. The blog will cease to be about accumulation and will start to be about articulation.
When a travel blog develops in this way, it ceases to be just a travelogue. It becomes a practice that enables us to reflect, to connect the dots between trips, and to get to the bottom of things. It isn’t about how many places we visit, but how well we understand them. It is how travel blogging becomes a narrative that will endure.
