6 BIG reasons you’re not a travel writer

[Feature photo: kokorawa shinjin]

Sooooo, you want to be a travel writer: Here are six big reasons you’re not.

1. You never get around to it.

You’ve traveled all over the world, hiked up to the base of the huge sandstone arch in Arches National Park; wandered the alleyways of Soi Cowboy in Bangkok in search of the most volcanic Thai food; crawled out of Rapid 24 ½ on the Colorado River, joyful to be still in your skin. You long to write about desert light on pomegranate rock and the way fear makes everything bright and sharp and how being trapped under a raft can last twenty years. Somehow you don’t. There’s always something to do, some tech gremlin to look at, the next bucks to earn so that once you have enough, you’ll be able to write.

2. You think you have forever.

You forget the story of the avid hiker and climber who slipped on the curb in a big city, hit his head and died an hour later.

3. You believe that you can be a good partner, parent, worker, student and/or anything else that will eat your time – and write.

4. You can’t be still long enough to find out what’s under your busyness.

5. You would rather get high or drunk or laid.

6. You have yet to read Steven Pressfield’s remarkable book, The War of Art

So you don’t know that Resistance rules your writing life. You think about finding a copy of it, but there are three thousand posts on your FB pages, two hundred emails, who knows how many texts or tweets or Instagrams – and the next thing you know, it’s 2AM and you are lying in bed, the words “Not done enough…” clogging up your head so thoroughly that you can’t see the glowing sandstone, smell fiery chilis or look up at rainbow canyon walls in gratitude for your life – much less write about them.