BoredomBusted — Find Your Next Favorite Thing To Do
Discover hobbies, activities, places, and ideas that spark joy. Whether you're looking for something creative, active, social, or relaxing, BoredomBusted helps you find your next favorite thing to do.
Browse our hobby guides, things-to-do collections, and place ideas to never be bored again.
Travel writing isn’t about exotic locations; it’s about your ability to notice the overlooked in everyday places, like the American Midwest.
Learning travel writing as a beginner allows you to articulate your adventures and share the essence of places you've visited in a compelling narrative – then shaping those notes into stories, essays, or guides others actually want to read.
Unlike journaling, it's audience-first.
Unlike photography, the medium is language.
The craft lives in the gap between what you saw and what the reader needs to feel.
In travel writing, hobbyists actively observe and document their journeys through sensory-rich note-taking, photography, and reflective journaling, capturing immediate experiences like sights, sounds, and conversations, often while traveling or during downtime.
Travel writing combats boredom by providing constant novelty through new sensory inputs and environments, inducing a flow state during immersive journaling, and fostering creative expression, all of which challenge routine and engage the mind.
You think travel writing means you need a passport stamp from somewhere exotic. Maybe a gap year. Definitely a story that starts on a train through Southeast Asia.
That's the assumption – and it's keeping you from starting.
A writer named Rolf Potts built a career partly on the American Midwest. Not Bali. Not Patagonia.
He found the strangeness already sitting there, and he wrote it like it mattered – because it did.
The real question isn't where you've been.It's whether you've trained yourself to see anything worth writing about – and that's a learnable skill, not a personality trait you either have or don't.
Reading travel writing feels like watching someone make it look effortless.
Your own first attempts will feel like the opposite of that – and that gap is the only thing standing between you and getting good.
Before: Blank page. Words that sound like a brochure. Every sentence either too dramatic or too flat. The feeling that you were there and still can't capture it.
After: A draft that smells like the place. Specific details you almost edited out. Sentences that move. Readers who weren't there, feeling like they were.
The one thing worth knowing before you sit down: write the sensory detail first, before the logistics. Not what time the ferry left. What the diesel and salt air smelled like when it did.
Generic. Forgettable. Abandoned.
That's where most first drafts end up – not because the trip wasn't worth writing about, but because the writer led with the schedule instead of the moment that made the trip real.
Start with the thing that made you stop walking. Build outward from there.
When to start: Early morning
Duration: 1 hour
Cost to try: $0
Success criteria: If you write one 3-sentence scene with 3 sensory details and 1 photo caption that makes the park feel specific, do session 2.
Every beginner does this – you list what happened, Tuesday through Sunday, because it feels like the full story.
Replace one "we went to" sentence with a single sensory detail – what it smelled like, who was arguing nearby, what the light did at 4pm.
You were there for ten days and you want it all in, which is understandable – but readers bounce the moment a piece feels like a highlight reel.
The flight was delayed, the cab driver was chatty – beginners lead with this because it's chronological and chronological feels organized.
Start at the sharpest moment of the whole trip, then work outward from there.
It's easy to name-drop neighborhoods and landmarks like shorthand, because you're still inside the experience when you write it.
Before publishing, read your draft as someone who can't find the country on a map – if they'd lose the thread, add one grounding line.
Population figures, founding dates, colonial history – beginners add these to sound credible, but it reads like Wikipedia got stitched into your diary.
If a fact doesn't directly explain something you witnessed, cut it and trust the scene to carry the meaning.
Travel writing happens wherever you can sit, observe, and type – the gap between "at home" and "out in the world" is smaller than most hobbies.
Coffee shops, airport lounges, hostel common rooms, your own kitchen table with yesterday's trip notes – all of it counts.
Walk in and say you're new to travel writing and looking for feedback on a first piece.
That declaration gets you pulled into critique circles fast – because groups need fresh work to read, and you have exactly that.
This is the closest thing to "standard" travel writing – structured, practical, built around a specific place.
You're answering the question: what should I do, eat, and know before I go?
Best for beginners – it gives you a clear framework so you're not starting from a blank page.
Less about the destination, more about what happened to you there.
The place is a backdrop; the story is the point.
Best for writers who already have a voice and want to use travel as material, not just subject matter.
You're pitching editors, hitting deadlines, and writing to someone else's word count and angle.
It's the most demanding variant – and the only one that reliably pays.
Best for people with journalism experience or a very thick skin for rejection.
You're writing for a specific reader – backpackers, solo women, van-lifers, disabled travelers – and building an audience over time.
The writing standard is lower; the consistency requirement is brutal.
You're contributing to a Lonely Planet, Moon, or similar series – which means research-heavy, highly structured, and usually commissioned.
You don't break into this one cold – it follows a track record in other formats.
Best for experienced travel writers looking for a longer-form, better-paid project.
Some of the same instincts show up in Playwriting — worth a look if this clicked.
Some of the same instincts show up in Screenwriting — worth a look if this clicked.
If the texture of this appeals to you, Game Narrative Writing is built on similar bones.
Most beginners obsess over describing places better — more vivid adjectives, richer sensory detail. That's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is knowing what the place is actually about.
The skill is scene selection — the ability to identify which single moment from a trip carries the emotional truth of the whole experience, and build outward from there instead of forward through time.
Not the itinerary. Not the highlights reel.
The one moment where something shifted — in you, in the crowd, in the light.
That's your essay. Everything else is context you add in service of it.
When you can identify the load-bearing moment, every other detail in your piece earns its place or gets cut. Readers feel the difference immediately, even if they can't name it.
Without it, you write chronologically by default — which is the structural equivalent of handing someone your raw footage instead of a film. Scene selection is what separates travel writing from travel reporting: one has a center of gravity, the other just has stops.
Commit to 8 writing sessions over 30 days — roughly two per week. That's enough time to work through the initial awkwardness and actually feel what this hobby does to you.
Eight sessions matters here because travel writing has two distinct phases: capturing notes on the road, then shaping them into something at your desk. You need enough reps to experience both.
If you kept looking for excuses to sit down and write — replaying a trip, reaching for your notebook on the train, mentally narrating your surroundings even when you weren't "working" — that's the signal. Start tracking your sessions in a dedicated notebook and plan your next trip with writing in mind from day one.
If you finished each session feeling neutral — task done, nothing pulling you back — the writing mechanics may be fine but the travel isn't fueling them. Try writing about somewhere genuinely unfamiliar before you decide: the form only comes alive when the source material has friction in it.
If translating experience into words felt like draining a swamp — if you dreaded sitting down with your notes each time — this form of writing may not be the payoff you were imagining. That's a clean answer, not a character flaw.
You're already writing things down unprompted — captions that are too long, voice memos on flights, journal entries that read more like dispatches than diaries. That habit already existing means you're not starting from zero.
Travel writing is just giving that instinct a shape and an audience.
Travel writing without travel gets thin fast. If your schedule, finances, or responsibilities make regular movement impossible, you'll constantly be working from stale material — and there's a ceiling on how far one trip stretches.
The other real barrier is privacy. Travel writing is inherently first-person — your observations, your reactions, your presence in the story. If turning your perspective into content feels intrusive rather than natural, that friction won't disappear.
Deadline pressure is real if you want to publish. Editors expect timely pitches tied to seasons, events, and trends. If your schedule can't absorb that external rhythm, the hobbyist path works — but the publishing path will frustrate you.
Travel Writing is a deeper commitment than most boredom cures — for lighter options, check things to do when bored.
No, you don't need professional experience to begin travel writing. Most travel writers start as enthusiasts who develop their skills through practice and reading widely. What matters most is your ability to observe details, tell compelling stories, and connect with readers through authentic experiences.
Travel writing doesn't require extended trips—even a weekend getaway or day trip can provide rich material. The depth of your writing depends more on how closely you observe and reflect on your experiences than on how long you stay in a place. Many successful travel writers focus on deeply exploring one location rather than rushing through many.
A notebook and pen, or a laptop or smartphone for digital writing, is all you need to begin. Some writers also carry a camera to capture visual references, but good writing relies primarily on detailed observation and memory rather than equipment. As you develop, you may invest in better tools, but they're not essential to start.
Travel writers typically earn through publications (magazines, blogs, news outlets), sponsored content, self-published books, freelance assignments, or a combination of these. Building an audience and portfolio takes time, so most aspiring travel writers start as a passion project before monetizing. Some also combine travel writing with related work like photography, tour guiding, or social media content creation.
Travel writing is a literary form focused on narrative, culture, and vivid storytelling, often published in magazines or books. Travel blogging typically emphasizes practical tips, photos, and frequent updates across social media and websites. The two often overlap, but travel writing prioritizes depth and artistry while blogging prioritizes accessibility and frequency.
Many writers get published within their first year by starting with smaller publications, blogs, or anthologies, while others take several years to reach major outlets. Success depends on your writing quality, consistency, networking, and willingness to start small and build momentum. The key is submitting regularly and using rejections as learning opportunities.