by David Riel

Created on: January 01, 2010

Recommended travel writing on North America comes from both professional and amateur travel writers. There are fine travel writers in both groups.

The professional American travel writers - Bill Bryson springs to mind  (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America; A Walk in the Woods: rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail) - can write about any travel experience and make the read compelling.  Novelists read travel writers like Bryson to sharpen their descriptive skills and improve the "sense of place" in their own work.

The amateur writers are not always wordsmiths like the pros, but the good ones use their writing skills to invoke a strong experience in the reader's mind of the  place they're writing about.

The better writers in both groups tend to do the following: they evoke all of our senses on each page.

They describe the scent of the sea air on South Beach, Miami.  The feel of the heat enveloping as they leave a Las Vegas Strip Casino.  The texture of a granite outcrop on a climb in Yosemite National Park.  The clamor of Time's Square.  The cool grandeur of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in their formal winter whites. The taste of a soft rain in a green Oregon forest.

And they also put people in their work - not as we see typically see them in our everyday lives, or worse imagine them, as stereotypes or typicals of one job or region - but as unique and colorful individuals.  The fisherman has a stock tip.  The waitress writes poetry.  They are, everyone of them, surprising as real people invariably are when we get to know them.

For the best amateur writing look to the net.  There are many websites on which amateur travel writers work is presented.  It has the advantage of immediacy, local knowledge, and often passion, as well as individuality and uniqueness.

Some North American travel websites, like Miami-Beach-Travel-Guide.com - offer pages where amateur travel writers can submit their work for publication: Miami Beach Articles . These people are, in their normal lives, students, dancers, lawyers. But when they visit Miami Beach they see with new eyes, and become travel writers every bit as good - in evoking a strong and compelling sense of place - as the Bill Brysons of the world.

So read both, the polished professional North American travel writers, and the gifted amateurs, whose passion for the place they are visiting informs their prose with versimilitude and life.  Recommended North American travel writing is as broad in scope as the great vast, inexhaustibly diverting continent itself.  Whether you settle down for A Walk in the Woods with Bill Bryson, or imagine yourself in the warm sun of Miami Beach with the amateur writers of Miami-Beach-Travel-Guide.com, you will be treated to a North American travel experience that will place you as firmly in the place you are reading about as if you visited it yourself.

Learn more about this author, David Riel.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.