‘The Market Was Bustling’ And Other Reasons Why Most Travel Writing Is So Bad

PRAGUE, Czech Republic- For some reason I glanced at the email newsletter for the post that I published last night. The post was written quickly to fill in a gap in the blog’s narrative. I wasn’t trying to craft something exquisite, but just say, “Yo, I’m staying in the center of Prague. It’s cool.” I was shooting for the fast and banal … but there’s no excuse for one of the lines that I inserted into it. I read it and I had to laugh:

“Anyway, this particular Airbnb is exceptional.”

This line looks innocuous to most people, but to me it’s about as cringeworthy as grinding a set of freshly cut fingernails over polyester. This otherwise inconspicuous line actually holds one of the keys to why most travel writing is so bad: the lazy use of adjectives.

The Airbnb is exceptional.

The woman was beautiful.

The market was bustling.

These are couch potato sentences. They don’t really say anything. They don’t paint a picture of what is being described. This use of an adjective is just a short cut on to the next sentence. As a general rule, try to avoid the Subject + To be + Adjective sentence structure. It comes off as though you can’t be bothered / aren’t creative enough to come up with a more picturesque mode of description.

There are exceptions, of course, and no hard rules here — such as when trying to make a sort of stylistically ironic point — but just keep it in mind that this use of adjectives is the literary equivalent to biting into a steak and getting a mouthful of fat.

If you do use this sentence structure, make sure not to use cliche adjectives, like exceptional or, especially, bustling — the worst word in travel writing. Instead, use something that pushes the reader deeper and better creates the chasm between what you have experienced and what the reader experiences when ingesting your story. It doesn’t have to be majestic, something like “The Airbnb was exceptionally well thought-out, with …” would do it. It’s still a little boring, but it at least gives the imagination some handholds to grasp onto.

A better way to use adjectives is to use the Subject + Verb + Adjective + Noun form.

Ex: “The exceptionally trendy apartment stood at the end of a shady sycamore-lined street in an easy going stretch of Prague 2.”

You could draw a picture of that. You can’t draw a picture of “The apartment was exceptional.”

Basically, when describing something in writing ask yourself the question: Based on what I’ve written, can I draw a picture of it?