Does Your Writing Suck? The Plight of Writing and Travel Porn

📝 Does Your Writing Suck? Yes — And That’s the First Honest Sentence You’ll Ever Write

The rain in Luang Prabang didn’t fall — it seeped. Not into my notebook, but into my confidence. I sat cross-legged on a damp bamboo floor at 6:17 a.m., watching mist coil off the Mekong like slow smoke, while my pen hovered over a sentence I’d rewritten six times: ‘The golden light spilled across ancient temples like liquid honey.’ It was technically accurate. It was also hollow. I’d written that exact phrase — or variations of it — three times already that week. Not because I saw honey-colored light, but because I thought that’s what travel writing required: luminous adjectives, curated awe, a veneer of transcendence. That morning, staring at the real, unvarnished truth — mild hypothermia, questionable coffee, and a monk sweeping wet leaves with quiet indifference — I asked myself aloud, voice cracking: Does your writing suck? And the answer wasn’t rhetorical. It was diagnostic. What I’d mistaken for ‘travel writing’ was actually travel porn: highly stylized, emotionally rehearsed, commercially palatable content designed to evoke envy, not empathy. This is the plight of writing and travel porn — not that it’s ‘bad,’ but that it obscures the very thing travel asks us to confront: reality, friction, and our own unedited selves.

🌍 The Setup: Why I Went to Laos With a Full Notebook and an Empty Ethos

I arrived in Luang Prabang in late October 2022, after five years of publishing freelance travel essays online. My byline appeared in two mid-tier digital magazines and a regional guidebook supplement. I’d covered festivals in Bali, hiking trails in Georgia, and street food in Oaxaca — always with tight deadlines, image briefs, and SEO keyword targets embedded in the editor’s notes. My process was efficient: arrive, photograph, interview three locals (usually English-speaking guides or café owners), draft three emotional beats (wonder → disorientation → revelation), and ship copy within 48 hours. I called it ‘responsive storytelling.’ In hindsight, it was narrative shorthand — a set of reusable emotional templates disguised as insight.

This trip was different. I’d booked it without an assignment. No pitch, no deadline, no photo editor breathing down my neck. Just me, a 2014 Moleskine with peeling corners, and a promise to myself: Write only what you can verify with your senses — nothing added, nothing smoothed. I chose Laos precisely because it resisted easy framing. No Instagrammable skyline. Few English-language billboards. Minimal Wi-Fi outside guesthouse lobbies. I wanted friction. I got humidity, silence, and the low, persistent hum of motorbike engines passing my window at 5:30 a.m. every day.

💭 The Turning Point: When the Temple Bell Didn’t Ring Like Poetry

On Day 3, I visited Wat Xieng Thong — the ‘Golden City Temple,’ one of Laos’ most photographed religious sites. I’d read dozens of descriptions: ‘gilded façades shimmering under tropical sun,’ ‘serene monks gliding through shaded courtyards,’ ‘centuries of devotion held in every carved teak panel.’ So I waited for the shimmer. I waited for the glide. I waited for the devotion to land — not as abstraction, but as felt experience.

It didn’t.

Instead, I watched a teenage novice sweep dust from the main pavilion floor — not meditatively, but quickly, shoulders hunched, sweat beading above his eyebrows. A tour group of eight Europeans fanned themselves with laminated maps, their guide speaking rapid-fire English about ‘symbolic naga motifs’ while they nodded politely, eyes drifting toward the souvenir stall beside the entrance. At 10:45 a.m., the temple bell rang — not deep and resonant, but thin and slightly off-key, like a school bell with loose wiring. No one paused. No one bowed. A woman adjusted her sunglasses and snapped a selfie against the mosaic wall.

That’s when I closed my notebook. Not in frustration — in recognition. My instinct had been to fix the scene: reframe the novice’s fatigue as ‘dedication,’ reinterpret the off-key bell as ‘imperfect harmony,’ recast the selfie as ‘human connection across cultures.’ But none of those edits were mine to make. They belonged to the people living inside the moment — not to me, the observer with a deadline and a thesaurus.

🤝 The Discovery: A Teacher Who Wrote Nothing Down

Two days later, I met Boun, a 68-year-old former schoolteacher who ran a small guesthouse near the Nam Khan River. He spoke fluent French and passable English, but never used either for storytelling. Instead, he told me about his childhood in Xieng Khouang province — not in paragraphs, but in objects: a chipped ceramic bowl he kept on his shelf, its glaze faded blue; a bundle of dried kaffir lime leaves tied with string; a single black-and-white photograph of his father standing beside a bicycle, both grinning, neither looking at the camera.

‘You ask me why I don’t write?’ he said, stirring sweetened condensed milk into his coffee. ‘Because words are like boats. They carry meaning — but if the boat is too heavy, it sinks before it reaches shore.’ He tapped the bowl. ‘This bowl held rice for six people during the war. That is true. If I say “this bowl witnessed suffering,” that is not true. I did not witness it. The bowl did not witness it. Only the people did.’

Boun didn’t keep journals. He didn’t post on social media. He didn’t even have a smartphone. Yet his memory was precise, textured, unembellished. He remembered the weight of the rice sack, the sound of the monsoon wind tearing at bamboo walls, the taste of bitter ferns dug up when stores ran low. His truths weren’t lyrical — they were logistical, sensory, anchored in cause and effect. When I asked how he taught history to students, he smiled. ‘I brought them here. To this river. I asked them to count stones. Then I asked them to imagine each stone as a year. Then I asked them what they heard when they put their ear to the water. Not what they hoped to hear. What they did hear.’

That afternoon, I sat on his porch and wrote for 47 minutes — not a single metaphor, no similes, no attempts at profundity. Just: The river smells of wet clay and diesel. A boy in yellow flip-flops kicks a plastic bottle downstream. It spins twice, catches on a root, then floats free. The sun is hot on my left shoulder. My notebook page is damp at the corner.

For the first time in years, writing felt like documentation — not performance.

🚋 The Journey Continues: From Luang Prabang to Vientiane — and the Slow Unlearning

I took the overnight bus to Vientiane — seven hours on a rattling Volvo coach with cracked vinyl seats and a driver who stopped twice to buy sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves. No Wi-Fi. No power outlets. Just the rhythmic sway, the glow of passing roadside stalls, and the low murmur of Lao pop music from someone’s phone.

I didn’t write. I watched. I noted how the light changed from indigo to gunmetal gray to pale gold as dawn broke over the Bolaven Plateau. I watched an elderly woman unwrap her lunch — a single boiled egg, two slices of cucumber, a handful of roasted peanuts — and share half the egg with the teenager sitting beside her, no words exchanged. I watched the driver pause at a roadside shrine, light a stick of incense, bow once, and return to his seat without fanfare.

In Vientiane, I visited the COPE Visitor Centre — a nonprofit documenting the ongoing impact of unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the Secret War. There, I met Sisavath, a prosthetics technician who lost his right leg at age 12. He showed me a new knee joint prototype — lightweight, adjustable, built locally. When I asked how he explained his work to visitors, he said, ‘I tell them the truth. Not the sad truth. Not the hopeful truth. Just the facts: this metal part costs $220. It lasts five years. We train four new technicians every year. Last month, we fitted 37 people.’

No metaphors. No grand arcs. Just data, labor, and continuity.

Back in my room, I opened my notebook again. This time, I didn’t reach for ‘evocative’ language. I wrote: Sisavath’s hands are calloused on the thumb pads. His workshop smells of machine oil and solder. The new knee joint has three bolts. He tightened them with a blue-handled wrench. A poster on the wall says “Safe Fields, Strong Communities” in Lao and English. The English is spelled correctly.

Writing wasn’t getting easier. It was getting slower. More deliberate. Less about capturing a mood — more about recording a sequence.

🌅 Reflection: What This Experience Taught Me About Travel and Myself

I used to think travel writing succeeded when readers said, “I want to go there.” Now I know it succeeds when readers say, “I understand what it means to be there — not as a visitor, but as a participant in a continuum.”

The plight of writing and travel porn isn’t moral failure — it’s methodological collapse. It mistakes aesthetic coherence for truth-telling. It confuses emotional resonance with emotional accuracy. It treats place as backdrop rather than co-author.

What changed for me wasn’t my subject matter — it was my relationship to evidence. I stopped asking, What does this place mean? and started asking, What happened here — and how do I know? That shift demanded humility. It meant admitting when I didn’t know — when a gesture was culturally specific and I hadn’t asked; when a building’s history was contested and I couldn’t summarize it fairly; when a local’s story felt too complex, too contradictory, too alive to fit into my 800-word frame.

It also meant accepting boredom as valid data. The long waits at bus stations. The miscommunications over lunch orders. The heat that made pens skip and pages curl. These weren’t ‘interruptions’ to the story — they were the story’s infrastructure.

💡 Practical Takeaways: How to Ground Your Travel Writing (Without Losing Voice)

You don’t need to abandon style to embrace honesty. You just need to recalibrate your tools. Here’s what worked for me — not as rules, but as recurring experiments:

“Truth isn’t found in the grand gesture. It lives in the micro-friction between intention and outcome.”
— Boun, Luang Prabang

1. Anchor every descriptive claim in a sense — and name it. Instead of ‘the market was vibrant,’ try ‘the fish stall smelled of brine and crushed lemongrass; a vendor slapped two tilapia onto a wooden counter, scales flying like silver sparks.’ If you can’t cite sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste — cut it.

2. Interview with silence, not agenda. Before asking ‘What does this mean to you?,’ ask ‘What did you do today before coming here?’ or ‘What’s the hardest part of this job in rainy season?’ Listen for logistics before philosophy.

3. Let contradictions stand. A tour guide may passionately describe cultural preservation while wearing a Nike cap and checking WhatsApp. Don’t resolve the tension. Name it: ‘He adjusted his cap, tapped his screen, then gestured toward the mural and said, “This tells our oldest story.”’ Reality is polyphonic — your writing can be too.

4. Track your assumptions in real time. Keep a second column in your notebook titled ‘What I Think I Know.’ Next to each observation, jot one line: ‘Assumed because…’ Later, verify or discard. (Example: ‘Assumed the monk was young because he wore sneakers — verified he was 32, ordained at 28.’)

5. Publish the mundane first. Draft your piece using only concrete, verifiable details — no adjectives beyond color/size/material/temperature. Then, and only then, add interpretation — clearly labeled as such: ‘I interpreted this as…’ or ‘Local friends later explained…’

None of this guarantees ‘good’ writing. But it does guarantee writing that can withstand scrutiny — from editors, readers, and your future self.

⭐ Conclusion: Writing That Breathes, Not Performs

I still use that Moleskine. Its pages are now filled with uneven script, coffee stains, and marginalia in three languages — some translated, some not. I haven’t published a single piece from that trip. Not because it’s unworthy — but because the work isn’t finished. Some stories need distance. Some need verification. Some need to sit quietly until their urgency matches their accuracy.

Travel writing doesn’t have to be flawless to be faithful. It just has to resist the reflex to polish away the grit — the rain-seeped floors, the off-key bells, the untranslatable jokes shared over lukewarm tea. That grit isn’t noise. It’s texture. It’s proof that you were present — not as a curator of experience, but as a witness to it.

So yes — your writing might suck. Mine did. And that suckedness wasn’t failure. It was the first honest syllable in a longer sentence — one that’s still being written, slowly, carefully, with all five senses wide open.