Travel Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Nobody wants to read about your bus journey. They also do not want a piece with no one in it — the anonymous, competent, guidebook voice that describes a town without anybody having been there. Travel writing sits between those two failures, and where a particular piece should sit is a decision the writer has to make deliberately, because drifting produces the worst version: a narrator prominent enough to be noticed and not interesting enough to earn it.

We work on what travel writers produce — features and long-form essays, columns and dispatches, book manuscripts and proposals, pitches to editors and commissioning correspondence, anthology and competition submissions, place writing that is not conventional travel, blog and newsletter pieces, and the material that goes to agents and publishers. Our editors work on how much of you belongs on the page.

The first person is the travel writer's central decision and it is usually made by accident. The question is not whether to appear but what your presence is for, and there are only a few honest answers: you are the one being changed, you are the instrument the place is measured by, or you are the person things are explained to. We work through pieces so the reason for the "I" is consistent within the piece, since a narrator who is a sensitive observer for three pages and then the subject of a paragraph about their divorce has changed the contract; so the writer's discomforts earn their space or go, given that the delayed connection and the difficult hotel are the most written and least interesting material in the genre; so people encountered are people rather than local colour, with names where names were given and their own words where you have them; so what you did not see or understand is admitted, because a piece implying total access is doing something dishonest and readers feel it; so the privileges of the trip are visible where they shaped what happened, as a piece silent about how you got there reads as a piece pretending; and so at least one thing in the piece resists your reading of it. Pieces edited this way sound like someone rather than like travel writing.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished pieces, pitches and manuscripts. We are editors rather than commissioning editors or publishers, and we offer no view on where a piece should be placed or its prospects. What we can do is make the decision about your presence a decision.