Original article on www.vagabondjourney.com
One of Vagabond Journey’s writers, David Fegan, is trying to fully finance his travels through writing. He’s asked me a few times for advice on how to do it. The guy works hard, he’s going out and chasing intrigues, putting himself into uncomfortable situations, engaging people for interviews — grabbing his stories with both hands. Where other tourists are spending their time abroad drinking beer and trying to bag bedmates, this guy is going out into deserts to talk to film makers, going as a journalist to climate conferences, learning about the lives of homeless buskers, and exploring elements of culture, such as the new sport of slackline and the tradition of drinking yerba mata, and then scurrying back to his hotel room to sit for endless hours writing it all up. The guy is going to make it. When you have guts and fortitude like this you’re eventually going to put the pieces together and accomplish something.
Though I had to think a long time before responding to his question, as what I realized I must tell him is overtly counter-intuitive:
Good stories like the kind you’re doing are often not the kind that makes money.
So I told him to follow the strategy of the classical artist. I told him to look at the lives of the painters with Ninja Turtle names, read about the others who are grouped in the same league as them. Those guys painted boring, run of the mill portraits of rich people and taught students by day and did their real art in their spare time. Many of them never really made any money on the work they would eventually become legendary for.
It is a relatively new concept for people to expect to make a living from their art. The artists of old lived off of day jobs. Melville toiled in a customs house, others were admen or worked for newspapers or did other kinds of work that was completely unrelated to their art. Then, the idea of making a living off of writing books was preposterous. Work and art were distinctly divided, treated like two different things entirely.
It is my impression that this dual approach is again needed today. To develop as a traveling writer you need money, and it’s not going to come from your travel stories. Going out into the world and doing grade-A, experiential journalism like the stuff of Nat Geo is a good way to wind up sitting on some broken down dock in Amazonia without a dime. Sure, you can do the work, you can get the stories, and even publish them, but to get enough money to even cover the costs of the travels is a pipe dream.
While it is more than possible for someone who would do this to get published in major outlets, most of them just don’t pay unknown freelancers (i.e. The Atlantic, etc . . . ). And the fact of the matter is that many seem hesitant to stake their reputations on newbie journalists writing primary narratives that can’t easily be fact checked anyway.
