This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page I interview Gayle Keck, who has written for Gourmet, GQ, Islands, Executive Traveler, Four Seasons and the Washington Post, where she created a monthly column on travel magazines. She tells me how her career began with a challenge from a friend. “A friend challenged me to stop talking about wanting to be a travel writer and actually do it,” she says. “He gave me a deadline to complete a story. Pinned and wriggling, I wrote 2400 words about a spa in France. I submitted it to the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and it ran in one of their all-travel specials. Through sheer luck, I happened to have written a piece that fit their theme for that issue.”

In the interview, Keck examines the difference between approaching a place as a traveler and as a reporter:

There’s always a tension between living a place and reporting a place. In most cases, I prefer that people not know I’m a writer – but there’s a fine line between asking enough questions, getting enough information, and being “outed” as a reporter. On the other hand, there’s sometimes a temptation to just relax into a situation and be a “normal” traveler. I did that once at a friend’s wedding. And, of course, when I was chatting with an editor a few months later, she was looking for a story about that very destination. After an insane amount of time on the Internet and telephone, I finally gathered the research I could have collected along the way.

Full Gayle Keck interview online here.