This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview Tom Haines, who works as a staff travel writer at The Boston Globe. At the Globe, Tom has covered guns and cricket in Guyana, trumpets and nationalism in Serbia, and Gandhi’s legacy in rural India. In 2005 and 2003, he was named Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. His story about an Ethiopian village facing famine appeared in the Pico Iyer-edited 2004 edition of The Best American Travel Writing.

Haines shares lots of great insights into travel-writing in the interview, and I’ll tease a few pull quotes here:

• “I still believe that the best travel writing, regardless of genre or style, is that which begins with careful, thorough reporting. Seems obvious, perhaps, but I’m often surprised how much travel writing fails to get very far out into the world.”
• “I believe good travel writing, as opposed to foreign reporting, or essay writing, or memoir, or whatever, comes with recreating the experience of place. That is, try to present a complete picture: factual, imagistic, emotional. Try to capture, in other words, the multiple layers of reality of a place. Economics and politics, religion and history are all critical. But so is the way people walk, or talk, or act in a group, for example. So is how the light changes by late afternoon, or the feel of a hot wind from the west.”
• “Before going [to a place], learn a lot, but not too much. Have ideas, but not a plan. Essentially, aim for an informed ignorance, so that you can know the contexts beforehand, then let the place define itself.”
• “Travel writing, unlike so much in newspapers, at least, is really almost completely defined by the writer. There is seldom a hard news hook, or even a thematic element that demands a certain structure or content. So it is up to the writer to choose what voice, what structure, what content will drive the story.”
• “When I look back at early notes of a story, or early drafts, it’s amazing what never makes it to print. Whole episodes or encounters or scenes. The good news is there comes a point in the writing when the big block of formless granite that is a journey or experience somewhere takes shape and pieces chip off easily and you can try to polish those that are left.

To read the full Tom Haines interview, click here.