This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers Page, I interview Tony Horwitz, author of Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Henry Holt 2002), as well as Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon 1998), Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia (E.P. Dutton 1991) and One For the Road: An Outback Adventure (Random House 1988). He has also been a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and a staff writer for the New Yorker; his awards include a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, and an Overseas Press Club award for coverage of the first Gulf War.

One of the challenges of travel writing, Horwitz tells me, is staying open to the possibilities of the story. “Travel comes from the French word, travail,” he says. “It can be hard work. Much of the travel I’ve written about is to difficult places, and I tend to head off with little or no plan. Improvising in strange places makes for the best stories, but it’s also exhausting. You’re never really off work; everything that happens from the moment you wake to the moment you fall asleep is potential material. You’re also planning ahead — where do I go next, how do I get there, what will I do there? — while trying to milk the most out of the place you’re in.”

Horwitz also suggests that serious travel writers should try to break in to the craft when they’re young:

Travel is potentially punishing: to your body, to your relationships, to your bank account. The older and more settled you get, the harder it becomes to take off for weeks or months at a time, on some harebrained adventure. If you do it young, the worst that can happen (apart from death, dismemberment, or chronic dysentery) is that you’ll suffer for awhile and find something else to do, which is better than being filled with regret years later over never having tried.

Full Tony Horwitz interview online here.