David Farley at RolfPotts.com

This month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview my longtime friend and travel-writing colleague David Farley, whose book An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town debuts this month. Farley has also written travel stories for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, and Slate.com, and he co-edited Travelers’ Tales Prague and the Czech Republic: True Stories.

Here some outtakes from the interview:

• “One thing that makes breaking into travel writing somewhat egalitarian — at least in theory — is that American newspaper travel editors don’t want to be pitched. They want writers to send in the finished piece, totally polished, and ready to go. This means the editor isn’t necessarily interested in where (or if) you’ve been published in the past. If the piece is good (and there’s a need for it), the editor will buy it. This happened to me when I sent a story to the Chicago Tribune travel section about getting married in Rome. I went from having some clips at a city magazine (that few knew outside of the Bay Area had heard of) to having a clip in a nationally known newspaper.”
• “It’s nearly impossible to make a (decent) living with a focus exclusively on travel. For that reason, when I’m not on the road, I write about the New York dining scene and other stuff. I think it’s important to have a couple thematic beats that you can focus on at home. That way you can make money when you’re not traveling and you can always shift that same theme to the place you’re traveling to. For example, when I go to, say, Rome or Mumbai, I’ll naturally focus on food while I’m there.
• “It’s important to have broad intellectual interests (be an intellectual dilettante). Develop thick skin — there’s a ton of rejection in this business; know that even the successful writers get rejected frequently. Talk to writers more successful than you are and ask lots of questions. Read fiction and other genres in addition to travel writing. Approach travel writing for the art of the genre — not just to fetishize free travel; you can smell a hack travel writer from a thousand feet away and it’s not a pretty scent. Determination is key.”

Full David Farley interview online here.