Patrick Forsyth
Few journeys are simple. If we get up in the morning and head off somewhere down the road it may require no planning at all, but mostly travel involves a good deal. You need to: decide on a destination, check passports, book flights, arrange insurance, think about packing and a great deal more. Then, come the day, you have to actually do it all – and that all includes a great many things from maybe getting up at three in the morning to suffering the whole tedious airport experience. Your readers do all this too.
One decision for the writer is which part of the process to focus on. The word count is a major factor here. In a book you might describe a whole journey or a place in detail. In an article you might focus on just a small part of the travel process. Such a part may be tiny.
Consider an example: the passport. There are serious points to be made: where is it, is it up to date, does it include any necessary visa and have you left it on the sideboard? But there are others too, some topical: will Brexit see the British passport return to having a dark blue cover? Will we return to the old, old days of collecting and counting stamps if/when new arrangements apply to travel in Europe? There are a legion of possibilities even in such a tightly focused area.