Talking Travel Writing

3 days ago | travelwriting.substack.com | Lottie Gross

Something exciting is happening in the world of PR: the unsubscribe button has finally arrived. I wouldn’t have seen a single unsubscribe option in my inbox of press releases five or six years ago, but now it’s everywhere, and I’m feeling empowered by it. Every time yet another irrelevant press release drops in my inbox — “The perfect family getaway thi…

1 week ago | travelwriting.substack.com | Lottie Gross

We’ve all heard of writer’s block. That feeling when you sit down and look at your blank page or half-cobbled together feature and you just can’t write anymore. You’re out of inspiration. Your brain is on pause. You need to walk away and come back later. But what about ideas block? This is something I have struggled with immensely over the last few years. Ideas block — a term I’m coining right here, right now — is when you’re just all out of ideas. You need to pitch stories, but you’ve got none.

2 weeks ago | travelwriting.substack.com | Lottie Gross

Fancy spending a few days in Harrogate with a bunch of like-minded aspiring or early-career travel writers, with two professionals to guide you on your next career move? The TTW Retreat is back and this time we’re coming to Yorkshire!After hugely successful retreats in the Cotswolds, we’re taking our three-day travel writing course on the road to North Yorkshire and setting up shop in the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

3 weeks ago | travelwriting.substack.com | Lottie Gross

In the spirit of embracing AI, we’ve put Chat GPT to the test. We fed it data from our recent travel writing in AI survey and here’s what the bot spat out.Scroll to the end to see the prompt we used for this actually quite interesting article. Don’t worry, next week we’ll be back to our usual human-crafted programming. If you’ve been clinging to your notepad and Canon camera like lifebuoys in the AI storm, you’re not alone.

1 month ago | travelwriting.substack.com | Lottie Gross

AI isn’t coming for our first-person travel features – as Steph put it last week, it can’t taste, feel or smell, or even physically travel to a destination. Our perfect prose and beautifully crafted paragraphs are safe, for now. But is AI coming for our guidebooks? As a guidebook author myself, whose career started at a guidebook publisher in London way …