Daniel Stables is a freelance travel writer based in the United Kingdom. He has authored or contributed to more than 30 travel books on destinations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, for Rough Guides and DK Eyewitness, among other publishers. He also writes travel articles for publications including BBC Travel, National Geographic Traveller, and Lonely Planet, and has appeared as a guest on the Rough Guides podcast. In 2021, Daniel was shortlisted in the Travel Writer category at the Freelance Writing Awards.
How did you get started traveling?
I was lucky enough to have parents who took us on a foreign trip most years, usually in Europe, although occasionally places further afield like Turkey or New York. Just as much as where we went, it’s what we did that shaped me as a traveler and a person. We weren’t really a sit-on-the-beach type of family; we were always off traipsing around temples and ruins, or visiting art galleries. I’m still like that today, which is just as well really – there’s not that much interesting travel writing to be done about sitting around on the beach. My first big adventure was when I was 18, and I traveled around India for two months and then Southeast Asia for another two months with my mates Ollie and Charlie. That’s when I really got hooked in.
How did you get started writing?
Writing has always been my biggest, maybe only, strength. My parents both worked as English teachers, which probably helped – there was always a huge amount of books around the house, and I read a lot. I was good at English and other humanities subjects at school, but like a lot of people, I probably took it for granted – I wanted to be a musician when I was younger. When it came to paying the bills, though, I ended up reverting to writing pretty quickly. Since leaving university, my professional career has always been as a writer, whether writing marketing copy, as I started off doing, or the travel journalism I do now.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
When I was 25, I was working as a copywriter and trying to build up my travel writing portfolio by writing articles in the evenings and at the weekends, including for Rough Guides. I wasn’t even thinking about writing guidebooks at that stage, but one day I got an email from an editor there, Andy Turner, asking what I was doing for the next couple of months, and would I like to go to Indonesia to update a guidebook? I was about to quit my job to go traveling anyway, so I seized the opportunity, and haven’t looked back since. Everything that’s happened in my career since then, I owe to Andy deciding to email me that day. I’m extremely grateful to him for that.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Note-taking. After a day having your brain rattle around your skull on a hair-raising bus journey, hopscotching between rabid dogs on your way to your hotel room, or walking twenty miles with camping gear on your back, you can feel a little fried, and often the last thing you want to do is write up the day’s experiences – but you must. Transcribing interviews is another chore, as anyone who has to do it regularly will know. It sounds obvious, but it takes an awful lot longer to write down half an hour’s worth of speech than it does to speak it. I’m clutching at straws really, though – being on the road for a travel writing job is brilliant. The upsides far outweigh the drawbacks.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
The amount of reading and research that goes into even pitching every article, let alone writing them. I’ve thought I’ve been onto an idea for an article before and read an entire book on the subject before I realized the angle I was looking for wasn’t there at all. I have a constant compulsion – probably common to a lot of freelancers – to be always writing or submitting copy, i.e. doing the part of the job that I know I will soon be paid for. Reading and thinking still count as working, though. In some ways, they’re the most important parts of the job. The writing is the easy bit.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Without doubt, doing my taxes. I’m rubbish at remembering to get receipts for everything while I’m on the road, and it costs me money in unclaimed expenses every single year. I’m trying to work on that. In a more general sense, I have the same problem that most self-employed people do, in that I constantly feel that I either have too much work, or not enough. A connected issue is work-life balance, and setting myself professional boundaries. I’m passionate about my job to the extent that it doesn’t always feel like work, but that can make it difficult to switch off. It’s great to be able to pursue your passions in your work, but it’s good to know when to close the laptop too.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
I’ve always made a living from writing about travel in one way or another, but the tone of it has changed over the years. My first job out of university was as a copywriter for a travel agency in London. I remember cycling to Baker Street in the sideways rain, then sitting indoors at a desk all day and writing about hot air ballooning in Burma, exploring glacier caves in Iceland, or sleeping in a Bedouin desert camp in the Empty Quarter. It allowed for a bit of escapism, sure, but it wasn’t quite the life I had envisioned – I wanted to travel, not just write about rich people’s holidays. I started building up my portfolio and for the first couple of years I was still doing some copywriting, shifting the balance more and more towards articles and guidebooks until they were all I was doing. In my first meeting with my editor at Rough Guides, he told me that the copywriting would prove useful, and although I couldn’t see it at the time, he was right. I still write about hotels and itineraries when I’m writing guidebooks, only now I’m not trying to sell them to anyone, I’m just giving honest appraisals.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
One of the most intriguing books of any kind that I’ve read in the last few years is As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, a travel memoir by an anonymous lady-in-waiting, known as Lady Sarashina, who lived in 11th-century Japan. It’s a gorgeous piece of travel writing and a fascinating glimpse into a place and time which seems so alien to ours in so many ways; the author and her contemporaries seem to largely communicate in spontaneously composed poems, for one thing.
My favorite travel writer is Pico Iyer. He’s led an itinerant life, and he writes a lot about the ‘in-between’ things, which are always the most interesting: liminal spaces like airports, for example, and his own identity as a Brit of Indian descent who grew up in California and now lives in Japan. I’d recommend his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, as a good place to start. It’s all about cultural exchange and absorption between the East and the West, and how it works in a more complex and two-sided way than you might imagine. Travel is always the frame for Iyer’s work, but he writes about themes, which in general I prefer to traditional narrative travel writing. An honorable exception to that is Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose prose is brilliantly dense and florid in the best possible way. He disproves the received wisdom that you should always be as lean and concise as possible in your writing, which I’ve always been a bit suspicious of. In Mani, Leigh Fermor devotes a whole page to writing about the qualities of the Greek air, and it is captivating. I’ll leave the iceberg theory to Ernest Hemingway.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Be prepared to build a life that demands spontaneity. If you’re the kind of person who needs to have every day planned out for the next year, this isn’t the job for you. It’s rare that I get commissions with deadlines less than a few months away, and often something will come in which demands I go away, often to a different country, within the next couple of weeks. That’s the beauty of this job, of course, but it’s not for everyone. You need to be able to embrace uncertainty, and that goes for finances, too – while I’m fortunate enough to make a living from travel writing, I never know month on month how much I’m going to earn, and the whole thing could fall off a cliff tomorrow, like it did in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. All my guidebook jobs were pulled from under my feet, but I adapted and started writing more articles, and now I write for some of my dream publications. When life gives you lemons, and all that.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Being able to pursue and indulge my interests and get paid for it. That goes beyond travel, although that’s an obvious perk – seeing a wild tiger in Nepal, walking with Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and paragliding in the Himalayas are all magical experiences my job has afforded me. Even better than that is the opportunity to write about my interests, not just in travel, but in anthropology, food, music, history, and religion. Hustling and pitching for every piece of work often threatens to drive me insane, but it has the enormous benefit that I only write about topics of my own choosing. That is the great privilege and adventure of life as a freelance writer.
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