Lucas Peters is an award-winning writer, photographer, and travel expert with a portfolio that includes hundreds of travel articles, radio interviews, and podcasts. As the author and principal photographer of various travel books published by Moon Travel Guides (Hachette Book Group), Lucas has produced titles such as Moon Morocco, Moon Grand European Journeys, Moon Seville, Granada, and Andalusia, and Marrakesh & Beyond. Additionally, he is the owner and managing director of Journey Beyond Travel, a boutique travel company. Lucas resides in Tangier, Morocco with his wife and two children.
How did you get started traveling?
When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and I on quite a few roadtrips around the US to camp out and hike in the national parks, but it wasn’t until 2001 that I began traveling internationally. That year I spent the winter and early spring in London doing a study abroad. I was studying English Literature at the University of Washington. We had a class that met once a week at different corners of London for a walking tour with a local professor who knew all of the vagaries of British history. We kept a travel journal for this class and were encouraged to not only write, but sketch as best we could what we saw. It’s a practice I’ve kept up ever since.
How did you get started writing?
Since about third grade I’ve always been writing it seems, making stories or jotting down notes in a journal of one sort or another. There have been ebbs and flows, periods of more creativity or output and periods of slumber (or rather, outright hibernation if I am being more honest)… but I always had a habit of coming back to writing. It wasn’t until I was approaching my 30th birthday that I realized people besides maybe Stephen King could actually could make money writing. Stupid probably, but it wasn’t something I had given much thought to and the writers I had met never talked about anything as crass as what they were getting paid to put words on the page. This was about the age I started becoming serious about writing for an audience, which I think is quite a distinction, at least in my case. To write for an external reader takes some editing chops and this, more than the act of putting words on a page, is where I think real writing begins in so much as it counts for me.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
When I was more active on Twitter I followed a lot of different literary journals. Ploughshares, one of these journals, and an incredibly well-respected one at that, announced that they were running a “Literary Boroughs” series and were looking for writers to submit content for their cities or towns as “literary boroughs.” I wrote a piece that was a mix of Asilah and Tangier in Morocco. The editors ended up preferring that it be a singular location and we went with Asilah. It was my first experience working with an editor and though it didn’t pay, it was the sort of publication I could then show to other outlets and began getting quite a bit of paid work from it.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Weeding through the bullshit.
The thing is, almost everyone has an angle or a motivation for telling you what you want to hear or what they think your audience might want to hear. Where I produce the most writing (Morocco), this is a particular issue as people take for fact what they have been told by someone they trust. Like this, a lot of non-factual miscellany is passed as truth, from guide to guide, merchant to merchant, and so on. It doesn’t help that in Morocco, people love telling stories of varying degrees of truthiness. Parsing fact from fiction, a historical truth from a tall-tale, is a never-ending challenge.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Knowing when to say “enough is enough.” I tend to do dive into a place and do a lot of slow travel. Whether it’s to meet a deadline or make time for my family, I find myself having to reign in my natural penchant to linger in a place. And after the research is done, it can sometimes be difficult for me to make hard editorial decisions — cutting to the heart of the thing and removing what does not add to the story or purpose. I find that this is where I really do need a bit of time to remove myself and the research I have done from the writing practice, to divorce who I am from what I’ve created, what words are on the page, and to be able to effectively break out the scalpel and hunker down to more precisely cut away and fashion whatever piece I am working on for a larger audience.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
It seems like every age brings a new challenge. A decade ago my biggest challenge would have been finding an outlet that would pay me for my work. As I have evolved into working my travel writing into a travel company, Journey Beyond Travel, this is (thankfully!) less of a problem. This sort of evolution follows the path of guidebook guru and travel man extraordinaire Rick Steves. These days, the biggest challenge is more of figuring out a way to have what I write mesh with what we are doing with our company and saying “yes” to the right sorts of opportunities that align with my values, both as a human being and as the owner of a company and invested traveler.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Haven’t we all?! My wife always jokes that I’ve done “every job under the sun,” which is an obvious bit of hyperbole, but I have done a lot of work to just get by. From the perhaps more typical, like teaching English overseas, busking, bussing, waiting tables, and bartending, to the more perhaps atypical for a writer, like working demolition, painting houses, and selling Beanie Babies, knives and vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The thing for me was always finding some sort of value or story in what I was doing with my time to make a bit of money just to keep the lights on and a little food in the fridge.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Oh man. This is a really tough question. I often think my first “travel book” was The Beach by Alex Garland. It whips by and introduces a whole culture and place so artfully and in a way that makes you want to get out of your chair and go someplace, which is the mark of great travel writing, right? Of course there is this outlandish, fantastical story overlaid, but at its heart in a lot of ways I still think of it as a travel book. In a similar vein, I would also put some of Hemingway’s work (The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bells Tolls come immediately to mind) and as well as the London of Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down and High Fidelity are what I think of most) and the New York of Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay).
In my earliest days of really writing travel for publication, I was geographically focused on Morocco and read Edith Wharton’s On Morocco before heading to Marrakesh for the first time. Paul Bowles was also very influential on me for all things Morocco, of course, particularly Let It Come Down and Spider’s House as was Leila Lalami’s collection of linked stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.
When I moved to Paris and started writing about my life there, Adam Gopnik’s collection of travel essays, Paris to the Moon, loomed large for me — particularly as my wife and I had our son in Paris and I was lucky enough to live a few of the moments Gopnik describes in his pages. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and My Life in France by Julia Child are two very different books that I learned a lot from while some classics, like Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and A Moveable Feast, by Hemingway (again) were sources of learning craft. For what it’s worth, Hemingway’s Garden of Eden describes the Cote d’Azur beautifully and I feel like I learned more about bringing a place to life in these pages than maybe in any of his other stories, save maybe The Sun Also Rises.
Other writers that you might more classically find in the travel section of your local bookstore I’ve only begun reading these last few years, like Pico Iyer (how great was Autumn’s Light?) and Paul Theroux (anything he touches, it seems!) and Rick Steves’ Travel as a Political Act which I found both inspiring and a sort of window through which we can see our own travels, to say nothing of the different ways as writers we can tackle what might be an uncomfortable sort of topic.
Oh… and purely as a “how to make a living in travel writing” sort of resource, I found Gabi Logan’s The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map invaluable and recommend this to anyone looking to make a living or a little money doing any sort of travel writing.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
When I signed my first book deal and was working with my editor, she said something in passing that stuck with me: “The thing with good travel writing is that it’s just good writing.” Sometimes I think that is lost a bit with travel writing as a genre. If you don’t love writing first, you won’t enjoy travel writing. It seems obvious, but perhaps not so much? When you are writing, there is a lot of time spent in solitude just putting words on paper and then later working through edits and everything else, drafting and redrafting, and trying to craft a piece just-so. If you don’t find this process enjoyable — this would be my big warning — you will not find travel writing (or probably any other type of paid writing) fulfilling.
Otherwise, if you love writing, well, in that case, the world is your oyster! From your backyard to the dark side of the moon. The sky is the limit. There is no shortage of content and ideas, and hopefully you find your way in to discover your own corner of the world or the world beyond, but then it is a question of outlets for publication. For my part, I work hard to be a punctual, timely writer that does all the little things — formatting correctly, using spellcheck and grammar check, and turning in the most professional work possible. I also work hard to be flexible with my editors so we can work together to put out the best, most informative, engaging, and entertaining piece of content we can produce. I find that if you approach the art of writing with an eye toward being professional and developing these sorts of industry relationships, this can go a long, long way in your own development, both as a writer and in the business of travel.
To that end, depending on where you are at in your own trajectory, you might find something like an MFA program helpful (I know I did!) or any number or writing retreats geared specifically toward travel writing.
And, of course, a great writer is nearly always a great reader, so read, read, and read some more! And then when you’re done reading, pick up another book.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
It maybe sounds corny, but for me the best reward is when I have helped someone out. As fun as it is to travel and as privileged as I am to get to go to some of the places I to go and see and experience some of the things I do, the reason I am a writer is to share these sorts of things so people can get out there and do amazing things too! It is always so incredibly rewarding when these sorts of pieces I put together hit home and people take the time to reach out and say thank you or put a review on Goodreads or Amazon. Like this, I get that “job well done” feel that makes me want to go back out and do it again!
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