Zora O’Neill is the author of All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World, winner of the SATW Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book of 2016. She has been a travel writer since 2002 and has written dozens of guidebooks for Moon, Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Perceptive Travel and Travel & Leisure, where she published an essay about refugees in Greece, which was honored by NATJA and compiled in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, vol. 11.
How did you get started traveling?
My parents were big travelers before I was born. I grew up with their souvenirs and their stories, so even when I was in middle school, I was itching to go to more thrilling places than Albuquerque, where I grew up and which, like all disgruntled teenagers, I thought was the most boring place ever. Of course I love it now!
But aside from a cheesy London theater trip in middle school — ooh, Starlight Express! — I didn’t travel until midway through college. I went to Cairo for the summer to continue the Arabic studies I’d started. It was just as overwhelming and perspective-shifting and crazy-fun as you’d imagine. I went dancing a lot.
It also set the kind of traveling I continued to do and still (mostly) do: I go places for work or study, or some other specific mission. I’ve never just put on a backpack and bopped around with no plan at all — I never had the financial freedom to do that. But it has been great for my writing, because when you stay in one place for a while, you have time to realize that your first, second and third impressions are all goofy and mostly wrong, and the world probably doesn’t need to read them. Now I know to wait, to let things marinate a bit.
How did you get started writing?
During dot-com era 1.0, way back in the 20th century, I was working as an editor at a tech magazine in New York City, and the stuff freelance writers filed made me think, I can do that. So I quit my job.
And the very next month, the stock market crashed and so did the demand for all the tech journalism I’d been banking on. So I started pitching travel stories, and they were hilariously bad. “Hey, editor I’ve never met, Croatia is going to be the next hot place! Send me there to write about it!”
I was totally right about Croatia, for the record, but there was zero reason to send me to write about it, because I’d never been there. I kept pitching all kinds of random stuff, overreaching, but I was really spinning my wheels. But then…
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
A friend sent me an ad she’d seen for Moon guidebooks. I hadn’t been thinking about guidebooks, really, but what the heck, I applied. And they gave me the hotels section of a New York City guide. It was super fun, snooping around all these places and visiting neighborhoods I’d never been in. I also really liked the mapping and generally keeping track of stuff. I genuinely love spreadsheets and databases. So I was able to build on that job and do more work for Moon, Rough Guides and Lonely Planet, and that was my travel writing bread-and-butter for a long time.
For more narrative writing, I did eventually nail a pitch: a story about kid-friendly stuff in Amsterdam, for a British parenting magazine. I knew Amsterdam because I’d worked there for a couple of summers, and went back to visit a lot. It felt really good to pitch something I knew in my bones, and knew was a good fit for the magazine. It felt so natural when the editor wrote and said yes! That’s still a nice feeling, to find that perfect fit — rare, but nice.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
It took me a long time to realize how much energy it takes to speak foreign languages and make decisions and chitchat with strangers. Travel is supposed to be fun and relaxing, so I just ignored the signs when it wasn’t. And I would, without fail, spend at least one day of any trip totally flattened and sick and hating everything. Things got much better when I started being easy on myself and acknowledging that some days, it’s fine to just sit around and read a book and not talk to anyone.
Sort of related, I’m not a naturally outgoing person, but guidebook writing always gave me an excuse to ask (admittedly boring) questions and talk to people. When I went off to work on my travel memoir, All Strangers Are Kin, I no longer had the guidebook “excuse.” I was in the United Arab Emirates, without anything but this big, important narrative book project, and I was like, Oh crap, how do I make stuff happen? It didn’t help that people in the UAE are a lot more reserved than people in Egypt. So I was wandering around aimlessly, just smiling at strangers and hoping for the best. Then I decided I just had to make up new missions for myself.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
The research bloat is the worst. It happens with guidebooks and narrative stories, where you’re digging around fact-checking, and you find something related that makes you think, Oh nooooo, this is definitely something I should’ve checked out, and how did I miss it? And should I mention it now? And I spend all this time trying to decide if whatever I’m writing should just balloon out to include this thing.
It’s a great feeling when I realize, no, duh, it shouldn’t be there. What happened on the trip, the research I did then, was definitely enough. That stupid research balloon just deflates suddenly. But then I’m like, Where did my whole day go?
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
The irregular cash flow of freelancing is hor-rib-le. Three years into my freelance life, I had a stomach ulcer and hated everyone I wrote for because they could not manage to pay me in a timely fashion. [Guidebook publisher redacted]’s accounts payable pushed me to tears.
A couple of years later, I got married, and it was a massive relief. Having one steady income stream makes it possible for me to treat editors with loving kindness. And to do stories where I’m charging all the expenses and waiting months to be reimbursed. And to write a book that takes a year and a half longer than expected to finish. I could not have done that on my own, and I’m in awe of people who do manage to pull this off.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Definitely — and for my sanity as well. All along, I’ve worked as a freelance copy editor at various magazines here in NYC. It’s a great, super-flexible gig, and I love the job and the people. It’s a relief to work on small jobs that are done in ten minutes or a day, just waltzing in and fixing something, instead of starting from scratch and wrestling for days, months, years. And it’s nice to have colleagues to see in person.
At first, the majority of my income was copy editing. Now it’s much smaller — I basically do it, as an on-payroll temp, so that I can have a bunch of taxes withheld and I don’t have to mess with estimated taxes.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
I love, love, love Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a deeply educated man who’s lived in Yemen since forever. He wrote a series of books following in the footsteps of the medieval traveler Ibn Battuta, and they’re just so erudite and funny and generous.
Jenny Diski’s book about riding Amtrak, Stranger on a Train, is this wonderful book in which she just relays all the crazy stories she heard in the smoking lounge. It’s so inspiring to see that just describing people and a culture is enough — and even better, in fact, than interjecting meaning and comments and jokes and things.
Related to that, I remember liking Paul Theroux a lot, years ago, and then when I was starting to write All Strangers Are Kin, I went back and read some and was just so taken aback by how condescending he can be, especially in places I’d since traveled to and knew better. Like, descriptions of bumbling servants and people with comically bad teeth. I used to think those things were funny and snarky, and now they just seem arrogant and hurtful.
It really helped me develop my principle that whoever I’m writing about, even if it’s just some passing mention, I would want them not to be hurt if they happened to read it. This means people should never be comic relief, or illustrations of some annoying tendency in a culture.
Of course, as I’m saying this, I’m thinking of times I’ve violated it, especially early on, and even recently, just by not knowing enough. But never, ever make jokes at the expense of strangers. Pretty much all the jokes I make are at my own expense.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
If you’re intimidated by starting writing, or even if you’re not, in your travel journal, just write description. Don’t try to analyze or draw grand conclusions, because you filter too much out in the process. I did this when I was first traveling, in college, and it put so much pressure on, and I hated what I wrote so much that I stopped keeping notes for a long time — and now years of trips are lost!
If you’re full-time freelance and traveling, build a network with fellow writers. In addition to my copy-editing buddies, I’m also very grateful for my fellow guidebook writers. It’s great to be able to sit around and kvetch about what outsiders see as a “dream job.” It’s still work, and work friends are key.
And don’t get too caught up in freebies and Instagram-pretty, if you can help it. I feel lucky I started working well before Instagram, and wrote for editors who wanted me to tell it like it is. Stay honest, and be conscious of your position relative to the rest of the world. Don’t forget that foreign people and places are not there just to be the backdrop for your photos or the source of anecdotes — they’ve got their own thing going on.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Practically, it’s taught me to really enjoy eating alone at a restaurant. Hell yes, I double-dip my chips.
But more generally, I’m so grateful to all the people in other countries who’ve opened up their homes and their hearts to me. If I hadn’t felt empowered by this strange job, by calling myself a travel writer, I’m not sure I ever would’ve opened myself up to make these wonderful connections.
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