A frequent contributor to National Geographic Traveler and Travel Holiday, Tim Nolan has traveled from the Straits of Magellan to Bhutan and yet is equally at home writing about fly fishing and American history. A member of the Metropolitan New York Golf Writers Association, Tim has also written for Travel & Leisure Golf and The Golf Insider. A graduate of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, where he obtained a BA and M.A.T, Tim recently spoke with V!VA Travel Guides about his career in travel writing.

How did you get started in this field?

By the time I was a student I decided that I wanted to become a newspaper reporter. When I got out I applied at a few different places, one of which was right in school, really, the Gannett (a major American newspaper chain) papers; they hired me a month or two later. I had done a little free-lancing for another paper in the meantime, which always helps because it gives one some clips, even modest clips. I covered some school board meetings and that sort of stuff as a freelancer. I got a full time job as a beat reporter with Gannet by the end of the summer.

I continued in newspapers at one place or another until 1981. Not the same paper, and at that point I went to upstate New York and got a job with a big corporation, Citibank, as a public relations writer and then I became a speechwriter, which I very much wanted to do as long as I was in a corporate job; I think it is the most interesting thing you can do in a corporate job as you are in constant contact with the most senior management, and your work needs to be very good. And it has got a collegial atmosphere that includes the chairman of the board and the senior vice-president.

If you are thinking of what to tell people of the whole process, I had a knowledge base at that point in banking. So I was able to go and interview for a speechwriting position with a pretty good knowledge of the banking industry and what its issues were. If you have an aspiration to a career in writing, there are other choices. There are public relations, marketing; all of which require writing.

But speech writing is what I wanted to do, and I was lucky enough to get a job at Chase Manhattan doing that, when I was 25. I did for three to five years. I wanted to something else, so I did some corporate freelance work as an independent. I got an invitation to a magazine that the New York Times and IBM were publishing. I did that for two years, and then I wanted to get away from any kind of corporate work and get into travel writing.

That is how I got into travel writing, and the one sacrifice that a travel writer has to make, and it is a very important one, is that their income is going to plummet.

It is something you need to think about if you are going to get into that business. It is a buyer’s market, and I think always will be; there are many more people who would like to do this work than there are jobs -- staff jobs on a travel magazine or freelancers -- available.

I should say that most travel magazines depend a great deal on freelancers for story ideas and for writing, as opposed to staff, which is charged with managing the magazine, managing the writers, managing the copy, and managing the mix of stories in a given issue, depending on what their job is on the magazine. Generally they (staff) are not writing for the magazine, so it is mostly freelancers. It varies from magazine to magazine. That is what I do now. I am (also) working as an adjunct professor in English.

When you transitioned, how did you cope with the income plummet?

When I initially left Chase Manhattan, which was my last corporate job, at first I had a month by month contract for one year, so I still had a regular income. In the world of writing, there is no more high paying gig than corporate work. I made a good amount of money, so I combined corporate writing, because it didn’t demand all of my time, with travel writing, so I had a mesh there.

I am starting to teach, because one of the things that freelancers have a hard time with is a consistent income is a steady income. It is going to be irregular. You will go for a couple of months with little income, and then you will get paid two checks in a week, unless you are the sort of person who is blessed with an independent income who does travel writing because he enjoys it.

Has the Internet opened up possibilities or crowded the playing field?

I think there are more opportunities because of the Internet. I know there are websites that exclusively cover travel, more than there used to be, (but) a lot of magazines simply transfer their material, story by story, to their internet sites, and that doesn’t do you any good because the Internet income for the stories you’ve done are pitiful, 50 bucks. It is nothing.

In the United States -- and I don’t know if it is everywhere -- magazines first purchase North American rights. What that means is that they will run the story in a certain period of time. Once they run it all the rights to the story come back to the author. They (the magazines) don’t own it; they use it. I can do anything I want with it. Sometimes I have been lucky enough to sell it to someone else. You don’t do any additional work and you are essentially able to re-use the story.

I do that with a couple of newspapers; though do not pay nearly as well as the magazines do. But remember, it is low-hanging fruit. You don’t have to do anything. You just e-mail them a Word document and essentially you are done, but you get a check in the mail. You get a check for four or five hundred dollars, but that counts too, especially when you don’t have to create the story. It has already been done.

There is a Catch 22: I want to work for you, but I don’t have clips, so how do you get started? I talked to a couple of editors, and told them what my situation was. Based on my work in other areas, they could see that I knew how to write. They would give me assignments, based on my own ideas, which is usually, very, very important for travel writers. It almost never happens that someone approaches you and says hey, I have got a great idea for a travel magazine and I would like you to write for us. What magazine editors are looking for are ideas.

If they like the idea, chances of getting attention and getting work just soars. What I did was I started writing those little front-of-the-book pieces, 150 words. I did a few of those, and it just builds on itself.

And you begin to work for different magazines. Anytime you can meet an editor in face to face is just golden, if you can establish a rapport with an editor. You just can’t do on the telephone, and I don’t think e-mail works very well for an initial contact. Once you have settled that aspect of it, it is terrific.

Also e-mail: If I work for an editor, and I have six story ideas, they can be tough to reach on the telephone, or they can be on the road, but I can send them my story ideas an e-mail, and they can read them in Australia, or they can read them in their office.

Most senior editors have an automatic buffer system which is called the administrative assistant. If you call, the administrative assistant is going to pick up the telephone and your chances of getting a call back are very slim. But e-mail, most people have their own box, and they will read their emails. So it has been a real asset to writers, to be able to gain access to editors, in a way that they couldn’t do ten or fifteen years ago.

You are a regular contributor to National Geographic Traveler. That would be the dream of a lot of aspiring writers.

I met one of the editors at a magazine conferences, my point about meeting editors and getting face time. There are magazine conferences, some more valuable than others. Ones that are going to choose the writers that are going to come, so they are powerful engines for editors. What you end up with at a magazine conference is a bunch of editors and a bunch of writers, and usually the writers have a lot of credibility because they have worked before, and the editors line up with what I like to do.

If the editors are lining up with magazines I would like to work for, I go. And it was at one of those, that I met a National Geographic Traveler person and got three or four assignments from them. They usually pay by the word. After awhile, if you are successful, that goes away. You get paid for the piece…and you will get more money.

Your expenses will get picked up more readily and you will end up getting paid a good bit more, and as some magazines are tightening their belts, and I have seen word count numbers go down.

But I would say the number that most people work around a dollar a word. If you do a thousand word pieces, and you don’t travel for most travel pieces, then you are sitting in your chair by calling people; it took me X amount of hours to do this, and I got a thousand dollars for it. The economy may not be one that pleases you. But again, I know one person who was able to live entirely off his income as a freelance travel writer, yet he is on the road 48 weeks a year.

The trick is to have a second income flow. The other thing about travel writing I have found is that when I am working on stories, they don’t necessarily take up every bit of my day. Some stories will have tighter deadlines than others. You can look at your deadline and pace the story over a longer period of time. If your deadline is far off you can do other things. For me, being an adjunct professor is not going to make a lot of money, but it is steady.

It does a lot of good to know where the public relations people are. There are public relations people for places, for things, for airlines. Remember that most airlines have magazines. They don’t need a lot of writers, though, and use the same ones, but there are certainly lots of travel opportunities there if you become one of their stable of writers. Look at Continental Airlines; you’d want to get stories about all the places that Continental Airlines flies.

It is tough to cold call editors. You have to present story ideas. Research is very, very important; you have to know the client. If you are going to pitch to Lufthansa, you have to know where they fly, Google them et cetera. Do not offer anything irrelevant or already done.

What about the quality of one’s writing?

The first hurdle is showing people you can write. There are very few editors who are willing to correct grammar. That’s why you want another reader for everything you do. You can begin to break the rules of grammar once you master them. I certainly don’t write run-on sentences because they will lose the reader, but I certainly write sentence fragments.

I like short, I think readers like short. I think everyone likes short, as long as they are willing to be flexible on grammar and trade grammar some for understanding. I certainly do write sentences that begin or end with a preposition. I don’t always don’t use the same punctuation in the sentence just because I am trying to create a rhythm; some stories move at a more rapid pace, others at a more languid pace. You need to have an opportunity to do that, to use craft.

Do you have a favorite among the places that you’ve traveled?

Travel writing has taken me places I’d never gone to otherwise: I’ve been to the Straits of Magellan and the Chilean Patagonia, the Bhutan, but in terms of favorites it depends on your taste. This past summer I flew to Denver, got a car, and drove to Canada, not taking any interstates, or staying in any motels that anyone has ever heard of, or eating at MacDonald’s and just playing a little golf along the way. I do write about golf as well. I am not sure I ever enjoyed a trip more than that one.

If you think about it, that doesn’t sound like a sexy trip, but I just had a blast. It was a place I had never been to before. I got to drive, instead of taking airplanes. I like to be on the ground.

You got to go with what you are interested in and what you like. That is where you will find your best ideas.