Most of your travel experiences will never be recorded. Even if you had a GoPro running 24/7, it wouldn’t capture what matters most — your internal journey. A camera can’t detect the dopamine hit of soaking in a mountain view, nor the gratitude garnered from a stranger wordlessly handing you a bowl of borscht. There’s only one device recording these crucial building blocks of a travel story: your memory.
It’s a vital piece of equipment in the arsenal of a travel writer, but also a potential hazard to truthful storytelling. Figure out how to tame your memory so that it becomes a useful ally on your travel writing journey.
Memory: An Eager But Unreliable Partner
Memory is generous when it wants to be. It paints vibrant pictures from the moments that matter: the way the sunset perfectly aligned with a Kathmandu temple; the scowl on the face of an unhelpful bus driver.
But it’s also selective. It deletes the unremarkable, rearranges sequences, merges moments, and fills in blanks. And yet, these mental reconstructions form the basis of nearly every great travel narrative. As memoirist Mary Karr put it, “Memory is a pinball in a machine — it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard.”
In the 1970s, American psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer performed a series of memory-related experiments. They implanted false memories in subjects by the way they framed a question. For instance, if a car crash was described as a “major collision” rather than a “minor” one, subjects were more likely to falsely remember glass shattering.
Memories can be altered by emotions or preconceptions. An artist in a Prague gallery looked more intimidating because I felt trapped; a bar in Riga looked different in my mind’s eye compared to online photos.
As a travel writer, treat your memory with both reverence and skepticism. Your job isn’t to recreate your journey down to the GPS coordinates — it’s to evoke the emotional reality of your experience.
Working with Memory: The Writer’s Toolbox
To help bridge the gap between memory and fact, writers can — and should — build tools into their processes. The aim isn’t to eliminate memory’s subjectivity. However, by approaching a story the right way, you’re creating a foundation which can spark new, true memories.
Written Notes
Note-taking can feel awkward. Moreover, it threatens to detach you from the present moment and the characters involved. However, it’s one of the best ways to capture your observations while they’re fresh. I tend to make notes on my phone, rather than a notepad. This is more inconspicuous – you look like you’re just texting or searching for directions.
If you can’t take notes in the moment, make a mental note to write it down later. You’re not aiming to capture every detail, just the ones that stand out. It could be snatches of dialogue, the smell of a food stall, or the colors of a landscape.
For my street art story, I took an impromptu self-guided tour of Sofia, Bulgaria. Knowing the venture might lead to a story, I noted down every character that caught my eye. From drunkards on a park bench to a dog peeking over a balcony, each one was noted down for later use.
The key is recognizing what might become a story and being hyper-observant of the details. Over time, you’ll improve at spotting the details that matter and noting them down.
Voice Memos
Some writers may prefer to take audio notes. Journalists use this all the time for structured interviews. It’s much easier to hit record and then forget about the microphone than it is to try and scribble down notes verbatim as a subject is talking. As a travel writer, though, you might not be aiming for verbatim quotes, so this is less necessary. However, if you can film a moment, it’ll help you capture dialogue. I find dialogue hard to make up, so using real quotes helps give authenticity to a story.
Another option is to record yourself whenever you get the chance. If something cool just happened, hit record and imagine you’re relaying the story to a friend. The earlier you do this, the more accurately you’ll capture the details and your emotional response. Next time you’re walking in a new city, why not speak your thoughts into your phone? Others will assume you’re on a call when, in reality, you’re filling a potential gold mine. When you listen back, you’ll re-experience the raw atmosphere of a moment.
Photo Journals
Most travelers take photos almost constantly, so this shouldn’t be hard. While travel writing benefits from eye-catching imagery, this needn’t be your main goal. Even blurry, poorly-lit photos can aid your writing. A photo doesn’t lie. It’ll reveal the clothing you wore, the architecture of the streets, and other details your brain decided to delete.
The more photos you have, the easier it’ll be to reconstruct a scene. Make sure you have enough storage space and get good at organizing your files. For my Edges of Europe column, I work on stories from years gone by, before I was traveling as a writer. By trawling Instagram story archives and long-forgotten chats, I was often able to recover enough photos to restore lost memories. If you know you’ll be writing about a trip, it’s easier to be intentional with your photo-taking.
Fact-Checking
For everything you don’t have records for, you can always look it up. Research is a standard feature of most writing, but something often overlooked by writers of creative, narrative-style stories. Sure, you’re writing about a personal experience, so your stories don’t need to be dripping in stats. However, there’s no excuse for publishing easily checkable mistakes.
Place names and directions are easy to look up online. Be sure to also research cultural practices. Don’t misrepresent a community because you misinterpreted something that happened. You can reach out to your contacts after the fact to double-check anything you didn’t fully understand.
My accidental walk through a Serbian slum was a sensitive topic. I’d chanced upon a community of which I was ignorant. It’s hard to write a story when you don’t have the correct terminology. Through a combination of online research and talking to locals, I put together a thoughtful piece that’s faithful to reality.
Don’t Overthink It
If you’re aiming for perfect recall, you’re on the path to failure. Instead, aim for sincerity and authenticity. Readers don’t expect you to remember the exact words a rickshaw driver in Sri Lanka said six years ago. What they want is a story that feels real — one that gives insight into a place, a moment.
But let’s be clear: this is not a license to fabricate. If you invent a person or create a dramatic moment that never happened, you’ve crossed from creative nonfiction into fiction. The difference lies in intention. Misremembering the color of a door is human; creating a fictional character and passing them off as real is dishonest.
Your memory is the key to a story, so embrace it at least as much as you doubt it. As essayist Dinty W. Moore said, “Memory is like a rope, knotted every three or four feet, and hanging down a deep well. When you pull it up, just about anything might be attached to those knots. But you’ll never know what’s there if you don’t pull. And the more you pull at that rope, the more you find.”
Hidden within the depths of your mind are incredible stories that you might not have clocked at the time. If you investigate your memory with integrity, you’ll find awesome material. Just remember: you can reconstruct a scene, but don’t manufacture it.
When Memory Fails, Be Honest
Sometimes, forgetfulness is part of the story. Rather than filling in gaps with untruths, it’s better to acknowledge it. If you can’t remember something, perhaps there’s a reason for that. Use phrases like, “The trip was a whirlwind, I can’t remember if it was the third day or the thirteenth when…” Or, “I can’t remember her face, but based on how she made me feel, it must have come with a warm smile.”
If anything, acknowledging your blind spots makes the story more human and believable. It builds trust with a reader, encouraging them to continue on the journey. We’re all flawed and limited creatures – why hide that in your writing?
Memory holds the seeds of a travel story; it’s the bridge from lived experience to words on a page. It’s messy and unreliable, but if you work with it, it will help you become a better writer. Your memory is a tool and you are the craftsman; it’s your job to use it with care to create something beautiful.
