Charting the Unknown: A Brief History of Travel Writing and the Role of the Writing Coach

Travel writing is one of the oldest and most shape-shifting literary forms. At various times in history, it has served as religious documentation, imperial justification, personal confession, anthropological observation, and artistic expression. The travel writer, by definition, is someone who leaves—but what they bring back, and how they frame it, has changed radically over the centuries. And as travel writing continues to evolve in the age of global tourism, climate consciousness, and digital storytelling, the role of the creative writing coach becomes ever more crucial in helping authors negotiate both the freedom and responsibility that come with writing about the world.

To understand how creative writing coaching fits into this genre, it helps to begin with the genre’s past. The writing coach, like the cartographer of old, helps the modern travel writer chart a course through the ethical and aesthetic choices that make a journey worth writing about.

I. Pilgrimage and Empire: Travel Writing’s Roots

In the ancient world, travel writing was often devotional in nature. Pilgrims recorded their journeys to sacred sites. One of the earliest known examples is The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek travelogue describing trade routes in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean from the 1st century CE. By the time of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in the medieval period, travel writing began to broaden into ethnographic and commercial terrain. European and Islamic empires used travel both to better understand the world and to claim it as their own. The Age of Exploration gave birth to grand narratives of conquest disguised as discovery. These texts shaped Western notions of the “exotic” and left behind a legacy of narrative dominance that contemporary writers still grapple with.

For modern writers—especially those aware of the genre’s colonial entanglements—this historical backdrop can feel like both a burden. A creative writing coach can help writers interrogate their own positionality in relation to place. Who is speaking? For whom? And with what knowledge, humility, or intent? These are not questions to answer once but to keep asking throughout the writing process.

II. The Romantic Traveler

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the travel narrative had begun to absorb the aesthetics of Romanticism. Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Darwin, and later, Isabella Bird and Robert Louis Stevenson, brought more introspection into their accounts. They went beyond describing where they had been to explore the ways that being there had changed them.

This turn inward paved the way for a new type of travel writing that is equal parts memoir, cultural critique, and philosophy. In the modern travel essay, the destination becomes secondary to the transformation the journey brings about.

Yet this inward turn also poses its own challenges. How does a writer strike the balance between the personal and the observational, the lyrical and the factual, the vulnerable and the self-indulgent? A creative writing coach helps the writer develop the instincts to know when their story serves the reader’s understanding, and when it veers into solipsism. Through manuscript consultations, feedback sessions, and reflective exercises, a coach can teach a writer to build a world around the “I” without being swallowed by it.

III. The 20th Century and The Birth of Mass Tourism

The 20th century saw the democratization of travel, as mass tourism, air travel, and guidebook culture changed how people encountered the world. Travel writing responded in turn, sometimes doubling down on charm and whimsy—as seen in the witty sketches of Paul Theroux or Jan Morris—and sometimes turning toward political engagement. Writers like V.S. Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuściński began to write travel as a way to explore the aftershocks of colonialism, the fault lines of globalization, and the human cost of border-crossings.

By now, the genre had splintered into many forms: travel journalism, adventure memoir, spiritual odyssey, exilic narrative. There was no longer a singular path through the world or a single way to write about it. And this diversity of voices meant that writers had to think carefully about form, audience, tone, and politics.

IV. The 21st Century: Climate, Culture, and Consciousness

Today, travel writing exists in a paradox. Never before has the world been so accessible, yet never has the morality of travel been so fraught. Writers face the urgent question of how to write about place in an era of climate collapse, mass displacement, and cultural commodification. What does it mean to fly across oceans to seek insight—or pleasure—while the carbon footprint of that journey looms large?

Modern travel writers must reckon with this. The genre is undergoing a moral and philosophical reconfiguration, and the best writing now wrestles openly with this tension. Whether the writer is trekking across disappearing glaciers or documenting ancestral return journeys, the act of travel is no longer neutral. Nor should it be.

A good creative writing coach helps the travel writer lean into this complexity. Not to flatten it into easy guilt or defensive justification, but to explore it honestly. Coaches can offer prompts that help writers address their own complicity. They can challenge vague language and encourage grounded, specific observation. They can offer frameworks for research, cultural sensitivity, and ethical self-awareness.

V. The Travel Writer as Witness, Not Tourist

The future of travel writing, then, may depend less on the novelty of the place and more on the clarity of the gaze. The travel writer is no longer a discoverer, if they ever were—but they can still be a witness. A good witness listens more than they speak, notices what others overlook, and acknowledges their limits.

Creative writing coaches are uniquely positioned to cultivate this witness mindset. They act as both readers and mirrors, helping the writer see what’s really on the page—and what’s missing. They guide not only the arc of the story, but the ethical stance of the storyteller. In a genre defined by movement, a coach helps the writer stay grounded, both in the arc of a travel narrative and in the writer’s approach to its ethics. Travel writing has never been just about the world “out there.” It has always been, in one way or another, a record of the world inside the writer.