Common Mistakes Travelers Make When Writing About Local People—and How to Avoid Them
You come home with a notebook full of faces and no idea what to do with them. There is the woman at the bus stop who shared her umbrella, the boy who corrected your pronunciation for twenty minutes, the fishmonger who refused to sell you the wrong fish. In the moment, these encounters feel enormous. On the page, they have a habit of collapsing into three sentences and a sunset.
Most travel writing about local people fails for a boring reason: we reach for the nearest available language. The postcard, the documentary, or the charity appeal. All three are easy to write, and all three erase the person you actually met. What follows are the mistakes that turn up most often in drafts, and what to do instead — not to make your writing more cautious, but to make it more accurate. Accuracy, it turns out, is where the warmth lives.
The village is not a backdrop
The most common problem is grammatical before it is moral. Look at this sentence: We wandered through the lanes as children played in the dust and women hung washing from the balconies. Nobody in it is doing anything except us. The children and the women are scenery with pulses, placed there to make our walk feel meaningful.
The fix is simple to describe and hard to do consistently: give the people in your piece a verb that has nothing to do with you. Not "a woman smiled at us as we passed", but "Rosa runs the till at the co-operative and is furious about the new road". One test will catch most of it. If you delete yourself from the paragraph, does the scene still exist? If it doesn't, you have written about yourself wearing a village as a costume.
"The locals" is not a character
An article can say "the locals" two or three times without harm. A whole piece built from the phrase means you didn't ask anyone anything. Nobody in a town thinks of themselves as a local; they think of themselves as the person who fixes the church roof, or the one who refuses to speak to their brother-in-law.
So name people, with their permission, and give them a job, an opinion, a specific complaint. The fishmonger who thinks the new pier is a waste of money is worth ten paragraphs of "friendly locals". Specificity does not mean overclaiming, though. One fisherman's view is one fisherman's view, not "the fishermen think". Say whose opinion it is. That isn't hedging — it's the difference between a source and a stereotype.
Turning ordinary life into theatre
Exoticizing rarely announces itself as exoticizing. It arrives dressed as admiration. A Sunday church service becomes "an ancient ritual". A town with fibre broadband and a supermarket becomes "timeless". "The women in traditional dress" is usually a sentence about people wearing what they wear. "Untouched by tourism" describes a place that has sat on a trade route for eight hundred years.
The remedy is to describe the modern and the boring alongside the beautiful. The phone face-down on the table. The motorbike leaning against the wall. The kid in a football shirt, the television in the corner, the laminated menu. Detail that includes concrete and television is more respectful than detail that freezes a place in the eighteenth century — and it makes better reading, because it is surprising where the postcard is not.
Hardship stories and hero stories are the same flattening
There is a version of respect that turns people into saints. The wise grandmother, the smiling child who has nothing but is happy anyway, the family who "have so little, yet give so much". Every one of those sentences is about the writer's feelings. The person in them has been hired to teach you something about gratitude, and they never agreed to the job.
If you write about someone's material circumstances, be exact and be careful. Describe what you actually saw and what you were told, and let it stay complicated: the house is small and the sons have moved away and the roof leaks and there is a good stereo in the corner. And let people be unremarkable. Tired, funny, wrong, bored, mildly rude, bored of you. If every person in your piece is warm, wise and poor, you weren't paying attention.
The words that do the damage
Individual adjectives carry a lot of the weight here. Watch for these in your own drafts:
- Shy. Often means "didn't want to talk to a stranger with a notebook". Try describing what happened instead: she answered in one word and went back to the accounts.
- Simple, humble. Almost always condescending, even when it isn't meant that way. Say what the person did.
- Genuine, real. Real as opposed to what, and for whom? These words mark the writer's nostalgia, not the place.
- Ancient, timeless. Fine for a building, suspicious for a person. Nobody lives in "timeless" conditions.
- Colourful. Usually a way of not describing anyone.
- Always, every morning. Lifts one observation into an eternal truth. "Every morning the women gather at the well" is a claim you cannot support from one Tuesday.
- My guide, my driver, my host family. Possessives that turn people into equipment. Use a name and a skill.
- The passive voice. "We were invited to dinner." By whom? Passive constructions quietly remove the person who did the thing.
Consent, and the things you don't publish
Ask before you photograph people, and especially before you photograph anyone working or any child; if a child is the subject, ask a parent or guardian. Explain, briefly, where the pictures will go. People are entitled to say no, and to change their mind afterwards, and a no should not appear in your text as a charming detail about "shyness".
Names are a separate decision. Some people are delighted to be identified. Others might face consequences at home or at work for what they said about the mayor. Offer the choice, and use a first name only, or a changed name, when the answer is uncertain.
When you quote someone, keep their words and cut your own fluency out of them. Don't transcribe an accent for comic effect, and don't tidy their English until it sounds like yours — but don't leave in errors you'd never leave in your own writing either. If someone tells you something in confidence, treat it as off the record until you've asked, and ask again months later before publishing. Some things said at a kitchen table were said at a kitchen table.
Five fixes you can make this afternoon
- Count the sentences in which your subject is the grammatical subject — the one doing the verb. If it's fewer than half, restructure.
- Write down three concrete details about the person that have nothing to do with appearance: a habit, an objection, a piece of expertise.
- Check every generalisation for its source. "The village distrusts the council" becomes "Marta, who has run the shop for eleven years, thinks the council has done nothing since the flood."
- Remove yourself from two paragraphs entirely. Let the scene stand without your reaction attached to it.
- Note the money. Who paid for what, who earned from your visit, who didn't. Travel writing often leaves this out, and its absence is loud.
Before you publish
Read the piece once looking only for the people in it. Are they named? Do they do things that aren't about you? Do they contradict themselves, get annoyed, know something you don't? Is there one description that could only apply to this person and no one else on earth?
If a paragraph could be moved to another country with the names changed and still make sense, it isn't about anyone yet. Go back to your notes. The umbrella, the pronunciation lesson, the wrong fish — the material is usually already there, waiting to be looked at properly rather than admired.
