Lucas Peters is an award-winning writer, photographer, and travel expert. His extensive portfolio includes hundreds of travel articles, radio interviews, and podcasts.
Author and Photographer
As the author and principal photographer of various travel books published by Moon Travel Guides (Hachette Book Group), Lucas has produced titles such as Moon Morocco, Moon Grand European Journeys, Moon Seville, Granada, and Andalusia, and Marrakesh & Beyond.
Journey Beyond Travel
Additionally, he is the owner and managing director of Journey Beyond Travel, a boutique travel company.
Peters lives in Tangier with his wife and two kids.
Morocco with Lucas Peters
Early Influences and Career Beginnings
When Peters was a kid, his parents took his sister and him on quite a few road trips around the US to camp out and hike in the national parks, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he began traveling internationally. That year he spent the winter and early spring in London doing a study abroad. He was studying English Literature at the University of Washington.
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They had a class that met once a week at different corners of London for a walking tour with a local professor who knew all of the vagaries of British history. Peters kept a travel journal for this class and were encouraged to not only write, but sketch as best he could what they saw. Since about third grade he’s always been writing it seems, making stories or jotting down notes in a journal of one sort or another. There have been ebbs and flows, periods of more creativity or output and periods of slumber (or rather, outright hibernation if he is being more honest)… but he always had a habit of coming back to writing.
It wasn’t until he was approaching his 30th birthday that he realized people besides maybe Stephen King could actually could make money writing. This was about the age he started becoming serious about writing for an audience, which he thinks is quite a distinction, at least in his case.
Ploughshares, one of these journals, and an incredibly well-respected one at that, announced that they were running a “Literary Boroughs” series and were looking for writers to submit content for their cities or towns as “literary boroughs.” He wrote a piece that was a mix of Asilah and Tangier in Morocco. The editors ended up preferring that it be a singular location and they went with Asilah.
The Authenticity Challenge
The thing is, almost everyone has an angle or a motivation for telling you what you want to hear or what they think your audience might want to hear. Where Peters produces the most writing (Morocco), this is a particular issue as people take for fact what they have been told by someone they trust. Like this, a lot of non-factual miscellany is passed as truth, from guide to guide, merchant to merchant, and so on. It doesn’t help that in Morocco, people love telling stories of varying degrees of truthiness.
Balancing Research and Editorial Decisions
Knowing when to say “enough is enough.” Peters tend to do dive into a place and do a lot of slow travel. Whether it’s to meet a deadline or make time for his family, he finds himself having to reign in his natural penchant to linger in a place. And after the research is done, it can sometimes be difficult for him to make hard editorial decisions - cutting to the heart of the thing and removing what does not add to the story or purpose.
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Evolving Challenges and Rewards
It seems like every age brings a new challenge. A decade ago my biggest challenge would have been finding an outlet that would pay me for my work. As he has evolved into working his travel writing into a travel company, Journey Beyond Travel, this is (thankfully!) less of a problem. This sort of evolution follows the path of guidebook guru and travel man extraordinaire Rick Steves.
Haven’t we all?! My wife always jokes that I’ve done “every job under the sun,” which is an obvious bit of hyperbole, but I have done a lot of work to just get by. From the perhaps more typical, like teaching English overseas, busking, bussing, waiting tables, and bartending, to the more perhaps atypical for a writer, like working demolition, painting houses, and selling Beanie Babies, knives and vacuum cleaners door-to-door.
Literary Influences
This is a really tough question. Peters often think my first “travel book” was The Beach by Alex Garland. It whips by and introduces a whole culture and place so artfully and in a way that makes you want to get out of your chair and go someplace, which is the mark of great travel writing, right? Of course there is this outlandish, fantastical story overlaid, but at its heart in a lot of ways I still think of it as a travel book.
In a similar vein, he would also put some of Hemingway’s work (The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bells Tolls come immediately to mind) and as well as the London of Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down and High Fidelity are what I think of most) and the New York of Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay).
In his earliest days of really writing travel for publication, Peters was geographically focused on Morocco and read Edith Wharton’s On Morocco before heading to Marrakesh for the first time. When he moved to Paris and started writing about his life there, Adam Gopnik’s collection of travel essays, Paris to the Moon, loomed large for him - particularly as his wife and he had their son in Paris and he was lucky enough to live a few of the moments Gopnik describes in his pages.
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Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and My Life in France by Julia Child are two very different books that he learned a lot from while some classics, like Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and A Moveable Feast, by Hemingway (again) were sources of learning craft.
Advice for Aspiring Travel Writers
When Peters signed his first book deal and was working with his editor, she said something in passing that stuck with me: “The thing with good travel writing is that it’s just good writing.” Sometimes I think that is lost a bit with travel writing as a genre. If you don’t love writing first, you won’t enjoy travel writing. It seems obvious, but perhaps not so much?
When you are writing, there is a lot of time spent in solitude just putting words on paper and then later working through edits and everything else, drafting and redrafting, and trying to craft a piece just-so. If you don’t find this process enjoyable - this would be my big warning - you will not find travel writing (or probably any other type of paid writing) fulfilling. Otherwise, if you love writing, well, in that case, the world is your oyster!
From your backyard to the dark side of the moon. The sky is the limit. There is no shortage of content and ideas, and hopefully you find your way in to discover your own corner of the world or the world beyond, but then it is a question of outlets for publication. For my part, I work hard to be a punctual, timely writer that does all the little things - formatting correctly, using spellcheck and grammar check, and turning in the most professional work possible. I also work hard to be flexible with my editors so we can work together to put out the best, most informative, engaging, and entertaining piece of content we can produce.
To that end, depending on where you are at in your own trajectory, you might find something like an MFA program helpful (I know I did!) or any number or writing retreats geared specifically toward travel writing. And, of course, a great writer is nearly always a great reader, so read, read, and read some more!
The Best Reward
It maybe sounds corny, but for Peters the best reward is when he have helped someone out. As fun as it is to travel and as privileged as he is to get to go to some of the places he to go and see and experience some of the things he do, the reason he is a writer is to share these sorts of things so people can get out there and do amazing things too!
It is always so incredibly rewarding when these sorts of pieces he put together hit home and people take the time to reach out and say thank you or put a review on Goodreads or Amazon.
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tags: #Morocco
