[I wrote this after attending the 2009 Tucson Festival of Books, where I attended a session with two travel writers.]

Rolf Potts and Tom Miller talked about travel writing to a lecture theater packed with Tucsonans last weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books. The secret of success, they said, may be over a volleyball net.

When traveler and writer Rolf Potts describes his career arc, it is enough to make other travel writers at least roll their eyes, if not go somewhere quiet and lie down until the nausea passes. Talented, yes, but more boldly adventurous and self assured than the bookish crew writers usually are, he got his start by selling an article to Salon. For those of you who are principally readers rather than writers–let me explain. That’s a sale that most travel writers spend years aspiring to.

The secret to his success? After this auspicious beginning, he put himself in interesting places, practiced persistence, worked hard, and  persuaded Salon to assign him a regular column and from that point on major magazines like Esquire, New York Times Magazine and National Geographic Traveler came calling. Nowadays, it may not be unlawful to publish a “Best of” book about travel writing without Potts, but it is highly unlikely.

Potts teaches travel writing in Paris (more rolled eyes and murmurs of “tough life”) and says the main message is that it is what you throw out, more than what you decide to use, that makes a good story.  That, and developing the knack of selecting the telling detail of a culture, build a riveting tale. His first book, Vagabonding is a how-to book for taking off from “normal” life and traveling around the world wherever whim takes you. He describes his work as “postmodern” in the opening of his latest book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There tacks meta endnotes–a postmodern term if there ever was one–on each chapter to tell us behind the scene information about what was left out and why or to further explain what was left in.

He  observes  that he looks for the intersection between the news (mostly bad stuff) and traditional travel writing (mostly romanticized stuff). He wants to describe the texture of life between these two polls. Being open to participating in the life around you helps. Once in Thailand, some villagers invited him to join a volleyball game–not out of diplomacy or , but because he was by far the tallest person in the region. His hosts quickly became disheartened when they learned that he could not play a good game of volleyball, despite being tall and blond.

Rolf Potts was speaking in a session along with Tucson resident Tom Miller, no slouch himself at landing good writing contracts.  But the irony is that Miller discussed the time in South America when his car was stopped and he was invited to join a volleyball game. At one point the game stopped, one of the team members pulled over a car on the highway, extracted a bribe, came back and resumed the game. We will talk about Miller and his Southwest and Mexico travels soon, focusing on  Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, which I am currently reading.

Now I know why I am not a famous travel writer. I am not tall, and no one ever invited me to play volleyball in a third-world country.