I return to Prague in a few weeks to update the Fodor's guidebook to the
Czech Republic again, and I must say that I'm looking forward to it. On
the surface, guidebook writing is kind of horrible. It's very
repetitive and there are lots of capsule reviews where you don't get to
say anything. Oh, and you're also quite limited by the "intended
audience" of the book in question, whether they're middle of the road,
jetsetting hipsters, or smug backpackers. Plus, of course, the pay isn't
great.
Still, I like guidebook work, at least for a few weeks a
year. You get more than a surface impression of a place. It's less than
you'd learn as a resident, but that's also the point--guidebooks, for
the most part, shouldn't be fully written by residents, since their view
of a city tends to come with a set of assumptions that visitors don't
have. (I say that as someone who had to answer questions about the
safety of New York's subways for many, many years)
There's a zen
quality to seeing that many hotels or restaurants in just a short amount
of time. In fact, one would hope that a newly hired restaurant critic
would do the same thing, sending him or herself to a restaurant
boot-camp to get snapshot of how things are at the moment. Places slip
very fast; I'm sure that in the two years since I last updated the
restaurants some have closed, others that were great are now terrible
and, I hope, there will be plenty of surprising new spots as well.
Restaurants (and hotels) never stay as they are; it's a new day, every
day. Just look at the Gansevoort or The Hotel on Rivington to see that
something that seemed edgy a few years ago now feels dated.
Guidebook
assignments are just about the last part of travel writing that creates
a level of expertise. You do end up learning something during the
writing process, and that's less and less the case these days. The
economics of freelancing make it very hard to spend time with any
subject unless you're Michael Lewis or Mark Bowden. There will come a
time when guidebooks don't make sense in their current form. Perhaps
there will be a full-on switch to crowd-sourcing; I don't know. But for
the time being, let's try and support a genre of travel writing that
forces the writer to learn something in the process.