SLOW TRAVEL WRITERS: ANNA

About Anna

 

Losing my job in the Travel and Tourism sector, during the Covid shake-down that hung over so many of our heads, was a chance to seize the part of that job that I loved the most – the writing – and to seize the moment to reinvent myself.

It’s hard to be purist about a freelance writing career when there are bills to pay, and that all-important self-belief sometimes comes unexpectedly from others. For me it came from an old school friend who remembered a letter that my 13-year-old self had written to her from Cumbria, describing the sights and sounds of the fells. It came from my first commission, when someone had faith in me, just as I was losing it.

Now I do my best to write for a living. It’s a smaller living, there’s no denying, but a happy and creative one and I love adding photographs to go with the words. I am sometimes asked what I enjoy the most. It’s a good question because I’ve realised that it’s not so much what I write about, but who I write for. I love recognising the way people – and their businesses - want to be portrayed, I love identifying with their clients, being intuitive, relating to people, finding the right words and hitting the nail on the head with my copy.

If I want to write for myself, I can go off-piste and be myself - though there’s always a bit of myself in everything that I write. I think it’s what makes words come to life, and that’s where the Walks on the Quiet Side come in.

​

Somerset
03/12/22