The Travel Horror Story

My live-tweet storytelling takes readers on a journey through the worst travel day I ever had – and don’t just take it from me, the lady next to me who had been travelling for 30 years agreed.

I lived in Turkey at the time and was just trying to visit my dad in Helsinki for a nice trip and the airline said ‘lol, bet’.

In all seriousness, it took me over 26 hours to get from my apartment in Ankara to a hotel room in Istanbul (a mere one-hour flight) with roller coaster turns along the way. Interested? Check it out here:

Storytelling Principles Used

I used various different writing techniques to help keep my writing suspenseful for this story.
1. This story was told entirely from my point of view. I had no clue when the number of lines would end or when I would get out there. Readers also experienced this as I did
2. I used different style and form, some portions where I make exclamations like ‘I was DONE’ helps get across the frustration and strain of the whole incident without getting to descriptive. The formatting and capitalization did that work for me
3. I left a number of my tweets on a mini ‘cliff hanger’ that encouraged readers to go to the next part to figure out just how the story could have gotten worse.

I also used some common themes of my experience to help tell the story better, including relatability (I’m sure we all have a horrible travel story in some capacity), emotion and authenticity. This is how I would have told the story verbally to someone sitting next to me.

I also tried to include paragraph breaks at the end of sentences to keep the content uncluttered and more appealing to read.

Overall this experience was horrible, especially considering I was a pretty new traveler at the time. But, I got through it and I hope you will too! Thanks 🙂