Modern Travel Writing

Surfing Dolphins

In Search of Wonders: the elusive art of the modern day travel writer
BY RORY MacLEAN

Take a deep breath, I tell myself. Be calm. Don't fret, just 'let the phenomena occur'. For a month now I've been pacing the floor, lying under my desk, trying to decide what book to write next. I'm juggling countries and ideas; Peru or Portugal, healing or hedonism, love story or road romp. My editor says that Latin America doesn't sell. A friend at the BBC predicts that Armenia will be in the news next year. 'You MUST go to Newfoundland,' insists a retired fishing net salesman I meet on a train. I lose sleep. Drink too much. Go on the wagon. California replaces Peru. I drop Portugal. I toy with notions of fantasy and ideal societies. I try to keep as many balls as possible in the air. I try to listen to myself.

This will be my seventh book. The first three were written from the heart; Stalin's Nose for my uncle, The Oatmeal Ark to understand my father and Under the Dragon for Burma. It may sound romantic, but it's the only way that I can motivate myself through two or three years' scribbling. Likewise my fifth book which I wrote to come to terms with the death of my mother. Falling for Icarus is at once a meditation on love and a portrait of a small Greek village. All my books interweave fact and fiction to reach – in a personal and individual way – for greater honesty.

So relax, I tell myself. This is how to begin. Be calm and juggle. All I need to do is pair emotion and curiosity, seize the skeleton of a plot, then settle on the country and let the journey propel me. Story first. Or character. Destination next. In that order. I travel in search of the story that I want to tell.

Time was that travel books were all about travelling. Travel writers embarked on valiant quests full of derring-do, paddling to the source of the Limpopo in search of original knowledge. Then the world shrunk. Day-trippers trampled the wilderness, pausing to picnic in Newby's Hindu Kush. In once-distant China the Great Leap Forward no longer describes Mao's economic programme, but rather the surge of tourists rushing to touch the Great Wall. Bruce Chatwin's isolated Patagonia is now a holiday home for George Soros and the Benettons. According to the Financial Times, 20% of 'wilderness' holidaymakers check their e-mail during a week away. Bhutan is on-line and TV travel programmes make the foreign familiar. So how does the modern travel writer return home with anything more original than an unusual intestinal parasite?

'Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead,' writes Jonathan Raban, 'that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they miss the brute differences in everything of importance.'

Today it is no longer enough to travel across a country, rather one must travel into it. Into its society. The travel writer becomes less a geographer of place, more of the human heart. The 'original knowledge' that he or she brings home is a collection of subjective impressions.

'Travel writing,' says Colin Thubron, 'is one culture reporting on another. Its history, more than most, betrays that objectivity is a chimera.' He adds that uniquely in literature, outside autobiography, the travel writer acknowledges his subjectivity. I revel in that partiality. It gives me the freedom to imagine. Once I manage to stop worrying.

So here I lie under my desk, juggling fancies, awaiting inspiration. Any time now the balls will fall into line and the sweeping arc of a rainbow will appear above Knighton Hill. Or it'll be lunch time. Some time soon story and destination will merge, I'll hop on a plane and go. I'll travel lightly, so as to be able to recognize things of value in the arbitrary. I'll not have many contacts, only one or two. Nor an itinerary which would disrupt the natural flow of the journey. A fixed itinerary, with a meeting in Bogota on Monday, and a second in Papayán on Thursday, hinders the evolution of a journey. It's not theory that drives me forward, but events, curiosity, intuition. My books come together when things don't go as I'd planned, or, at least, when I let accidents happen.

Which means, as I meet people, my story will change. I'll trust strangers, watch the sky, follow my nose and make a lot of notes. In eastern Europe I acquired a reputation for having a weak bladder. In the midst of heated conversations, my memory saturated, I'd charge off to the loo to scribble down their dialogue.

My journey will last about three months. Any longer and wide-eyed enthusiasm pales. Familiarity blunts attentiveness. Then, back home, I distil. I combine. I invent. The journey - and the people whose lives I've shared - anchors me. I lie on the floor again. I eat too many chocolate Hobnob cookies then swear off white sugar. 'The truth is not the facts,' according to Robert Altman. I try to create an honest composite of the actual encounters. The result is subjective, less documentary, but - I hope - more true.

Travel writers seek out wonders. That's our job. Always has been. Always will be. For me that wonder is in ordinary men and women who are separated by borders, politics, emigration, even time and death. Through my books I try to draw together their - and our - divided worlds. My objective is to enable a reader to understand a society and to empathise with its people through stories. To make a country and its history accessible.

Before the invention of photography, painters sought to make images that imitated the appearance of the world. Similarly before the globe was mapped, it was the responsibility of explorers and travellers to document facts. With the introduction of the camera, painting as a realistic form of expression fell from favour. In the same manner mass travel and television documentaries are now freeing the travel writer from the need to detail external realities. The duty of today's travel writer is to provide a new way of seeing and understanding the world. At least, that's how it seems to me from under my desk, still tossing around ideas and destinations. Fret. Juggle. Go

Link

Advice for Prospective Travel Writers

Travel Writer with Machine Gun

Here's the basics for anyone who wishes to be a succesful travel writer.

Good travel writing is done by good writers who travel. It is not enough to have swum through piranha-infested waters to the source of the Amazon. You must be able to write well to convey that experience. When you have learned the craft of writing, you can make a stroll through your own suburban neighborhood seem interesting, even exciting. Good travel writing needs much the same ingredients as any good story -- narrative, drive, characters, dialogue, atmosphere, revelation. Make it personal. Let the reader know how the place and the experience are affecting you.

"Good travel writing is just good writing. It must have literary merit. The most important journey you will make as a travel writer is the journey of a good sentence. Without that, you close encounter with the piranhas is wasted.

"Bad travel writing is done by travelers, often good travelers, who mistakenly believe they can write. There seems to be an awful lot of them about. Their prose is littered with clichés, their sense of narrative timing is inept and their characters, whether themselves or people they encounter, are clumsily portrayed. Too many travel writers seem to believe that the journey 'makes' the story. It doesn't. In the end, anyone can travel to Timbuktu, but only a few people will write about the journey well."

--Stanley Stewart, in Don George's Travel Writing (2005)

Rolf Potts, Stanley Stewart, Don George

The Demise of Rand McNally Bookstores

Thailand Handbook

Get Lost bookstore newsletter
July, 2005
A Tale of Two Closings

Rand McNally closed its San Francisco store last
week. The word is that they are closing all their
stores, and that the San Francisco location was
one of the last. On its website, Rand McNally
lists only one store, in Houston. Due to a number
of acquisitions, including Thomas Brothers maps,
Rand McNally controls a sizeable percentage of
the US cartography market. However, Rand McNally
filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in February
2003. A private equity firm took a controlling
interest in the company. Stores began closing,
and the pickings in the remaining locations grew
slim. I’m guessing they will now concentrate on
cartography, especially considering how newer
companies like Mapquest are licensing their own
products to other map companies. (Check out the
United States road atlases of National
Geographic, Michelin and American Map and thank
Mapquest for the cartography.)

I must admit I didn’t feel all that disappointed
when Rand McNally closed. I did feel a sense of
loss, however, when Easy Going, a Berkeley travel
shop, closed earlier this year. Easy Going was a
real mom-and-pop store that will be sorely
missed. Even as its shelves began to thin, they
still continued to host excellent in-store
events. Members of the community briefly rallied
to raise money (or purchase shares, I am not
certain which) to prevent the closure. But, in
the end, it did close. Easy Going, like other
locally owned independent bookstores, took
chances on quirky titles. Like Get Lost, they
carried small or self-published presses,
sometimes on consignment.

On the subject of locally owned, Dan Houston, a
partner in Civic Economics, has done studies
showing that local merchants contribute more than
three times as much economic value back to the
community than do chain stores. (Read an
interview at:

http://mail1.icptrack.com/trac­k/relay.php?r=849243958&msgid=­708610&ac

http://news.bookweb.org/news/3­094.html

or, read one of the reports at

http://mail1.icptrack.com/trac­k/relay.php?r=849243958&msgid=­708610&ac

http://www.civiceconomics.com/­Andersonville/AndersonvilleStu­dy.pdf

This contribution may well be augmented in the
case of locally owned bookstores, which are more
likely to support local or micro presses. Rand
McNally is headquartered in Skokie, Illinois. It
is hard to create a sense of community when
headquarters does your book buying. As I
understand it, the San Francisco store did manage
to carry the Rough Guides, an exception allowed
no other branch store.

When corporate headquarters doesn’t deem it necessary,
(that is,
profitable enough) to stock a quality series of
travel books like the Rough Guides, it probably
won’t carry wonderful, small presses like Garrett
County Press (out of New Orleans), Stone Bridge
Press (out of Berkeley), art-Sites Press (out of
San Francisco) Bored Feet Press (out of
Mendocino) or the self-published Time Off! The
Unemployed Guide to San Francisco, by two San
Francisco authors. I hope this hasn’t sounded
like a lesson in civics. I will miss Easy Going.
I will miss Rand McNally less.

While I am on the subject of local and
independent, get ready for Books by the Bay,
sponsored by the Northern California Independent
Booksellers Association (NCIBA), of which Get
Lost is a proud member. Read our events section
below for details.

Lee Azus
Get Lost Travel Books