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New Writing

Travellers' tales

Guest editor Sara Wheeler introduces her pick of poetry and prose in Issue 31 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2006

Travel writing has always seemed to me the perfect literary vehicle – a jet-fast Porsche with zero carbon emissions. Within the reassuring structure of the physical journey, the travel writer can ventilate an idea, explore a problem, ponder a conundrum. But my own experience of reading and writing travel literature for 20 years has shown me how difficult it can be to pull off.

Many these days like to announce the death of travel writing (‘All the journeys have been done!’). But I was delighted to read so many interesting Travellers’ Tales from Mslexia readers, and to see that the genre is far from dead. What an intrepid lot you are. I enjoyed the selection procedure very much, and I learnt a good deal. But the single most significant factor determining success or failure in a piece reinforced what I already knew. More about this later. First, I will say a few words about the submissions reproduced in this month’s issue.

‘The Lottery of Lava Falls,’ which tops my selection, illustrates the advantages and benefits of choosing to write about one specific incident rather than a whole journey. In her description of a whitewater rafting ride on the Colorado River, the author sustains the narrative drive and keeps up the tension, encapsulating (or so it seemed to me) the thrills, fears and expectations of a whole trip within a single episode. Very nicely done.

In my second prose choice, ‘India Healed my Broken Heart,’ Mary Lowe admits in the opening paragraph that she decided to travel, and to write, to get over a broken heart. This was a popular theme in the submissions pile, and Lowe shows how it can work. I thought her introduction was especially strong, and she kept up the energy with dabs of humour. Who can forget the image of a gaggle of lepers crooning ‘Don’t You Want me Baby,’ reading the lyrics phonetically from Lowe’s hand-written autocue? I make no apologies for selecting two leper pieces in my top four. Throughout ‘St Anne’s Leprosarium,’ Lucy Hewitt adroitly reveals how detail can work brilliantly for the travel writer (for any writer, come to that), and how a judicious selection of detail can give a snapshot impression of a whole life. To illustrate the suffocating existence from which her companion Emma has escaped, Hewitt cites a parental rule ‘forbidding mugs in the living room.’ One needs to know nothing else about this family.

Many women who sent in pieces chose The Personal Quest as their theme – a search for their past, or for a specific relative. Jill Sharp’s ‘Titanic Park’ was the best. In her chilly trip to Belfast with her mother and aunt, Sharp brings wartime Northern Ireland to life through the older women’s memories. I liked the way she used recurrent food motifs (in general, I am very keen on descriptions of meals, though this might just be because I am greedy).

Poems are more difficult to select. Their meaning, by definition, is more compressed (or should be . . .). I chose ‘Watching You Go’ at the top of my poetry list to show what a plastic genre ‘travel writing’ can be. Nobody goes anywhere in this moving poem, yet it says much about the impulse to travel, and indeed about the treacherous terrain of the inner landscape. In my second poem, ‘Portal Dolmen,’ Anne Connolly captures a single moment, and in 12 short lines conveys a whole world of emotion. Note how Connolly has inverted a phrase in the first line to end her poem. In prose too, it often works when the writer brings us back to the beginning at the end.

I liked ‘Panda’ partly for personal reasons – I used to be a porker myself, so I understand the painful feelings described here. I admired too the way the writer took a stereotypical image of China – the panda – and subverted it. ‘My Life in Souvenirs’ is another poem built around a strong, single central theme. It shows how travel writing can be retrospective – indeed I think much of the best of it is. ‘The Gloved Composer’ is a lovely poem freighted with mystery and sexual tension (don’t you get the impression it wasn’t just the gloves she wanted to peel off?). Imagery is important in prose but in poetry it is vital, and Allison McVety has worked hard to match hers with the mood she wishes to convey. Finally, some verses about bathos – when things turn out to be the opposite of what one expected or hoped. ‘Hollywood Hoax’ is an amusing little poem and I include it because of its clever handling of the theme.

Most submissions not chosen failed because they read like journals. They were inconsequential. This sounds like a harsh judgement, but it is one that I make time and again when I teach travel writing courses. This is the ‘single most significant factor’ I referred to at the beginning. It is narrative thread. There must be a pattern in the carpet. A good travel article – or a good travel book – has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it is about something other than ‘travel.’ You have to transform your experiences if you want a piece to succeed – you have to work on your material to give it shape and meaning that everyday life, on the road or off it, simply does not have. Too many writers who entered this time had failed to ask themselves the central question, ‘What do I want to write about?’ In many of the stories and poems I read, not enough happened. In others, the emotional content was overly self-indulgent. Beware!

What advice can I offer from my own experience? I have spent years trying to make chunks of prose work (with varying degrees of success, alas). But I have learnt a few things. One can certainly help oneself with a writer’s tool kit. The use of dialogue, for example. Direct speech can bring a static passage to life or invest the prose with emotional nuance – if a section isn’t working, try inserting a few lines of direct speech (not whole pages, please). ‘The Lottery of Lava Falls,’ reproduced here, is a good example of the efficacy of dialogue. Other traditional tools of the novelist that also work for the travel writer include characterisation. Recurrent characters provide a useful sense of structure and a kind of bogus unity, as do recurrent motifs. Above all, and I would hope obviously, I want to stress the importance of vivid sketching of scene. Just saying things are wonderful doesn’t make them so to the reader. When you want to conjure a place, think about what it looks like; what it smells like; its sound, feel and taste – but don’t whack all five into one short paragraph. Three is enough. (I find that three does the job in lists of all kinds.) Aim to be impressionistic rather than authoritative.

Equally vital is the never-ending war against cliché. Never again do I wish to read the dread phrase ‘city of contrasts,’ nor the moniker, ‘where east meets west.’ You must trawl every sentence for clichés, and not just once. ‘Snow-capped mountains’ are rather tiresome these days, as are lunar landscapes, beaches like a Bounty-bar advertisement and talcum-powder sand. Similarly, avoid those wearisome adjectives of magnitude: big, great, vast, huge, tremendous, gigantic. These are nothing but emotive noises inviting the reader to do all the work.

Three more points. I would advise anyone to read their work aloud. Bruce Chatwin used to recite every sentence, to test its rhythm and ease of comprehension (perhaps that’s why he used so few subordinate clauses). Don’t underestimate the importance of first lines. Remember the opening of Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent (still his best book, in my view)? It goes, ‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.’ My final suggestion to assist aspiring writers with the process of composition is that you read, read, read. Search for clues; work out what distinguishes a good book or travel story from a weak one. Tease out themes; note down successful devices; circle clichés. I still do this.

Travelling is so very much easier than writing, that I don’t think many readers need guidance on that part of the process – not if your stories and poems are anything to go by. I will mention only two of the things I have learnt over the decades. One, write EVERTHING down in your notebook on the day it happens. You think you will remember the salient detail, but you won’t. Two, when you’re on the ground, talk to people. In Ninety-Two Days, his book about Guyana and Brazil, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘Most of my information came casually from conversation in the hotel bar; indeed so much of one’s help comes in that way I wonder how teetotallers ever get about at all.’ Indeed.

SARA WHEELER’s books include the bestselling Terra Incognita: Travels In Antarctica. She chronicled the story of a six-month journey through Chile, Travels in a Thin Country, shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year award and currently in its 13th printing. She has also written biographies of the explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard and of Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s lover immortalised by Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa. This last book, Too Close to the Sun, appeared in hardback this year and will be published as a Vintage paperback in March 2007. Sara also co-edited Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women’s New Travel Writing. She lives in London, and serves as a trustee of the London Library.

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A good travel article – or a good travel book – has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it is about something other than ‘travel'.

SARA WHEELER