13 pos Writing About Places us The Travel Article Writing About Places: The Travel Article 117 Whatever the proportion, it would seem to be relatively easy. The dismal truth is that it's very hard. It must be hard, because it's produce not only their worst work but work that is just plain ter- in this area that most writers-professional and amateur- rible. The terrible work has nothing to do with some terrible flaw of character. On the contrary, it results from the virtue of enthu- siasm. Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell all about it—and "all" is what we don't want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else's? What can he tell us that we don't already know? We don't want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awe- some Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about. It's natural for all of us when we have gone to a certain place to feel that we are the first people who ever went there or thought such sensitive thoughts about it. Fair enough: it's what keeps us going and validates our experience. Who can visit the Tower of London without musing on the wives of Henry VIII, or visit Egypt and not be moved by the size and antiquity of the pyra- mids? But that is ground already covered by multitudes of peo- ple. As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self--the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells- and keep an objective eye on the reader. The article that records everything you did on your trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate the reader? It won't. The mere agglom- eration of detail is no free pass to the reader's interest. The detail must be significant. The other big trap is style. Nowhere else in nonfiction do writ- ers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes. Adjectives you would squirm to use in conversation-"wondrous," "dappled," “roseate," "fabled," "scudding"--are common currency. Half the sights seen in a day's sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills Next to knowing how to write about people, you should kom how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pile on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happi somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewher was like. In a few cases you'll need only a paragraph or two to sket the setting of an event. But more often you'll need to evoke te mood of a whole neighborhood or town to give texture to ti story you're telling. And in certain cases, such as the travel per itself—that hardy form in which you recall how you took abu through the isles of Greece or went backpacking in the Rockier descriptive detail will be the main substance. US ever read above history-haunted Writing About Places: The Travel Article 119 the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they do useful work. ferent in temperament but alike in the power of the details they I'll give you some examples from various writers, widely dif- choose. The first is from an article by Joan Didion called “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." It's about a lurid crime that oc- curred in the San Bernardino Valley of California, and in this early passage the writer is taking us, as if in her own car, away from urban civilization to the lonely stretch of road where Lucille Miller's Volkswagen so unaccountably caught fire: ON WRITING WELL and covered bridges; they are certified for quaintness. Towns an unnestled town in the hills and the countryside is dottet uated in hills (or foothills) are nestled I hardly with byways, preferably half forgotten. In Europe you awake to the clip-elop of horse-drawn wagons along a river; you seem to hear the scratch of a quill pen. This is a world where old meets new-old never meets old. It's a world where inanimate objects spring to life: storefronts smile, building boast, ruins beckon and the very chimneytops sing their imme morial song of welcome. Travelese is also a style of soft words that under hard exami. nation mean nothing, or that mean different things to different people: "attractive," "charming," "romantic." To write that "the city has its own attractiveness” is no help. And who will define "charm," except the owner of a charm school? Or “romantic"? These are subjective concepts in the eye of the beholder. One man's romantic sunrise is another man's hangover. How can you overcome such fearful odds and write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles-one of style, the other of substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it's probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them. Also resist straining for the luminous lyrical phrase to describe the wondrous waterfall. At best it will make you for fresh words and images. Leave "myriad” and their ilk to the poets. Leave “ilk” to anyone who will take it away. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion; but hard to buy a book. This is the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdresser's school. "We were just crazy kids," they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every 38 lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to the new style. Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive west from San Bernardino out Foothill Boulevard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the Forty Winks Motel. Past the motel that sound artificial-unlike yourself and at worst pompous. Strive As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don't write that “the shore was scattered with rocks” or that “occasionally a seagull flew over.” Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Elimi- nate every such fact that is a known attribute: don't tell us that ON WRITING WELL Writing About Places: The Travel Article 121 120 WAMPUM." Past Fontana Drag City and Fontana Church of the is 19 stucco tepees: “SLEEP IN A WIGWAM-GET MORE FOR YOUR Nazarene and the Pit Stop A Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at the corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means "Forbid. den Seas," the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind. HAL ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS! TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 DOWN." wind It is the trail of an intention gone haywire, the flotsam of the New California. But after a while the signs thin out on Car- streets by which senators and representatives can haul them- selves to work. Over the past couple of years, a succession of could measure velocities up to 200 miles per hour. They did not survive. The taku winds tore them apart after driving their indicators to the end of the scale. The weather is not always so European streets, adhering to its mountainsides and fronting The urge to move the capital came over Harris during those two years in the Alaska State Senate). Sessions began in January and ran on at least three months, and Harris devel- oped what he called a complete sense of isolation-stuck there. People couldn't get at you. You were in a cage. You talked to the hard lobbyists every day. Every day the same peo- ple. What was going on needed more airing." the salt water. ... nelian Avenue, and the houses are no longer the bright pastels of the Springtime Home owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow a few grapes and keep a few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road climbs and even the bungalows are few, and here-desolate, roughly sur- faced, lined with eucalyptus and lemon groves--is Banyan Street. The oddity of the city, so remote from the ordinary American experience, is instantly clear. One possibility for the legislators was to move the capital to Anchorage. There at least people wouldn't feel they were in an alien town. McPhee distills its essence in a paragraph that is adroit both in detail and in metaphor: Coming Into the Country, his book about Alaska-to choose one In only two paragraphs we have a feeling not only for the tack- iness of the New California landscape, with its stucco tepees and instant housing and borrowed Hawaiian romance, but for the pa- thetic impermanence of the lives and pretensions of the people who have alighted there. All the details statistics and names and signs are doing useful work. Concrete detail is also the anchor of John McPhee's prose. example from his many craftsmanlike books-has a section de- voted to the quest for a possible new state capital. It takes with the present capital, both as a place to live and as a place for lawmakers to make good laws: A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind. There are railings along the McPhee only a few sentences to give us a sense of what's wrong Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders. Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift some- thing like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque. 14 133 think." and what you Writing Abo Middle Yourself The Memoir best-their own? Writing About Yourself: The Memoir whatever it is that makes you unique. Write about what you know to see pop out of your papers-is individuality. We're looking for They can't. They don't think they have permission. I think they get that permission by being born. age brings no release. At writers' conferences I meet women whose children have grown up and who now want to sort out their lives through writing. I urge them to write in personal detail about what is closest to them. They protest. "We have to write what editors want, they say. In other words, "We have to write what the teacher wants." Why do they think they need per- mission to write about the experiences and feelings they know Jump still another generation. I have a journalist friend who a lifetime writing honorably, but always out of second- has spent hand sources, explicating other people's events. Over the years I've often heard him mention his father, a minister who took many lonely liberal stands in a conservative Kansas town, and ob- viously that's where my friend got his own strong social con- science. A few years ago I asked him when he was going to start writing about the elements in his life that were really important to him, including his father. One of these days, he said. But the day was always put off. When he turned 65 I began to pester him. I sent him some memoirs that had moved me, and finally he agreed to spend his mornings writing in that retrospective vein. Now he can hardly believe what a liberating journey he is embarked on: how much he is discovering about his father that he never understood, and about his own life. But when he describes his journey he always says, “I never had the nerve before," or "I was always afraid to try." In other words, “I didn't think I had permission." Why not? Wasn't America the land of the "rugged individual- ist"? Let's get that lost land and those lost individualists back. If you're a writing teacher, make your students believe in the validity Of all the subjects available to you as a writer, the one you know best is yourself : your past and your present, your thoughts and your emotions. Yet it's probably the subject you try hardest to avoid Whenever I'm invited to visit a writing class in a school or a college, the first thing I ask the students is: “What are your prob- lems? What are your concerns?” Their answer, from Maine to California, is the same: "We have to write what the teacher "That's the last thing any good teacher wants," I tell them. “No wants." It's a depressing sentence. about the same topic. What we're all looking for what we want country reacht of their lives. If you're a writer, give yourself permission to Writing About Yourself: The Memoir 135 who you are. tience with sloppy workmanship---the let-it-all-hang-out By permission" I don't mean permissive." I have me and humor and unexpectedness of life. The books I remember to the roots of personal experience to all the drama and pain biage of the '60s. To have a decent career in this t vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: tion of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please. In books such as André Aciman's Out of Egypt, Michael J. Arlen's Exiles, Russell Baker's Growing Up, Vivian Gornick's Fierce At- consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you'll end tachments, Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Moss Hart's Act One, writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you'll John Houseman's Run-Through, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, people you want to write for Writing about one's life is naturally related to how long Memory, V. S. Pritchett's A Cab at the Door, Eudora Welty's One has lived. When students say they have to write what the teache Writer's Beginnings, Leonard Woolf's Growing, What gives them their power is the narrowness of their focus. wants, what they often mean is that they don't have anything Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir as- say---so meager is their after-school existence, bounded largell sumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us television and the mall, two artificial versions of reality. Still 4 back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually any age, the physical act of writing is a powerful search mecha intense-childhood, for instance--or that was framed by war or nism. I'm often amazed, dipping into my past, to find some for some other social upheaval. Baker's Growing Up is a box within a gotten incident clicking into place just when I need it. You box. It's the story of a boy growing up, set inside the story of a memory is almost always good for material when your other welk family battered by the Depression; it takes its strength from its go dry. historical context. Nabokov's Speak, Memory, the most elegant memoir I know, invokes a golden boyhood in czarist St. Peters- Permission, however, is a two-edged instrument, and nobody burg, a world of private tutors and summer houses that the Russ- should use it without posting a surgeon generals warning: EXCES SIVE WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO THE ian Revolution would end forever. It's an act of writing frozen in a HEALTH OF THE WRITER AND THE READER. A thin line separates unique time and place. Pritchett's A Cab at the Door recalls a childhood that was almost Dickensian; his grim apprenticeship to no writer can go far without it the London leather trade seems to belong to the 19th century. Yet Pritchett describes it without self-pity and even with a certain license to prattle just for therapy. Again, the rule I suggest is Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful merriment. We see that his childhood was inseparably joined to the particular moment and country and class he was born into- work. Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and and was an organic part of the wonderful writer he grew up to be. anecdotes, ideas, emotions--are moving your story steadily Think narrow, then, when you try the form. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a pho- tograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and body's memoir. For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply me to memoir as a form. I'll read almost any even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction. Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in ego from egotism. Ego is healthy; Egotism, however , is a drag, and this chapter is not intended as events along
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