Travel Writing or Writing about Travel

Travel, whether it is your own or the kinds of travel you read about in magazines and journals, has always represented incipient adventure for you, destinations of places you longed to see for the first time or places you'd want to revisit because of previous pleasant experiences.

There is the freeing sense of leaving a place behind, either for good or for considerable time, perhaps even leaving old habits or arrangements at a distance.  Travel also brings with it the tingle of uncertainty and anticipation.  Will the destination be as you hoped?  Will you in effect find some or any of the things you'd undertaken travel to discover in the first place?

Your experience with travel also includes the kinds of reading you found in novels rather than the travel articles of newspapers or magazines.  These destinations were undertaken in a feeling most sympathetic to Ishmael, who knew a thing or two about travel when he experienced those moments so well presented by William Wordsworth and his observation:  "The world is too much with us--"

You wanted to get away from things you were more likely to find boring, rather than Ishmael's greater tendency to depression.  Although there were times you might have welcomed an encounter with the likes of Captain Ahab, you did well enough with your encounters involving eccentrics, so much so that, like it or not at the time of encountering the eccentrics, you're aware that your fiction, indeed, any fiction, comes to life for you only if the individual you meet burrow into your awareness, to come out on request, as fully formed and passionate near-lunatics.

As a traveler, you've pretty much reached the stage where you wear everything you packed, doing so without the need to buy something you already have enough of at home and neglected to include this time.  

For some years, your travel mate, your late wife, had her own plan for travel packing.  Her approach, markedly different than yours, added a note of adventure to your travels together, she packing for every contingency, but wearing almost none of it.  

A travel venture of a week or more involves some approach to baggage and to the apparel and related items that go into the baggage.  Over the years, beginning with a Greyhound bus trip from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and concluding with the more recent ventures to Santa Fe and the New Mexico high country, you've managed, no pun intended here, to come to grips with what and how much to take.  

This metric includes considerations of things you might have taken, things you ought to have taken and did not, and things you considered important but realized you had no use for them on your trip. In this vital sense, travel played a part in helping you improve your abilities at improvisation.  If you were away from home and lacking something that might have been at home or might not have existed at all, you could--and did--learn to improvise it.

There is always the possibility of other, more emotional baggage, and its effect on the traveler.  This baggage also relies on the informed balance of what to bring along and what to leave behind.  Most of your travels have been because you wished to go to a particular destination, looked forward to your arrival there, and seemed to have a built-in sense of abandon to the Fates of Good Times.

There was a time in your life when much of your travel was by Greyhound bus, which to this day you associate with uniformed sailors, being sick in the rear seats or of babies, indulging  steady and mournful tears, but even that did not forestall the sense of adventure at the outset of the trip.

Through your longtime association with the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, you began to enjoy the company of a fellow faculty member, who still practices the fine art of travel writing.  His verbal abilities, plus his talents as an amateur magician have helped you see yourself as a travel writer, not in the ordinary sense, rather of the sense of writing about known physical destinations but instead about the bargain rates, perfidious tour guides, and iffy meals available at emotional tourist traps.

How to Get a Character in Trouble on Page 1

To the extent that you know yourself, you know there are certain books, once you hear of them, you will have to read.  Such a title came to your attention in the form of John Clinch's recent (2007) novel, Finn.  

There is only one Finn for you, and since you have lazed hours away wondering what a meeting between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would have been like as each turned from his third decade into his fourth, how could you avoid such a novel as Clinch's, which gets us into Huck's relationship with his father ?

The question, How could you not? is a quality you are at pains to build into a character who must bear the narrative weight of agenda in fictional projects you undertake.  The more hard wired the character's goal or quest, the greater the probability you will find early on the depth of commitment you seek, both for you as composer and the character as a dramatic entity.

You had the same braided sense of awe and inevitability when you learned of Senta Jeter Nasland, a writer previously unknown to you, and how she had found one memorable sentence in Herman Melville's sprawling epic, Moby-Dick, in which lay embedded what is arguably her most memorable novel, Ahab's Wife.  She'd found the one sentence in which the text revealed Capt. Ahab having a wife back home, on land.  

Among the many challenges such a work implied, you were immediately aware of the most lofty of all, the first sentence.  In order to write a book about Ahab's wife, you have to taunt the reader, who'll have already read Moby-Dick, and it's straightforward, "Call me Ishmael."  Nasaland was up to the task.  "Ahab," she wrote, "was not my first husband, nor my last."

You still sympathize with the hours she spent in pursuit of that line.  You also came to understand, early in your reading of Ahab's Wife, the imperative for the line, "Call me Ishmael" to be included, somewhere within the text.  The structure of past things often contains coded directions for present-day things.

Your own evolution for decoding such connections had not come into place when you were assigned the reading of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, but mere chance placed a used copy of The Viking Portable Chaucer in your hands, whereupon you discovered how Troilus and Cressyde was the forerunner, how Chaucer in some probable scenario, "got" the idea for The Canterbury Tales while on a trip to Italy, and how that trip could be made to provide the background for a historical mystery or espionage novel.

Before Chaucer's time and well into the present, two parallel lines of literary discourse were developing.  One of these was a process known as quiting or responding.  Our most likely awareness of the word and concept is in unrequited or unanswered love.  Through the millennia, writers have quited or answered one another.  The observant reader and the English major catch the nods, the insides of their literary furnaces lit up with discoveries and of topical similarities such as the parallel paths taken by The Odyssey and The Aeneid.

The other parallel line is a concept with the Greek name ekphrasis, or writing about an imaginary work of art within a narrative poem or story.  You were more than ready for ekphrasis when you saw it in "The Spouter Inn" chapter, where Ishmael sees a painting whose subject is not clear in the dim light, and which then, through his point of view, takes on a shape suggestive of many things to him until it becomes clear to him that the painting is of a huge whale.  

At about the time you were being pointed at Moby-Dick, you also came upon a novel in The Age of Victoria where Oscar Wilde put ekphrasis to work in The Picture of Dorian Gray.  These lines of building on a previous work, quiting, and ekphrasis come close to touching within your imagination, but you can see how you are less interested in connecting strands of logic.  Your interest lies in situations where characters find themselves in circumstances where they are not only taking on surface goals or desires, they are slogging through the mud of cultural conditions and morel quagmires.

Start Each Story with Spiders

One of the earliest conversations of significance you recall having with your mother came after you'd approached her, eager to tell her of an exciting dream you'd had.  The conversation lurched into one of the documents of evidence you would eventually use almost as though they were legal briefs in the inevitable battle between parents and children.

Your mother gained your attention by telling you she'd be happy to listen to your dream.  But then, before you could relate it, she went on to explain that grown-ups were likely to be interested in their own dreams but not the dreams of others, particularly those of young persons such as you. 

She was quite patient about leading you to see that it was one thing for a young person to tell an older person that he'd had a bad dream, and maybe one or two salient details.

"Like maybe being covered with spiders," you suggested, knowing most grown-ups had little regard for spiders.

"You didn't dream you were covered with spiders, did you?"

Although you weren't sure why, you knew you had her attention, which, after all was what you'd wanted in the first place.  This was indeed a learning experience.  Start with spiders, which, even then, you understood was code for something ominous, menacing, or discomforting.

As a young person, your relation with grown-ups was fraught with doubts, misgivings, and regrets.  Teachers were, for the most part, all right because they seemed to believe what they were telling you and the better ones had the kind tendency to speak of facts as "things most persons seem to agree upon." 

This gave you hope that there would be better answers to things other grownups told you and that more ordinary things would have the potential to end in adventure.  You were obviously bored much of the time or cynical when you were not bored. 

You'd already come to the refreshing conclusion that your parents were--to use your own, much favored word--crazy.  At the time, persons who did not respond in ways you found predictable to be either crazy or, to pick a term you stole from your father's attention to the radio broadcasts of on-site calling of horse races, "off and running."

You like the notion of a bell sounding and horses, bursting from starting gates and,of the right kinds of persons, crazy persons, to be sure, off and running after their own adventures, which is to say their dreams.

As your own dreams and goals became more articulate, school classes with the suspicious title of Creative Writing became places where you were presented with information you wished to take at face value even though you found some of the information difficult to assimilate.  You were willing then to accept the trope of Creative Writing because that was the label given by adults, who would tell you anything that seemed convenient, just to keep you from asking questions they considered impertinent.  

To this day, you substitute the term Inventive for Creative because you find it easier to get along with inventive.  Over the years, "Creative" has become one of your least favorite words, while such words as "inventive," "made-up," and "speculative" seem to cause that momentary lurch into a string of dramatic events when you hear them.

These are of themselves generalizations, but when you hear them, you begin to see specific individuals doing things, running from, running toward, attempting to gain entrance or exit from a building with a specific personality, skulking about in a hoodie or striding through a traffic stream on Lexington Avenue. 

You have no readily available definition for the word "creative," because it seems to you to have become the equivalent of a blob of dirt removed from an athlete's shoe, then tamped back into the sod from which it was extracted.  Classmates who were spoken of as having creative narrative styles seemed always to have been unfortunate young men and women who were better at describing things than you ever wished to be.

You have spent years being told by teachers and superiors in publishing that dreams ought to be mentioned as generalities.  Look, they'd say, at Gregor Samsa.  "After a night of uneasy dreams--"
Your response to this is simple.  Make a story of the entire dream.  Do not speak of it as a dream.  Allow the actual dream to stand as the code for the final events of a story.  There are enough grown-ups to listen to who qualify as crazy or off and running.  No surprise that most of them are writers or editors.

Sentence Length or Length of Sentence

Your rationale for using long sentences has its origins in recognition of how many things in the present had their origins way back beyond simple past tenses and into compound tenses, with tendrils or webs reaching into the present moment.

Another considerable contribution to the force behind your fondness for long sentences has to do with the way a sentence begins to take on a cadence, suggesting a swirl of information as it is spilled out on some work area surface.  

You find the same kind of pleasure in long sentences that you experience when doing crossword puzzles, the clues for the definitions being at once ambiguous, sometimes a pun, causing you to lean forward in your seat, alert to challenge.

The longer the sentence, the greater the possibility to go skittering off on some syntactical detour, bringing the entire construction of words to a monstrous hash of circuitry.  In the throes of composition, you sometimes feel the tingle of excitement at the knowledge of getting on in length and of only getting a start in what could be an entire paragraph, contained in a single sentence.

There is also the pleasure of showing off, in effect announcing that you do not have to rely on simple, declarative sentences to carry the weight of your thoughts and narrative purpose.  At your stage of life, showing off should not mean that much to you; the sentences, regardless of length, should carry the ideas you seek to investigate and convey, should adhere to some sense of logic where the words may be read for their purpose, not for their flair.

But you have, in your time, read any number of works where you had to fight to stay awake, even to the point of taking notes or marking the text to make sure you knew what the author was going on about.  Worse yet, you've had to suffer through many of your own attempts at composition, either bored to an embarrassing degree, or impatient with yourself for not getting on with it.

You'd not considered narrative to be anything but immediate present time until you discovered the need to read and absorb the work of a writer you came to, with a few notable exceptions, relatively later on in your own process of discovery.  By the time you'd come to this writer, you'd already seen your early style and voice begin to emerge from the narrative tangle.  

You'd found yourself one afternoon in a high school class describing the prose of some author as having the same clattering sound of the schoolboy prank of tying strings of tin cans to the rear bumper of an auto.

Your metaphor won laughter from the teacher and students from whom you'd wished to evoke laughter, but with the reward of their laughter came your comparison of the sound of your own writing.  The more stern teacher who was your own judgment suggested that you might well have been describing yourself.

The writer with whom you've been on more increasingly friendly terms over the years is William Faulkner, whose work has begun to strike emotional recognition from you in addition to your earlier, more intellectually rooted reasons for appreciation.  You may read elitism and the kind of showing off you do not appreciate in others, thus why should you allow it in yourself.  

Liking Faulkner at first was liking him for his remoteness from the more accessible narration.  But once you admitted that he was not so easily come by for you, the game began to change.  You saw humor on several levels, enormous regret, complex feelings, wrapped in outlandish behavior, and, most important to the emerging you, compassion for individuals you'd once greeted with the sense of great relief that you were not so needy, ignorant, or self-centered.

For the moment, your solution seems to keep you happy.  First and early drafts often wander along into twenty-five word lengths and beyond, set forth in the sure knowledge that you will come back, pen in hand, to shorten them.  Unlike Faulkner's long sentences, yours often reveal what you've come to think of as stuffing words, words such as "somewhat," "rather." "perhaps," and "significant," words which, on closer inspection, cause more of the bloated feeling you associate with boredom.

You discussed this aspect with a writing chum, who reminded you of something you'll do well to keep at close hand.  "When you're talking,"  he said, "people may think you go on a bit, but no one is aware of your sentence length."

Distractions

In the same way some persons tend to be accident prone, you are distraction prone.  To set the proper tone here, you do not believe this admission is a coded or even euphemistic admission of you having Attention Deficit Disorder.  Distraction, in its own way, is quite enough.

One proof of your claim can be seen in the number of times you've worked at a project through the afternoon hours, well past your normal dinner hour of seven, only to look up at about nine, taunted by hunger pangs. Another proof resides in the number of times when, either at your desk composing or your reading chair, reading, you become aware how the transiting sun has caused the day to take on darkness, without your awareness.

Even when the mosquitoes of ADD buzz about you, you have strategies for sending them into the other room or, better still, out into the night, in search of other victims.  The point here is that you damned well know ADD when you see it and have a supportive sensory awareness to inform you when you are being distracted from one focal point to another.

When the symptoms of distraction begin, you're aware of a lifting sensation, often followed by an emerging spread of euphoria through your lower entrails, seeming to fizz upward, leaving deposits of alertness and curiosity to tantalize you.  Your inner jester stirs awake, alert for possibilities of mischief.  You begin to think you can hear yourself, speaking in a not at all  unkind way, saying, "Here we go. Again."

At the present moment, you are aware of two distractions, lingering like the marine layers of June and July, each heavy enough to remind you of how vulnerable you are to them, how in their thrall you've become, thinking of them during portions of the day already spoken for.  One of these is a booklength project that has not behaved well at all, jostling and forcing its way to the head of the line of projects.  As it progresses into an advanced provisional draft, it has found yet newer ways of wanting your attention.

The design of this project allowed you to pick the one hundred novels you believe you've learned the most from as study guides and inspirations to story writing.  With all the books about writing you've read, edited, and written yourself, these hundred novels have taught you more, inspired you more, distracted you more.  After considerable thinking and list making, you arrived at your list of the hundred titles you'd choose, then settled on the approximate number of words you would allow yourself to write about each.  

With six hundred words allotted to each of the hundred novels, and a rigorous ten thousand words for front matter and a final essay, you're seeing seventy thousand words, not a bad length if each word is chosen well and carries its own weight.  But in recent weeks, you notice another novel has begun distracting you, wanting to sit at the grown-up table, meaning the title changes to the hundred one novels, or that one of the chosen ones is disinvited, perhaps relegated to a list of also-rans in the back matter.

So far as you are concerned, distractions have a mind of their own.  Yes, that sentiment is a demonstration of the pathetic fallacy, where human qualities are attributed to inanimate objects or concepts.  Yes, you will allow it to stand on the grounds of the concept buttonholing you, engaging you in animated lobbying, reminding you of a favored photograph of Lyndon Johnson, when he was Senate Majority Leader, badgering and cajoling some unwary senator to cast an otherwise uncommitted vote to a measure still in debate.  Distractions do seize the opportunity to catch you when you are off balance.

You have been lobbied away from a project under way in which you discuss and demonstrate how techniques used by actors to enhance their portrayal of a role can be adapted to show fiction writers how to develop quirky, memorable, and skilled characters for their own stories.

And what of the second project?  You are at the stage of life where your interests and pursuits have less to do with material things and the attraction of people and more to do with things you have referred to as abstractions when dealing with students or clients.  Don't speak to me of a character wanting wisdom or happiness, you complain.  

Give me characters in quest of a specific scientific formula or a specific equation or a tangible ability, say to run a mile in three minutes, forty-five seconds or to be able to dance the lead role in The Firebird or Swan Lake, or to be able to pick up a tenor saxophone and replicate John Coltrane's spirited rendition of  his composition, "Giant Steps."

To the contrary notwithstanding, you are giddy with distraction about someone, at once enjoying the giddiness and welcoming it back into your life and hoping it will remain with you in full force in order to portray it in fiction, expanding the stage of your imagination yet again as all distractions expand the stage on which lives play out.

When Story Is Like an Egg Cream

Down at the secular level of definitions available for the word epiphany, you are pleased to find the one most suitable to you, a moment of sudden awareness or insight.  You first encountered the word, which in itself was a sudden insight, from your sister, who had a habit of telling you things that did not seem to relate to anything until you realize, often well after the fact, that insights, whenever they came, brought a chemical sense of tingle.  

At the time, you associated that with a word you'd learned on your own, effervescence, which you learned after watching your father plunk two wafer like tablets into a glass of water.The tablets were a then popular anti-acid, over-the-counbter remedy called Alka-Seltzer.  

Indigestion was a rare event among your family, thus some considerable time elapsed between the discovery of your father, immersing the two-tablet dose in a glass of water, and the need of either of your parents or your sister for the long, satisfying burp after ingestion signaling the tablets had done their job well.

You were the immediate suspect for the missing Alka-Seltzer tablets, and properly so.  Watching an ordinary glass of water become transformed into a cornucopia of fizzing was almost as much pleasure as you could bear.  Perhaps in the interests of economy, your sister showed you a trick that was a one-up on the fizzing tablets.  One heaping teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in a glass, followed by a half cup of vinegar.

Your on-the-spot epiphany after being introduced to this formula was how, in fact, epiphany trumped effervescence.  In time, your interests caught up with your education, at least in the sense that you came to conclude how nice it would be if the stories you were writing had epiphanies.  And yes, you were soon brought to the family tribunal yet another time.  "Someone," your mother said, "has been using the bicarbonate of soda and vinegar."  

While you were in and about that age, you heard a number of sentences begin with the word "someone."  They could as well have begun the sentence with the more specific use of your name.  You were that someone, who learned to enjoy the greater visual of epiphany rather than effervescence.

So far as you are concerned, stories should effervesce into epiphany.  Your own significant variation on the theme of story is the subtext of nothing ever being what it seems.  For the longest time, this brought you difficulty among teachers and such others as you were able to wheedle or torment into reading your material.  Your intentions were not to be dreary.  Although a bored younger person, well imbued with impatience, you were not dreary at all.  You were in many ways the living enactment of the effects of bicarbonate of soda into which a quantity of vinegar had been introduced.

Your belief that nothing is what it seems does not mean you are suspicious or, indeed, cynical, rather that you hadn't expected much from those two Alka-Seltzer tablets or the combination of bicarbonate of soda with vinegar, and yet, look what happened.  You had another sort of epiphany when handed a drink of mythical proportions, the so-called egg cream, which, contrary to its name, contains neither egg nor cream.  When you first heard what the ingredients to this remarkable beverage were, you could not believe the information.  

Then someone showed you with great specificity.  An inch of Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup at the bottom of a tall glass, followed by three and-a-half inches of milk, the rest of the glass filled with seltzer water from a siphon bottle as opposed to being poured from an ordinary bottle of soda .  You might get passable results from Bosco or Hersey's chocolate syrup, but you would never experience the true transformation of the mystical periodical table of elements.

In similar fashion, any bicarbonate of soda and any vinegar will oblige, but for your needs, a greater specificity calls out.  The bicarbonate of soda must be Arm and Hammer backing soda.  The vinegar must be Heinz's distilled white vinegar.

In such matters, particularity as they relate to story, science becomes replaced with a combination of magic, sentiment, and the child-like amazement at the kinds of chemistry where things mix not according to their atomic numbers or valence or any other explanation related to science.  Story needs to have its elements combine as Fox's U-Bet syrup combines with cold whole milk and seltzer water.   

Even were you to secure a bona fide seltzer siphon bottle, Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup, and cold whole milk, you would need to combine these elements with the same sense of their being something of magic or myth or some secret code necessary as the attending ritual to produce a viable result.

Creation comes from technique, a child-like sense of wonderment, an inherent faith that nothing is what it seems, and a curiosity to plumb the dark corners of human awareness.

Being in Character

In some of your most personal and basic moments, you consult your most precious cache of treasure for two objects, one quite tangible, the other most abstract.  

The former treasure is a small pocket notebook with a list of characters who appeal to you to the point where you visualize yourself portraying them.  The latter is the equivalent of an E Ticket to Disneyland, in fact as open a ticket as possible to the inner worlds of fantasy.

According to the whim of the moment, you imagine yourself portraying one of the characters in your notebook.  The list crosses race, gender, and age boundaries.  The more you indulge your fantasy, the more aware you become of the training, skills, and instincts you have for being a portrayer, a player, dare you call yourself an actor?  

The more you indulge your fantasy, the more aware you become of some trait or interpretation you would bring to your portrayal that would in effect make the character even more memorable to you, in effect enhancing your ties to the character, whoever he or she might be.

The most recent character you've indulged this fantasy with is one of the great dramatic challenges for an actor of any age or experience, the King Lear of Shakespeare's eponymous play. In your fantasy, you were the CEO of a large family business, reminiscent of the publishing company Knopf, when its founders, Alfred and Blanche, were still alive.  You recall Knopf railing against the printing of so many books, a if to say his list was so comprehensive and good that few others were necessary.

You like that kind of authoritative hauteur, find yourself trying out various postures to help project it.  Your Lear would be Jewish, by no means because you are and would thus be able to draw from experience.  Your own Jewishness lacks that cultural and experiential platform.  

Your choice was made because the idea reminded you of the aspect of Jewish humor that is accepted because it has to be.  As this Jewish Lear of the publishing house, Lear Books, you would retire, giving control to your three daughters, all of whom follow their counterparts in the original play.

Another reason for bringing Jewishness to Lear has to do with your reading of the play as the most starkly apocalyptic of all the plays, ending on a note that reminds you of The Final Solution, as it is being carried out.  In your fantasy, you even have two of the daughters selling Lear Books to the German conglomerate, Bertelsmann, which owns so many American publishers.

This fantasy game of yours, imagining yourself as the personality inhabiting your favorite characters, reminds you of a musician running scales or chords.  It is play and practice, both of which are essential for writing things for performance, which is to say publication, but also for the sake of having done them, which is first and foremost for the self as writer.  

In this same E Ticket fantasyland, you are also a writer who wishes to publish, who writes things for publication, who understands the impersonal nature of rejection and the surprising aspects of publication.  At one point, you ached to be published in some larger sense than you seeing your byline in newspapers and magazines.  When that happened, you accepted the fact that you'd reached a plateau where, nice as it was, that was no longer why you wrote.

The act of becoming your favorite characters for the sake of fantasy performance is of a piece with the phenomenon of fan fiction, wherein devotees of certain stories or characters invent their own adventures.  Your own understanding of fan fiction and your own adaptation of the concept ratify your understanding of the need for story in life, to create it, to be in it, and when the need arises, to usurp the work of ongoing stories about you to supply your own version.

Now, when you create a character, you begin wondering what it will take to portray him or her.  Do you give her the same fragility as Williams' Blanche Dubois, or is there something in her that causes you to make eye contact with her and begin the dangerous flirtation wherein you and she see each other's chemistry?

Such things are often spoken of as guilty pleasures, but for you there is no guilt, only the immense presence of pleasure.  Story and its denizens have become for you the presence of pleasure, no matter where they take you when they approach you, sometimes in your sleeping dreams, sometimes in your daydreams, sometimes when you are lost in composition.  "What say we get out of here," they say, "and go somewhere for a drink?"