About twenty people showed up for my travel writing workshop at the library yesterday, almost all of them - as one of the women noted - women. I said it was typical, and told them what a tennis instructor had once told a female friend of mine: Women think they can learn from someone else; men think they can teach themselves. "Or that they know it all already," another woman said.
I went over the three phases: pre-trip research, on-site observation and participation, and writing. For the last I used my "10 Sins of Travel Writing" - the stories all sound the same, they are full of cliches, they ignore the people, etc. - and read corrective passages from Theroux, Thubron, Waugh. After I talked about the importance of the lead, and read Peter Ackroyd on Helsinki, one woman exhumed an old column of mine and read its lead. It paled in comparison to Ackroyd's, but I was flattered all the same.
I told them the best way to learn to write is to read good writers (learning from others, though in private). As always, I focused on the human element over practical information, the personal narrative over the consumer article. The latter is more in demand by editors, but the former seemed the more appealing to the students, who told of renting an apartment in a foreign city, conducting environmental studies on a Caribbean island, driving a truck across Africa.
We all want to express ourselves. The trick is finding an interested audience.
