I recently received an email from a travel editor with the subject line: “What’s wrong with travel writing?”
The answer, according to the editor, was that there is little diversity in the group of people writing it. “What about traveling while Black, or queer, or disabled?” she asked.
My complaint about contemporary travel writing is that it is often more focused on the traveler – his or her experiences, feelings, epiphanies – than on the people traveled among. If the identity of the writer becomes a matter of importance, the level of self-centeredness will only rise. The one modern travel book that is hailed as a literary masterpiece – In Patagonia – would not have been improved by Chatwin writing about his homosexuality.
Watching the Wimbledon women’s final on Saturday – or, more accurately, watching the trophy ceremony – I was reminded of the similarities between tennis and writing. The player holding the trophy, Iga Świątek, was having, until that afternoon, a disappointing year, with not a single tournament win. Her ranking had dropped from #2 to #8. But in less than an hour, as the commentator Mary Jo Fernandez noted, all those losses disappeared in the light of this great triumph.
It's the same in writing. You send out a manuscript – or a story, or an essay – and one acceptance wipes out all the rejections that preceded it. The difference between the two fields is that in sports, talent is always rewarded – talent plus hard work and dedication – while in writing it’s popularity that reigns supreme. Talent often plays a role, but brilliance – the game-changer (literally) on the playing field – frequently goes unappreciated on the page.
I’m always looking for ways to promote my book – if not me, who? – so yesterday I posted this on social media:
Seeking relief from the heat? My memoir will transport you to winter in northern Greece; Providence, Rhode Island; and – most chillingly – Warsaw, Poland.
In the latest Spectator, Charles Moore remembers a journalist, Sandy Gall, who died at the age of 97: “He was a dear man,” Moore writes, “neither broken by the horrors of war, nor puffed up by his courage in the face of them – a true reporter.”
Monday I received an email from someone who had recently read my first book – published 34 years ago – and wanted to thank me for it brought back memories of his one trip to Warsaw, back in 1987, while on tour with the Cleveland Orchestra.
I’ve been fighting a cold for almost a week and the message worked better than any medicine in improving my mood.
Tuesday morning I had an appointment with an orthopedist (the reason for my absence here) and filling out the forms in the waiting room I came across a question as to my profession. I wrote “writer.” Then I was asked “part-time” or “full-time.” After giving it some thought, I checked the “part-time” box. These days I write only when I get an idea for something; I don’t write every day. But I never wrote every day, even when I had a full-time job as a writer/editor. And even writers who do write every day usually write for only part of the day – mornings for instance. Most writing – most good writing – requires such intense concentration that only several hours of it at a stretch are possible. The rest of the day is spent in research, or reading, or editing what they’ve previously written. Which is to say, all writers are part-time writers.