I recently guest-taught in an online travel writing course. One student, whose story was the most problematic, asked if she could send me a reworked version to my personal e-mail.
It arrived last week, and still needed a lot of work. The lead was wordy and uninspired and some of the sentences were confusing, though not as much as the time structure. The story began in present tense, changed to past, then went back to present, then back to past, then back to present before finally ending up in past.
I sent the writer my critique, adding that I hoped she didn't think it too harsh. She responded very positively, thanking me and saying that my comments were helpful and not at all hurtful because, in the meantime, she had sent the story to a magazine where it had been accepted.
If you were starting out as a travel writer in the 1980s one of the books you read was written not by a travel writer but by an academic, a man who taught English, at the time, at Rutgers University. The book was Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars by Paul Fussell, and it did more than just examine the authors you had studied in college (though not, alas, their travel writing) - Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene - it devoted entire chapters to brilliant writers none of your English professors had ever mentioned: Robert Byron and Norman Douglas.
It was like a course no college ever taught - British Travel Writing 101, my first introduction to a distance university. The scholarship was rugged, eclectic and sweeping; the writing authoritative, engaging and witty. With chapters titled "L'Amour de Voyage" and "The New Heliophily," the book reinforced the image of travel writing as a romantic endeavor, but it also championed it as art. Here, it said, is an overlooked genre that has attracted some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Here is a literature worthy of academic regard.
The second of these ideas turned out to be the more lasting. Travel writing continues - despite Fussell's assertion that tourism killed it - but without the participation of the day's great novelists. At the same time, academic papers and conferences on travel writing keep proliferating. It is ironic that the book that announced the death of travel writing gave birth to the field of travel writing scholarship.
I was amused to hear on NPR yesterday that The New Yorker online had asked people for words that should be eliminated from the language. The winner, oddly, was "slacks."
A word that needs to be silenced should be one that is used frequently, and when was the last time you heard anyone - especially anyone under the age of 50 - refer to pants as slacks? My choice, as faithful readers of this blog will know, would have been what's in a pair of pants, namely "butt."
My amusement was caused by the fact that the longtime editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, had a number of words he would not allow to appear in its pages. As a mnemonic device, staff writers came up with the following sentence, which I read to every writing class I teach (as an example of the power of words to annoy):
"Intrigued by the massive smarts of the balding, feisty, prestigious, workaholic tycoon, Tom Wolfe promptly spat on the quality photo above the urinal and tried to locate his gadget."
Recently in the New York Times Book Review, Geoff Dyer complained about the ubiquity of the word "tireless," and wondered if it was unique as a single-word cliché.
I immediately thought of travel writing, where there are a number of words that, through overuse, have become cliches. Most are adjectives: magical, mystical, charming, exotic. But there is at least one verb: nestled. And there are a handful of nouns: adventure (people rarely write about trips anymore; every excursion outside of town is invariably an "adventure"), wonders and – the most irresistible of all – paradise. I thought its days were numbered after National Geographic Traveler used it on its cover story about Bali the same month as the Kuta Beach bombings. But "paradise" made a speedy recovery and now appears in almost any story about a place where palm trees grow.
I had lunch yesterday with a former freelancer who was visiting from Chicago. In his 20s Steve traveled around South America and sent me funny stories about his adventures.
He told me that he was thinking of gathering these stories into an ebook. We talked about how technology has democratized the publishing business, but agreed that now, with so many voices in the marketplace, it's the loud ones that tend to get heard. Humility and subtlety have a tough time.
"I can be obnoxious," Steve admitted. "But I can't sustain it."
Yesterday I had coffee with a freelancer friend who is younger than me and his a wife and two kids. To support his family he has been editing books for iUniverse. "They're terrible," he told me.
His one steady freelancing gig is writing up interviews he does with people about their personal fitness training. His most recent subject was one of the women from Jersey Shore.
"Tom," he said to me plaintively, "when I was in j-school this wasn't what I imagined myself doing."