Though travel writing is sometimes viewed as its own, self-contained genre, its core task can pertain to all manner of prose writing, since any good narrative (fiction or nonfiction) needs to establish an effective sense of place. Place is, in effect, a character in any story, so it’s good for writers to know how to evoke it.
Having recently looked at moments of Pilgrims in a Sliding World that felt less-than-effective (or less-than-honest), I might also highlight a few moments where my never-published first book worked well as travel narrative. Often this happened in its evocation of place.
Evoking places can include detailing the expectations you took with you
In noting that I did a decent job of portraying places in my never-published first book, I am not saying that I had mastered the concept (and perhaps no writer can ever do that). Any place one visits is, after all, so complex and intricate that it can never be described comprehensively.
This is in part because any attempt to describe a place is in competition with one’s expectations of that place. That means it can’t hurt to be candid about how those expectations can affect your experience of a place. Take for example this outtake from Chapter Four (“Notes from Everyplace”) of Pilgrims in a Sliding World:
One cannot grow up outside of California without concocting largely mythological expectations of Los Angeles. Part of this LA myth comes from the ghost reality created by the entertainment industry. In television and the movies, LA is always the dramatical setting whenever setting is not important. Consequently, LA is a generic catch-all, an Everyplace, a geographically-tangible reference point for America’s electronically-automated collective unconscious. The rest of the myth comes from news stories—tabloid and otherwise—that depict the city as little more than an arena for varying combinations of riots, wildfires, earthquakes, traffic jams, freeway shootings, celebrity scandals, cosmetic surgeries, and daylong poolside cocaine parties. The synthesis of these two myths turns Los Angeles into a town fit for the Old Testament, an Eden where no conflict lasts more than ninety minutes combined with a Sodom that is always burning.
In using humor and imagination to outline my expectations of Los Angeles, my depiction of the actual experiences I did have there (which didn’t involve cocaine parties, but did involve the 1994 Northridge Earthquake) were more grounded in a sense of expectations-versus-reality balance.
Elsewhere, in Chapter Sixteen (“Platonic Gigolohood”), I satirized the expectations-versus-reality letdown of America’s Civil War battlefields by evoking the language of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Indeed, Mr. Lincoln: we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow these battlegrounds—but we can, apparently, score a nifty profit by marketing them for souvenirs. I saw enough battle-themed shirts, posters, flags, bumper-stickers, shot-glasses, knick-knacks and videotapes in local gift shops to stock a theme-park. Every major Civil War general seemed to have his own line of merchandise. What do we do with our war heroes in America? Apparently, the same thing we do with our sports heroes: we put them on t-shirts. I half-expected to find a silk-screened depiction of Robert E. Lee slam-dunking a basketball.
How you describe a place is tied to how (and when) you experience it
One perennial challenge of describing famous places and festivals is that they have already been exhaustively described by other writers. Novelist Evelyn Waugh touched on this travel-writing challenge in his 1930 book Labels: A Mediterranean Journal. Pointing out that Paris has already been described in “overwhelming variety,” the famous French city “has become so overlaid with successive plasterings of paste and proclamation that it has come to resemble those rotten old houses whose crumbling frame of walls is only held together by the solid strata of wallpapers.”
At times, my evocations of place in Pilgrims in a Sliding World were in competition with Waugh’s “wallpaper-strata” effect. For example, my descriptions of New Orleans were competent enough, but – no doubt because I visited the city during Mardi Gras – everything I recounted (people catching beads from parade-floats, drunken women flashing their breasts, etc.) seemed kind of obvious.
By contrast, my most effective descriptions of festivals came when I employed hyper-specific details from my own experiences in a way that evoked a broader sense for the event itself. Take for instance this description of a Florida Spring Break scene from Chapter Ten (“Junior High Visions of Adulthood”):
Every aspect of spring break in Panama City Beach is catered toward fulfilling a junior-high vision of ideal adulthood: quickie romance, fun rides, and tons to drink. When we arrived from Pensacola at mid-day, sunburnt groups of college refugees were openly drinking cans of beer as they walked the main drag. Reader boards at bars touted wet t-shirt contests, sumo wrestling, bikini contests, and free drinks. At a mini-mall, a man in a clean shirt and a necktie handed out free shots of tequila mixed with cinnamon schnapps as a promotion for a liquor store. “This’ll fuck ya up good,” the necktie man said earnestly, in the same tone of voice that he might recommend a grade of motor oil. Overhead, a bubble-domed helicopter swooped around, giving sightseeing tours of the gulf. Bungee-jumpers dove and dangled from a crane. Garish pastel souvenir shops and gaudy miniature golf courses lined the highway. Collegians darted through the streets on rental mopeds and miniature crotch-rocket motorcycles. Over the gulf, parasailers floated above boats and swimmers and jet-skiers. On the beach, Coca-Cola had set up a huge playground of Velcro obstacle-courses, mud-wrestling rings, and several booths of carnival-like games. A beach DJ played mostly heavy-metal pop songs from the eighties—music so unhip it nearly went full-circle and became hip again. The beach revelers cheered and sang along with songs popular when they were in junior high.
Tip #6: “Telling details” are better than broad generalizations about a place
In the end, employing broad generalizations about places in the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World proved less effective than focusing on “telling details” that showed what it was like to experience the place.
Take for example this evocation of teens and preteens hanging out at a Gainesville shopping mall from a different section of Chapter Ten:
In front of me, a sneering pair of young girls saunters past, extravagantly ridiculing someone named Heather. They pass a pre-pubescent boy, who stares down at his shoes as he scuffs his way across the floor, entranced by the sound of his own movements. An adolescent couple follows a few paces behind, their hands somewhat desperately entwined in warm certainty. At the edge of the floor, three girls with curveless preteen bodies flaunt so much lipstick and eye-liner that they look like little boys in drag as they solemnly primp in a display-window reflection. Near the entrance of a clothing store, three junior high boys in low-slung ballcaps have entered their tenth minute of standing around uncertainly with their hands in their pockets. More kids drift past my bench—all of them looking around, few of them shopping. They have come here to partake in a time-honored tradition of weekend nights in America, an ongoing quest for Friday night epiphany. They have come here to have a good time, whatever that is.
Perhaps my favorite evocation of place from Pilgrims in a Sliding World didn’t even involve a public space – it recounted the experience of hanging out in front of a muted TV at four in the morning with a trio of University of Georgia students who’d invited me to crash at their place after we’d all been thrown out of an Athens bar at closing time. As I wrote in Chapter Thirteen (“Channel Changers and Missing Persons”):
Ashley turned on the TV and muted the volume; Jacinthe put some CDs into the stereo. We all wrapped-up in blankets and sat on the couch—chomping gum, talking, listening to Pink Floyd and Smashing Pumpkins, and staring at the flickering TV like it was invented to be seen and not heard. Watching a muted television can be remarkably soothing and entrancing, like watching a campfire. Without noise, TV’s inherent state of hysteria turns on itself; the images blend together and become tranquil. Channel-changer in hand, an ad for 1-900 phone-sex gives way to a pro-wrestling match, which becomes an infomercial wherein Ricardo Montalban hawks GrillMasters: we know that we don’t have to buy into the manipulative and the goofy and the false. A flickering image of Zapruder’s JFK assassination translates into an episode of the A-Team, which evolves to a PBS documentary about the Civil War: we know that history inseparable from myth and fiction and subjectivity. CNN pictures of a flood flip to the solace of a telephone number flashing under a preacher in his pulpit, which blinks away to alternately somber and chipper newscasters: we understand that inspiration and information is always tainted by its messenger. We all sat in the warm trance, falling asleep one-by-one on the giant, L-shaped couch.
As evocative as this scene was, it also hinted at the fact that my travel experiences were inseparable from the age at which I was having them. In my next installment of this series I’ll explore how the pinched parameters and occasional neuroses of how my young manhood limited the scope and insight of my never-published first book.
Share This
