For all of the shortcomings I’ve identified in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at writing a travel book), it’s worth pointing out that it contained some of the earliest seeds of what later did become my first book, Vagabonding. At a certain level that makes perfect sense, as Pilgrims in a…

In re-reading Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at a travel book), I’m often struck by how young the narrator seems. This makes perfect sense, of course, since the book evokes a 24-year-old version of me trying to narrate the exploits of a 23-year-old version of me. Admittedly, I didn’t feel all…

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…

Travel writing has long been considered to be one of the least reliable forms of nonfiction narrative. Scholars often point to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville as the iconic example of a classic travel book that bore little relation to truth, but skepticism about the tales of voyagers runs from Lucian’s second-century True…

When I teach my travel memoir classes each summer in Paris, I often do a lecture based on Thomas Swick’s “Roads Less Traveled: Why so much travel writing is so boring.” This essay astutely outlines seven key things that tend to be missing from generic travel stories, including imagination, insight, and humor. Swick notes that…

Having touched on the task of depicting myself as a character in the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-finished first attempt at writing a travel book), I will now examine the task of depicting other people in nonfiction writing. Indeed, just as the “I character’ is a selective persona that doesn’t comprehensively…

When teaching my creative writing classes in Paris, I typically begin my memoir-themed craft lecture by writing these words on the whiteboard: Author | Character / Narrator The vertical line between “Author” and “Character/Narrator” is in part meant to underscore the fact that – in analyzing a person’s writing – we’re not talking about the…

For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author. Specifically, my failure to write an insightful and coherent book about my first vagabonding experience – an eight-month van journey around North America undertaken when…