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…
By Roy Peter Clark Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy…
At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or…
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black…
By Phillip Lopate In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective,…
