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 mediocre travel stories tend to be devoid of people (apart from, say, tourist-sector employees like bartenders and taxi drivers) – and that when people do appear in travel stories, they are observed without being quoted.
This absence of “dialogue” tends leave travel narratives (even ones that might otherwise be full of interesting observations) feeling dry and lifeless.
Oddly enough, Pilgrims in a Sliding World had decent (if not entirely effective) dialogues, and that’s something I’ll explore here.
Not all amusing road conversations belong in your travel book
If there was a weakness to the dialogues I recounted in Pilgrims in a Sliding World, it was that they revealed me to be a pretty unimaginative young traveler. As I pointed out in my entry about depicting other people in travel narratives, the travel writer must get out of his comfort zone and meet people who can yield insights about the journey’s (and, by proxy, the narrative’s) greater themes.
All too often, the dialogues in Pilgrims in a Sliding World went something like this:
“Are you a narc?” Lucas asked me. “Because I smoke a lot of pot.”
“I’m not a narc.”
“I don’t sell any pot. I grow some, but I don’t sell any.”
“Okay.”
“I only sell a little pot. Plus, I grow some.”
“Okay.”
Lucas swayed and squinted at me. “You wanna buy some pot?” he asked.
“No.”
Lucas seemed confused. “Did I ask if you were a narc?”
This conversation, which appeared in Chapter Thirteen (“Channel Changers and Missing Persons”) took place at a Spring Break party in Panama City Beach, Florida. It was amusing enough, I guess, but ultimately it was little more than a low-stakes recollection of a low-stakes exchange with an extremely drunk young person.
Because I was a young person at the time – and because young Americans in the 1990s tended to meet new young people at parties – a lot of my dialogue thus consisted of humorous (and accurate enough) recounting of party chatter.
Take for instance this exchange from a bar near the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, as recounted in Chapter Fourteen (“Malfunction”):
Henry lined up shots of Jaegermeister for all of us, and we tipped back the licorice-tasting liquid in honor of Bart’s future.
“Why were you writing in a notebook?” Dale asked me.
“That’s my journal. I write down things that happen to me.”
Dale swayed on his seat and grabbed me by the arm. “I want you to write about me. Do it now!”
I brandished my journal, pen at ready. What do you want me to say about you?”
“Say that I make good money. Say that ambition isn’t worth the trouble because the only thing that happens is you get successful at something that nobody else cares about.”
I started to write all this down.
“No! Shut up!” Dale said. “Don’t write about me. I’m drunk. Write down that we need a war, so everyone can have jobs.”
I wrote this into my journal.
Dale leaned in toward me. “Women want to be lied to. That makes them feel good, because they’d rather feel good than know the truth. Then—if they find out the truth—it isn’t a problem that you lied because they just get mad, and that makes them feel good, too. They don’t care what they feel as long as they feel something.”
“Do you want me to write that down, too?”
“No!” Dale said, looking around fearfully. “That’s a secret, and you can’t tell anyone, because it took me too long to figure it out.”
While this conversation touches on issues like gender dynamics and the frustrations of middle-class working life in America, it is, once again, little more than the depiction of a random exchange between myself and an extremely drunk person who didn’t reappear in any other part of the narrative.
Hence, while these dialogues were colorful enough, they didn’t touch on any broader travel or life themes that might have justified their inclusion in the book.
Ideally, dialogues will evoke bigger themes about places, society and life
In the initial installment of this series about my never-finished first book, I noted that one chapter of Pilgrims in a Sliding World later found new life as “The Mystical High Church of Luck,” a Las Vegas-themed Salon essay that was my first real byline as a travel writer.
As it happened, only a part of that original Pilgrims in a Sliding World chapter made it into the Salon essay. This exchange between myself and a random stranger named Russ at a bar in the Flamingo Hilton, was edited out:
“I’ve decided I’m not drinking while I’m in Las Vegas,” I said. “I figure the odds are already stacked against me while I’m sober.”
Russ mockingly frowned at me. “You’re not drinking?” he said, as if it pained him. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three?! You’re a man! This is America! In America men prove their manhood by fighting and drinking. I don’t want to fight you, so it looks like you’ll have to drink.” Russ pushed the shot-glass back over to me and smiled, as if in challenge. “Come on,” he said. “Be a man.”
I stared down at the tequila and paused, trying to think of a clever comeback. “In America,” I said, “we start drinking as thirteen-year-olds because we think it will make us more like men. Then, when we drink as men, all we’re doing is acting like thirteen-year-olds.” I pushed the shot-glass back in front of him.
Russ howled with laughter. “Touche! Touche!” he exclaimed. He pounded me on the back and yelled over at the bartender. “Hey! Give the Zen-master here another shot of tequila!”
I ended up cutting out this dialogue before I submitted the chapter to Salon for two reasons. First, it was, once again, an amusing exchange with a stranger that didn’t have any stakes in the broader narrative of the book.
Second, it let the “character I” off the hook: As with so many other inconsequential dialogues in the book, the Rolf character played the even-keeled straight-man to a drunken (if somewhat pithy) stranger.
By contrast, look at this bit of exchange that did make it into the Salon essay:
“Give me a casino where the bartenders wear T-shirts and rubber flip-flop sandals and give you warm beer in cans, and the barmaids dress up in cut-off jeans and fuzzy bedroom slippers and bring you Halloween candy as a consolation when you go on a losing streak, and everyone who wants to gamble has to first go up to a microphone and tell the story of their first kiss, and people only get free drinks if they make ironical allusions to the laws of entropy or the Articles of Confederation or the Pauline definition of love. Shit, Jeff. Let’s open the place up ourselves. We’ll call it Jeff’s. Or better yet, we’ll just hang an electronic reader-board out front, and whenever a customer wants to change the name of the place, we’ll change it. What do you think, man?”
Jeff didn’t even pause. “I think it’s time we left Las Vegas.”
The person delivering this rant (which, in the Salon essay, begins a full two paragraphs earlier than what I quote here) is the Rolf character. Which means that I was not recounting the drunken musings of a random stranger: I was examining my own foolishness and frustrations in the face of Las Vegas.
Moreover, since my rant came in the wake of my own quixotic failure to outwit the gambling-industrial-complex in that city, it revealed something true about how outsiders experienced it (and how Las Vegas was quite literally designed to outwit even the most determined cynics).
Tip #4: Be true to what was said (but make sure it serves a broader purpose)
In the early weeks of the North American van journey that I recounted in Pilgrims in a Sliding World, I recall wishing I’d brought a tiny tape recorder, so I could surreptitiously document all of the conversations I was having. At the time, I think I was nervous that I would end up misrepresenting certain conversations when I tried to write about them later.
In revisiting those written conversations here, however, the shortcomings of the dialogues weren’t the result of verisimilitude so much as thematic irrelevance.
One of my more effective dialogues in Pilgrims was a simple exchange between myself and the officer who’d been assigned to accompany me on a police “ride-along” through the city of Houston:
After filling out a bit of paperwork and sitting in on a second-shift personnel meeting, I was introduced to my assigned officer, a coolly composed, athletic-looking 27-year-old black patrolman named John Waldon. Having grown up near the neighborhoods he served, John went about his job with an alert sense of courtesy and competence.
“Did you always want to be a cop?” I asked James.
“Not really. I always wanted to be a professional gospel singer.”
“Why did you change your mind?”
“I didn’t change my mind. If you saw me in church you’d never believe I was a cop. Most of my friends outside of work are women. When the workday is over I don’t want to think about being a police officer; I just want something soft to hold on to.”
This exchange, which later reappeared almost verbatim in my 2016 book The Geto Boys, was effective because it was about more than it was about. In recounting John’s seeming ambivalence about his job (even as I depicted him being quite good at it), I was hinting at the nuanced realities the young black police officer faced by making his living by patrolling he very neighborhood streets where he’d grown up.
In plays and screenplays, it’s often said that the most effective dialogue is contains sentiments that are either expressed awkwardly or left unspoken – and this also holds true in nonfiction prose.
In Chapter Ten (“Junior High Visions of Adulthood”), for example, I was able to use an exchange with a young busker I’d shared a meal with in Memphis to hint at the unspoken presumptions that underpinned my entire North American van-trip:
We sat in the van and compared road notes as we ate. “Tomorrow, you should go over to the Marriott hotel and hang out in their indoor pool room,” I said to Kevin. “We were in there for four hours today, and nobody ever figured out we weren’t staying there.”
Kevin looked at me like I was crazy. “I ain’t going in no hotels I don’t pay for! Especially the Marriott.”
“It’s easier than it sounds. All you do is act real casual.”
“You can act casual all you want. Black men don’t get away with that shit.”
In depicting myself cheerily oblivious to an unspoken social dynamic as I spoke with Kevin, I was able to illustrate the concept of “racial privilege” in America without ever using the phrase.
Next up, I’ll explore the places where I bent (or fabricated) the truth in recounting the events of Pilgrims in a Sliding World – and why, at several levels, it would have been more effective for me, as a storyteller, to simply stick to facts.
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