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 I was twenty-three years old.
The working title for that never-published first book was Pilgrims in a Sliding World, and I toiled at it for more than two years before abandoning it and moving to Korea to work as an “English as a Foreign Language” teacher in my mid-twenties.
It was while living in Korea that I cannibalized sections of Pilgrims in a Sliding World to land my first travel-writing byline, a Las Vegas essay for the then-prestigious online magazine Salon, as well as a second travel byline, a Joshua Tree essay in the dialup-era Ur-online lit-magazine Eclectica. Years later, I remixed parts of its Houston chapter for my 2016 book The Geto Boys, which appeared in in Bloomsbury’s music-themed “33 1/3” series. But, for the most part, my Pilgrims in a Sliding World manuscript has spent the past three decades sitting in a box in my closet.
On revisiting a never-finished manuscript
In 2019 I re-read this never-finished 70,000-word narrative to prepare for a Deviate episode entitled “Van Life before #VanLife: Rolf unpacks his very first vagabonding journey.” In so doing, I realized it was a much smarter and more nuanced book than I’d been giving it credit for.
Which is not to say that my attempt at a first book was worthy of being published. It attracted a smattering of interest (and, ultimately, polite rejections) from a few publishers and literary agents, and I am desperately grateful, years later, that it never saw the light of day.
Pilgrims in a Sliding World was, quite naturally, a coming-of-age road-trip memoir: a depiction of a young man exploring his own country by Volkswagen Vanagon, pushing his comfort zone, and seeking out new experiences – all while fixating on what adult life might have in store for him.
The book’s first chapter lays out its thesis in this way:
Too often, I think, we allow ourselves to be unwittingly dragged into adulthood behind job security or marriage or monthly payments on matte-grey home entertainment systems.Then we discover that we are adults in relation to our home entertainment system instead of ourselves.
If youth is a rehearsal for adulthood, I’m a willing victim of stage-fright: a person who has seen the script and sensed that—behind all the flowery language—the primary dramatic themes of adulthood are suspiciously similar repetition and banality. Perhaps my time here on the road is like improv in the green-room: a last-minute attempt to rework the script, so that—even if my play turns out to be a disaster—I’ll at least be reciting my own lines.
Starting today, I am going to travel around the United States for the next eight months. I don’t have a destination; I just want to buy some time. In keeping this journal, I hope my experiences might yield clues, parts of a greater sum, fragments of a formula that will allow me to make peace with my future.
On clever prose (but a vague story-arc, and low stakes)
The title Pilgrims in a Sliding World was taken from Robert Creeley’s 1983 poem “The Faces.” No doubt superimposing my own fixations onto Creeley’s words, I assumed the metaphorical “sliding world” of the poem represented a contrast to the adult world of fixity and (seeming) finality. In trying to embrace “the time it never / mattered to accumulate, the fact that / nothing mattered but for what one / could make of it / …a sly but / insistent yearning to outwit it / all, be different, move far, far / away, avoid forever the girl / next door” – I was really hoping to embrace all the unseen possibilities that my own life offered.
Occasionally aphoristic and consistently overwritten, Pilgrims in a Sliding World never exuded all that much insight or self-understanding. Its author clearly liked language, and wrote decent sentences, but he did not yet have a sense for narrative arc or big-picture story-structure. His best insights and passages made more sense as clever journal-snippets than as building-blocks in a coherent narrative.
Indeed, the central shortcoming of Pilgrims in a Sliding World was that its young narrator didn’t seem to know himself very well, even as he endeavored to depict himself and his life-concerns on the page. He had a weakness for overanalyzing everything (writing sentiments that were simultaneously articulate, yet not-all-that-well articulated) as he catalogued experiences in roadside diners and at urban festivals, at hardscrabble inner-city housing-ministries and on craggy national-park mountain trails, in the company of Trappist monks in Massachusetts and intimidatingly cute college girls in Florida.
Lesson #1: No work is lost (and “failure” has lessons to teach)
Ultimately, the stakes of Pilgrims in a Sliding World were pretty low. As a middle-class, college educated American, it was clear that my narrative anxieties – while authentic enough – were not something to be confronted and vanquished so much as endured and outgrown.
Nearly a decade after I first sat down and attempted to write Pilgrims in a Sliding World, my first published book, Vagabonding, made a much more focused and articulate case for how a long-term journey might identify and expand life’s possibilities. And while its themes and prose were far superior to what I’d attempted with Pilgrims in a Sliding World, Vagabonding would not have been possible without my unrealized efforts to create a first book.
I will never offer the entire text of Pilgrims in a Sliding World up to reading public, but I will, in the next several weeks, share snippets of its prose in an attempt to examine how and why it did not (and where, on occasion, it did) work as a book.
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