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 depict who the author is in real life, writing about other people involves choosing which aspects of those people’s personas will best serve the story.
In travel writing, it also involves choosing which people (of the hundreds of folks one encounters over the course of a long-term journey) to include – or not include – in the narrative.
Not everyone you meet on the road merits a mention in your narrative
Modern travel writing is heir to some of humankind’s oldest literary forms, from the mythic second millennium BC Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, to the picaresque misadventures of Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century Don Quixote (thought by some to be the antecedent to the modern novel).
The term “picaresque” is sometimes understood as “an episodic recounting of adventures on the road” – and the challenge of episodic travel tales is that, apart from the protagonist and his or her companions, most of the people described in the narrative only appear in certain scenes, and don’t have a recurring connection to the rest of the story.
An early example of this in Pilgrims in a Sliding World is the appearance of “Michele,” a friend of a friend, and the young women she hung out with in Los Angeles’ wealthy Brentwood neighborhood:
After dinner, we all moved outside to an exquisitely-gardened backyard patio, where the girls smoked cigarettes and chattered like sitcom versions of characters from some Salinger novel. I could barely keep up with all of the talk, so I mostly just sat and pretended that I was an anthropologist sent by the lower-middle classes to study the behavior of rich people. The manic conversation centered vaguely around their attempts to get fake IDs earlier in the day, but occasionally deviated without warning into tangents about serial murderers, their parents’ sex lives, or their obsession with stealing packets of sugar from expensive restaurants. Dramatic and boisterous, the girls talked as if they were dictating to some unseen scribe—emphasizing certain words so deliberately that I could almost feel the italics.
As prose, this was an imaginative (and factually honest) description of how I perceived Michele and her Brentwood friends, but it begged the question of why – apart from the fact that I did, indeed, meet them in real life – I chose to include them in the narrative.
At a certain level I think I was dazzled by having social access to the kinds of houses I’d previously seen only from the outside (i.e. the kinds of houses whose yards I’d mowed and raked in wealthy corners of Seattle while earning funds for the journey the previous year). But beyond the novelty of low-stakes upper-class voyeurism, my experience in Brentwood didn’t serve any deeper or more nuanced narrative themes.
Depicting your friends carries its own set of narrative challenges
In rereading the pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World, it’s remarkable to see how much of its social interactions centered on friends I’d known well before the trip began. This included my college friend Jeff, who’d accompanied me for the entirety of the eight-month van journey.
The fact that this is the first time I’ve mentioned Jeff in the context of my never-finished first book is telling, since from the beginning Jeff wasn’t wild about being depicted in its pages. Unlike, say, Neal Cassady, who was happy to appear as “Dean Moriarty” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Jeff wasn’t interested in being mythologized.
I introduced Jeff in the early pages of Pilgrims in a Sliding World in this way:
Jeff is the type of person who would be offended if you told him that he couldn’t make two parallel lines intersect, but he’d never get around to proving otherwise. Jeff can take a neutral object, such as a supermarket cabbage, and convince you for several minutes that the object is the funniest thing you have ever seen in your life. …Jeff is a remarkably creative and intelligent person who is bound and determined not to use such talents to any end that might be construed as constructive. I secretly suspect that he considers apathy to be a moment-by-moment form of immortality.
Again, this was an imaginative (and factually honest) description of how I perceived Jeff, but, in the pages that followed, I never quite showed what Jeff was like – in part because I knew that the real-life Jeff valued his privacy. Part of the reason that Jeff didn’t savor the thought of me writing about his antics was that – like any exuberant young person who knew a more-responsible life lay ahead of him – he wanted embrace the joys of being young without having someone record and dramatize those ragged-edged joys for a reading public.
Should I have considered this before trying to write a book about traveling with Jeff? Probably, but at the time I didn’t have an objective sense for what I was doing; I was just giving long-term travel – and book-length narrative travel-writing –a try, optimistically improvising everything as I went.
Seriously, depicting friends effectively is a tough thing to do
Someone who would have been happy to have been depicted in his full youthful glory was my friend H-Man (aka Brian, an old college track teammate), who took a Greyhound bus several days out of Oregon to meet Jeff and I for Mardi Gras that year in New Orleans.
This is how I introduced our friend in Chapter Eight (“Enter the H-Man”) of Pilgrims in a Sliding World:
If H-Man could participate in any endeavor for more than a week without self-destructing, Jeff and I would have bought a Winnebago and taken him with us around the country. Unfortunately, our friend lives like a phoenix, continually re-animating himself from the ashes of his most-recent experience. H-Man is the kind of guy who impulsively gets obsessed with strange things, like Norse mythology or middle-aged women or jigsaw puzzles or the MTV Music Video Awards. In addition to lukewarm Pabst Blue Ribbon, his obsession at this particular moment is a spontaneously-conceived postcard project which requires that we all write absurdly cheery messages to people back at our old college. The one condition to sending the postcards, H-Man says, is that we only mail them to people who don’t like us.
As flamboyantly quirky as H-Man could be, my sense for what he was like formed years before the trip began. The few days he spent with us in New Orleans (while entertaining enough) couldn’t compare with the antics I’d witnessed as his classmate in Oregon, or as his apartment roommate during my landscaping stint in Seattle.
Moreover, what I didn’t yet understand when writing Pilgrims in a Sliding World was that – whatever H-Man and Jeff might have been like in day-to-day life – my friends did not merit mention the pages of my book unless they could serve its broader, big-picture narrative (and, as often than not, they didn’t).
Lesson #3: Travel books require reporting (not just recollecting)
Ultimately, a central problem with depicting your friends on the page is that you know them too well. You can describe them in a way that might make sense to people in your friend-group, but that doesn’t mean the reading public will be interested.
Granted, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road featured a narrator traveling across America with different combinations of friends. But readers tend to forget that Kerouac wasn’t merely recounting hijinks with his buddies: He was making a case for a new definition of freedom and connection and heroism in America.
Moreover, On the Road was a roman à clef (i.e., a fiction closely tied to real-life events), which meant that Kerouac could bend events and characters to fit his narrative goals. In this way, Kerouac was able to retroactively give his characters a sense of purpose – that is, a quest in their travel – and a sense of purpose is what keeps a picaresque road-narrative from getting too vague and random.
Since I never properly articulated my quest in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (apart from my vague desire to put off adulthood and see what might be possible in life), I populated it with a seemingly random assortment of people I’d met along the way. Since I was a young person looking to have fun and ostensibly prolong my youth, I tended to spend time with a lot of other young people looking to have fun.
The thing is, you can’t populate an effective travel book with a random assortment of friends and people you partied with. You have to find a sharper sense of what your “quest” is, to travel more intentionally, to meet people – ideally people who aren’t all that much like you – whose lives and perspectives might make your quest worth writing about.
In short, you have to get out and do some actual reporting – to move past mere recollections of people who crossed your path, and seek to meet (and depict) people who can make your quest worth taking, and your story worth telling.
(You’ll also want to quote them effectively, which is something I’ll touch on next.)
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