Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Anti Travel Journalism"
Thomas Swick
The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale
swick@aksi.net
Why is so much travel writing so boring? Why on Monday morning do people talk about an Op-Ed piece they read in the Sunday paper, or a Sports column, or a magazine essay, or a feature profile, but never a travel story? Why do the travel magazines, lavish with tips and sumptuous photographs, leave us feeling so empty? (Journalism's tiramisu.) Why has the travel book become a rich literary domain, attracting some of the finest writers, while the travel story has remained the last refuge of a hack?
Much of it has to do with the very nature of the genre. There are people who are attracted to writing by the same misconception that attracts them to travel: An aura of glamor. Combine the two and you build a mecca for the chronically naive. Whenever I hear someone say, "I love to write," I am convinced that person doesn't know how to write; anyone familiar with the creative process -- the intense concentration, the endless problem-solving, the questioning and self-doubt -- would never make such a claim. "All writing is difficult," Flannery O'Connor once declared, "and if it's not difficult then it's not worth doing."
The same could be said of travel, and I am almost as wary of people who profess a love of IT. To go out into the world, to truly travel, is to be on constant alert -- discovering rhythms, deciphering patterns, finding connections, sniffing out incongruities, pursuing conversations (if only with oneself). It is not a walk in the park or an afternoon on the beach; it's a full-time job.
But this sense of difficulty and dedication eludes most of the practitioners. The vast majority of what falls today under the rubric of travel writing is neither travel nor writing. It comes out of an experience that is usually closer to a mindless vacation than a journey of discovery (it's rare that the writer travels alone), and its tone has more in common with a press release (with its breathless boosterism) than a work of literature (with its subtle ambiguities). Travel writing is the military music of prose.
Such a situation was understandable perhaps in the days when subsidized trips were common currency, and the puff piece the accepted (expected) payback. But many newspapers and magazines have commendably put an end to the practice, without a noticeable change in the product.
And why has the travel story remained virtually unchanged -- presenting all the predictable sights in all the usual cliches -- while the travel book has dramatically evolved? In 1975, Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar demonstrated that travel writing could be humorous, exasperating, censorious, colorful -- in other words, it could accurately reflect the nature of travel itself -- and it could ignore the monuments and concentrate on the people. In a few years writers like Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban came along, adapting the same personal approach but making it more analytical, realizing that in this age when everyone has been everywhere (or at least seen it on the Travel Channel) it is not enough for travel writers to describe landscapes, they must root out meanings.
Part of the explanation for the travel story's stasis is obviously the consumer orientation of much of our media. People need to know the essentials: where to go, what to see, where to stay, etc. Yet these are now provided far better by the Internet than by newspapers and magazines. In reality, the Internet now gives these publications the freedom to write.
What will they do with it? Will Conde Nast Traveler give up its love of lists for idiosyncratic essays? Will the New York Times finally add to its Travel section a signature columnist whose purview extends beyond the practical dilemma? Will people go to the travel pages not to find cheap air fares but to read a good story?
Obviously, a travel story cannot contain all of a book's magnitudes, but it can incorporate a lot of its properties. A travel story can, and should, have the same narrative structure. Like a short story, it should introduce characters and resonate with dialogue. It should, for once, look at a place from the perspective of those who live there rather than those who visit. It should possess a strong personal voice and point of view. (Almost all travel stories sound as if they were written by the same person -- or machine.) It should entertain and enlighten, and tell us something new. It should not only evoke the spirit of a place but, through original observations and thoughtful synthesis, attempt to explain it. And then it will inspire us -- not necessarily to travel.
Thomas Swick is the Travel Editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the author of the travel memoir, Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland (Ticknor & Fields, 1991).
Thomas Swick
swick@aksi.net
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