The world is full of stories: write them
Welcome to the first in a year-long series of blog posts from the Travel Writers’ Field Guide.
The Travel Writers’ Field Guide is a comprehensive handbook for writing while travelling. A practical, but beautifully produced, reference guide to best practice in travel writing, how to get published, how to write well, how to interview people and get the very most out of being on the road. It’s loaded with tips, advice, inspiration and some of our favourite travel writing.
But it’s more than just a book: it’s also a podcast and live talks. With this post, we launch the project, while the book and podcast will follow in November.
A Brief History of Travel Writing
From Aristotle writing the Poetics, the form of stories has long been considered and dissected. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes about form (the plot, in which there must be some discovery) and the content, which covers the language and ‘melody’ of the words, the characters in it, and the method of telling the story; who is the narrator for example?
Where does this intersect with travel? This is a predictably simple answer: stories about travelling. Our book is about making that definition more complicated because we want to answer a different question: what makes great travel writing? First, we must take a very quick look back into the history of travel writing as a genre.
Since man could speak or draw, we’ve been telling stories of exploration and travel. Pausanias (AD 110 – c. 180) was a Greek traveller and geographer who explored the Greek empire, writing down detailed notes as he went, the result of which was his Description of Greece. In it, he talks about architecture and natural history, religious ritual and art. His work left an important and, by many accounts, accurate description of the civilisation.
With a title that could be found in a library today, Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194), written in Latin by Gerald of Wales, attempted to offer a guide to the country. In Description of Wales (Descriptio Cambriae) he describes the good bits firstly about his fellow countryfolk, writing: ‘The Welsh go to extremes in all matters. You may never find anyone worse than a bad Welshman, but you will certainly never find anyone better than a good one.’ In the second book of the volume, he describes the bad bits.
Travel literature developing in China and across the globe
In China, around the 1300s, ‘travel record literature’ was emerging – a blend of narrative, prose, essay and diary. These were accounts that had an agenda, which mapped the cultural and topographical landscape in much the same way as a cartographer would map the geography. Similarly, Gilles le Bouvier, a royal messenger for Charles VII, travelled widely across Europe, writing about what he saw, not only for the king he served but for a wider audience.
It was an 18th-century audience that became most receptive to travel literature as it became a recognised genre aimed at a newly mobile public who were beginning to discover their country and their world. Diaries from explorers such as Captain James Cook, Robert Falcon Scott and Alfred Russel Wallace became best-sellers, as did poems, novels and plays based in exotic location from writers including Charles Baudelaire, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.
There is a wealth of work, too, from the rich toffs who embarked on the Grand Tour to plunder the riches of Egypt and fall in love with flower girls in Venice. It is, for the large part, a self-indulgent collection of overwrought meanderings, although often entertaining reads.
Who are some of the best travel authors?
The author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote several books with titles that could easily appear on the shelves of Daunt Books today: An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) – which isn’t quite the comedic romp it suggests (read Tim Moore’s hilarious Spanish Steps for that), but a valuable piece of writing nevertheless. It strikes another question we’ll ask soon: why travel?
Stevenson wrote:
‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.’
It was with travel authors such as Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux in the 1970s and 1980s, however, that ‘travel book’ as a separate section in the library’s Dewey Decimal Classification System was required. Here began a body of work from both writers who would set off, largely not knowing what to expect, but with the sole purpose of returning with a book for publication.
We cite these travel authors because they are masters of the genre: Chatwin’s sparse prose said as much about the art of travel as the culture itself, and Paul Theroux’s wry observations similarly offered a highly subjective view. These writers were the protagonists; it was their narrative, knowingly at the centre of the story, not just fly-on-the-wall observers. It is a style that we most readily recognise from newspaper travel sections and magazines today, yet as we are to discover, this is only one style among the vast range of travel writing.
If you’d love to turn your hand to travel writing or simply love travel literature, we’d love you to come back to our Travel Writer’s Field Guide. It won’t be long before everything gets underway! Stay tuned for more details on the upcoming podcast…