Wanderlust

I’m belatedly reading the New Yorker’s April 18th travel issue. Jonathan Franzen has an excellent Franzenian essay on traveling to the remote South Pacific island of Alejandro Selkirk, so-renamed by Chilean authorities to honor—or deploy as marketing force—the stranded Scot who is supposed to have inspired “Robinson Crusoe.” 

Franzen makes the requisite pre-trip trip to America’s retail temple of the outdoors: “Then I indulged in a little orgy of consumerism at REI, where the Crusovian romance abides in the aisles of ultra-lightweight survival gear and, especially perhaps, in certain emblems of civilization-in-wilderness, like the stainless-steel Martini glass with an unscrewable stem.”

I like a martini in the woods as much as anyone. But without a little self-discipline those REI stores can suck you into a meandering half-day adventure that finds you mulling life jackets in the canoe section when all you wanted was some protein bars. That’s the power of Crusovian romance.

There’s no quick and easy way to explain exactly what makes an oped good. At least I didn’t think there was. Then I met David Desrosiers, the publisher of RealClearPolitics. He shared a system that I will from now on use to tell writers how to amp up their work. And I’ll apply it to my own work. With a small modification, I think it can be used for any kind of writing. Here it is:

Fact: The most basic opeds have facts. But they can make you feel like you’re being strafed with buckshot. Right up until your eyes glaze over.

Logic: A better oped ties facts together with logic. If A then B. If you’re already wonkishly interested in a subject, fact and logic may be enough to keep you reading until the end. (Logic is less essential to non-oped forms of writing. But still desirable.)

Story: A very good oped has fact, logic, and story. If you want to go beyond preaching to the converted—which you should—a good yarn about a real live human helps.

Metaphor: The most advanced move. Metaphor, you could say, is the butterfly stroke of writing. The big wave. The grand pirouette. You get the idea.

Do you have rules of thumb that help you rate your own writing?

My book editor wrote yesterday:

“Here’s what I know. A couple years ago I was invited by Google Books to attend a daylong presentation about this issue. They do post a certain percentage of the book’s content (I think maybe 40% but I’m not sure). There’s some weird logarithm they have so that you can’t pull up the same content if you go back and search again. The deal with Google is that you can opt out of this program, but once you’re out you’re out, and the Google people showed some pretty impressive statistics about buy-in rates. Basically, they showed that if someone read six or more pages on Google Books then they clicked through and bought the book at some extraordinary rate. The point is that no one wants to read a book on their computer screen, so people are buying the book or downloading to their iPads or Kindles. So really, as much as it seems absurd that they post as much content as they do, their case is that it helps sell books.

“…I know it’s a shock!”

Authors have the right to opt out. Does anyone think that’s a good idea?

Does it make you cringe?

Today I had to choose some excerpts of my book to pitch to various magazines. It’s like listening to your own recorded voice—you think, “I sound like that?” 

I seem to recall David Sedaris doing a bit about working on a book and not being able to remember if he’d written about a particular scene in a previous book. He didn’t want to repeat himself. But the only way to find out for sure would have been to go to the bookshelf, pull down the old book, and read through it. And he couldn’t bear to do that, so he just took the safe route and avoided writing about the scene he had in mind.

That’s how I feel about my first book. I’ve never gone back and reread it, nor do I intend to.

Today, my editor ended up picking out a few passages to use as excerpts. I approached them as though with one hand over my face, peeking through my fingers…and breathed a sigh of relief. Still, I don’t know if I’ll be able to read the book in two years. 

Do you ever feel this way about reading your own writing?

When I was working on my new book “Wanderlust,” I kept coming across the same quote from Anatole Broyard, the late Greenwich Village essayist and editor. It is: “Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country.”

But while those words had clearly captured the imagination of many travel bloggers—don’t tell the folks back home—no one seemed to know the original source. I started hunting. I Googled. I searched two of Broyard’s books. Finally I determined that it must be in one particular essay, which I tracked down to “The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays,” published in 1989, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini. I found it on AbeBooks.

The quote appears at the beginning of Broyard’s essay Being There. You should read the whole thing. It says that “At home, we impersonate ourselves,” and that “When we travel, we are on vacation—vacant, waiting to be filled,” plus other things you’ve probably thought about if you’ve spent any time on the road. But here is the full opening quote:

“Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is invevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, ‘a centrifugal tendency.’ In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.”

So. Is travel like adultery?

After reading “Light Years” and some of the stories in “Last Night,” I was very happy to discover “There & Then,” a collection of travel writing by James Salter. This is what it says on the cover:

“Travel writing is something you do for the money, not a lot of money, but the working conditions can be pleasant…”

I’ve only just started reading, but I’m not convinced he did it for the money.

Laura Fraser in her travel memoir “All Over the Map,” on a form of journalistic hell:

“The bottom comes when I agree to do a slick women’s magazine story on “stumbling blocks to women’s friendships,” thinking it is a personal essay I can whip out quickly, but instead the editor wants me to interview random but demographically balanced and zip code-diverse women about their myriad issues with female friends. I just can’t make myself do another of those interviews with friends of friends about a vague topic, I can’t write another article that starts with a breezy dramatic anecdote, goes on to a nut graf defining a faux trends, then speeds through three more gripping personal stories, each illustrating a different aspect of the supposed trend, finally having a Malibu PhD who recently wrote a peppy self-help book on the subject weigh in with friendly solutions and bullet points so we can all stop thinking about it and go back to shopping already.”