Next to knowing how to write about people, you should know how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
In a few cases you'll need only a paragraph or two to sketch the setting of an event. But more often you'll need to evoke the mood of a whole neighborhood or town to give texture to the story you're telling. And in certain cases, such as the travel piece itself—that hardy form in which you recall how you took a boat through the isles of Greece or went backpacking in the Rock-ies—descriptive detail will be the main substance.
Writing About Places: The Travel Article 117
Whatever the proportion, it would seem to be relatively easy.
The dismal truth is that its very hard. It must be hard, because its in this area that most writers—professional and amateur—
produce not only their worst work but work that is just plain ter-rible. The terrible work has nothing to do with some terrible flaw of character. On the contrary, it results from the virtue of enthusiasm. Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it—and "all" is what we don't want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else's? What can he tell us that we don't already know? We don't want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hear-ing about.
It's natural for all of us when we have gone to a certain place to feel that we are the first people who ever went there or thought such sensitive thoughts about it. Fair enough: it's what keeps us going and validates our experience. Who can visit the Tower of London without musing on the wives of Henry VIII, or visit Egypt and not be moved by the size and antiquity of the pyramids? But that is ground already covered by multitudes of people. As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells—and keep an objective eye on the reader. The article that records everything you did on your trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate the reader? It won't.
The mere agglomeration of detail is no free pass to the reader's interest. The detail must be significant.
The other big trap is style. Nowhere else in nonfiction do writers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes. Adjec-tives you would squirm to use in conversation—"wondrous,"
"dappled," "roseate," "fabled," "scudding"—are common
cur-118 ON WRITING WELL
rency. Half the sights seen in a day's sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills and covered bridges; they are certified for quaintness. Towns situated in hills (or foothills) are nestled—I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills—and the countryside is dotted with byways, preferably half forgotten. In Europe you awake to the clip-clop of horse-drawn wagons along a history-haunted river; you seem to hear the scratch of a quill pen. This is a world where old meets new—old never meets old.
It's a world where inanimate objects spring to life: storefronts smile, buildings boast, ruins beckon and the very chimneytops sing their immemorial song of welcome.
Travelese is also a style of soft words that under hard exami-nation mean nothing, or that mean different things to different people: "attractive," "charming," "romantic." To write that "the city has its own attractiveness" is no help. And who will define
"charm," except the owner of a charm school? Or "romantic"?
These are subjective concepts in the eye of the beholder. One man's romantic sunrise is another man's hangover.
How can you overcome such fearful odds and write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles—
one of style, the other of substance.
First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it's probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them. Also resist straining for the luminous lyri-cal phrase to describe the wondrous waterfall. At best it will make you sound artificial—unlike yourself—and at worst pompous. Strive for fresh words and images. Leave "myriad"
and their ilk to the poets. Leave "ilk" to anyone who will take it away.
As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don't write that "the shore was scattered with rocks" or that "occasionally a seagull flew over." Shores have a tendency to
Writing About Places: The Travel Article 119
be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Elimi-nate every such fact that is a known attribute: don't tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they do useful work.
I'll give you some examples from various writers, widely dif-ferent in temperament but alike in the power of the details they choose. The first is from an article by Joan Didion called "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." It's about a lurid crime that occurred in the San Bernardino Valley of California, and in this early passage the writer is taking us, as if in her own car, away from urban civilization to the lonely stretch of road where Lucille Millers Volkswagen so unaccountably caught fire:
This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers school. "We were just crazy kids," they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every 38 lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from some-where else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to the new style.
Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive west from San
120 ON WRITING WELL
Bernardino out Foothill Boulevard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the Forty Winks Motel. Past the motel that is 19 stucco tepees: "SLEEP IN A WIGWAM—GET MORE FOR YOUR WAMPUM." Past Fontana Drag City and Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop A Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at the corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means "Forbidden Seas," the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind, "HALF-ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS! TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 DOWN." It is the trail of an intention gone hay-wire, the flotsam of the New California. But after a while the signs thin out on Carnelian Avenue, and the houses are no longer the bright pastels of the Springtime Home owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow a few grapes and keep a few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road climbs and even the bungalows are few, and here—desolate, roughly surfaced, lined with eucalyptus and lemon groves—is Banyan Street.
In only two paragraphs we have a feeling not only for the tackiness of the New California landscape, with its stucco tepees and instant housing and borrowed Hawaiian romance, but for the pathetic impermanence of the lives and pretensions of the people who have alighted there. All the details—statistics and names and signs—are doing useful work.
Concrete detail is also the anchor of John McPhee s prose.
Coming Into the Country, his book about Alaska—to choose one example from his many craftsmanlike books—has a section devoted to the quest for a possible new state capital. It takes McPhee only a few sentences to give us a sense of what's wrong with the present capital, both as a place to live and as a place for lawmakers to make good laws:
Writing About Places: The Travel Article 121
A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind. There are railings along the streets by which senators and representatives can haul themselves to work. Over the past couple of years, a suc-cession of wind gauges were placed on a ridge above the town. They could measure velocities up to 200 miles per hour.
They did not survive. The taku winds tore them apart after driving their indicators to the end of the scale. The weather is not always so bad; but under its influence the town took shape, and so Juneau is a tight community of adjacent build-ings and narrow European streets, adhering to its mountain-sides and fronting the salt water. . . .
The urge to move the capital came over Harris during those two years [in the Alaska State Senate], Sessions began in January and ran on at least three months, and Harris devel-oped what he called "a complete sense of isolation—stuck there. People couldn't get at you. You were in a cage. You talked to the hard lobbyists every day. Every day the same people. What was going on needed more airing."
The oddity of the city, so remote from the ordinary American experience, is instantly clear. One possibility for the legislators was to move the capital to Anchorage. There at least people wouldn't feel they were in an alien town. McPhee distills its essence in a paragraph that is brilliant both in detail and in metaphor:
Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders. Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civ-ilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an
122 ON WRITING WELL
American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchor-age is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque.
What McPhee has done is to capture the idea of Juneau and Anchorage. Your main task as a travel writer is to find the cen-tral idea of the place you're dealing with. Over the decades countless writers have tried to harness the Mississippi River, to catch the essence of the mighty highway that runs down the pious center of America, often with Biblical wrath. But nobody has done it more succinctly than Jonathan Raban, revisiting the Midwestern states inundated by the rivers recent massive floods. Here's how his article begins:
Flying to Minneapolis from the West, you see it as a theo-logical problem.
The great flat farms of Minnesota are laid out in a ruled grid, as empty of surprises as a sheet of graph paper. Every gravelled path, every ditch has been projected along the lati-tude and longilati-tude lines of the township-and-range-survey system. The farms are square, the fields are square, the houses are square; if you could pluck their roofs off from over people's heads, you'd see families sitting at square tables in the dead center of square rooms. Nature has been stripped, shaven, drilled, punished and repressed in this right-angled, right-thinking Lutheran country. It makes you ache for the sight of a rebellious curve or the irregular, dappled colour of a field where a careless farmer has allowed corn and soybeans to cohabit.
But there are no careless farmers on this flight path. The landscape is open to your inspection—as to God's—as an enormous advertisement for the awful rectitude of the
peo-Writing About Places: The Travel Article 123
pie. There are no funny goings-on down here, it says; we are plain upright folk, fit candidates for heaven.
Then the river enters the picture—a broad serpentine shadow that sprawls unconformably across the checkerboard.
Deviously winding, riddled with black sloughs and green cigar-shaped islands, the Mississippi looks as if it had been put here to teach the god-fearing Midwest a lesson about stubborn and unregenerate nature. like John Calvin's bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland.
When people who live on the river attribute a gender to the Mississippi, they do so without whimsy, and nearly always they give it their own sex. "You better respect the river, or he'll do you in," growls the lockmaster. "She's mean—she's had a lot of people from round here," says the waitress at the lunch counter. When Eliot wrote that the river is within us (as the sea is all about us), he was nailing something true in an everyday way about the Mississippi. People do see its muddy turmoil as a bodying-forth of their own turbulent inner selves.
When they boast to strangers about their rivers wantonness, its appetite for trouble and destruction, its floods and drown-ings, there's a note in their voices that says, / have it in me to do that... I know how it feels.
What could be luckier for a nonfiction writer than to live in America? The country is unendingly various and surprising.
Whether the locale you write about is urban or rural, east or west, every place has a look, a population and a set of cultural assumptions unlike any other place. Find those distinctive traits.
The following three passages describe parts of America that could hardly be more different. Yet in each case the writer has given us so many precise images that we feel we are there. The first excerpt, from "Halfway to Dick and Jane: A Puerto Rican Pilgrimage," by Jack Agueros, describes the Hispanic
neighbor-124 ON WRITING WELL
hood of the writer s boyhood in New York, a place where differ-ent principalities could exist within a single block:
Every classroom had ten kids who spoke no English.
Black, Italian, Puerto Rican relations in the classroom were good, but we all knew we couldn't visit one another's neigh-borhoods. Sometimes we could not move too freely within our own blocks. On 109th, from the lamp post west, the Latin Aces, and from the lamp post east, the Senecas, the "club" I belonged to. The kids who spoke no English became known as the Marine Tigers, picked up from a popular Spanish song.
The Marine Tiger and the Marine Shark were two ships that sailed from San Juan to New York and brought over many, many migrants from the island.
The neighborhood had its boundaries. Third Avenue and east, Italian. Fifth Avenue and west, black. South, there was a hill on 103rd Street known locally as Cooney's Hill. When you got to the top of the hill, something strange happened: Amer-ica began, because from the hill south was where the "Ameri-cans" lived. Dick and Jane were not dead; they were alive and well in a better neighborhood.
When, as a group of Puerto Rican kids, we decided to go swimming in Jefferson Park Pool, we knew we risked a fight and a beating from the Italians. And when we went to La Milagrosa Church in Harlem, we knew we risked a fight and a beating from the blacks. But when we went over Cooney's Hill, we risked dirty looks, disapproving looks, and ques-tions from the police like "What are you doing in this neigh-borhood?" and "Why don't you kids go back where you belong?"
Where we belonged! Man, I had written compositions about America. Didn't I belong on the Central Park tennis courts, even if I didn't know how to play? Couldn't I watch Dick play? Weren't these policemen working for me too?
Writing About Places: The Travel Article 125
Go from there to a small town in East Texas, just across the border from Arkansas. This piece by Prudence Mackintosh ran in Texas Monthly, a magazine I enjoy for the aliveness with which she and her fellow Texas writers take me—a resident of mid-Manhattan—to every corner of their state.
I gradually realized that much of what I had grown up believing was Texan was really Southern. The cherished myths of Texas had little to do with my part of the state. I knew dogwood, chinaberry, crape myrtle, and mimosa, but no bluebonnets or Indian paintbrush. Although the Four States Fair and Rodeo was held in my town, I never really learned to ride a horse. I never knew anyone who wore cowboy hats or boots as anything other than a costume. I knew farmers whose property was known as Old Man So-and-so s place, not ranches with their cattle brands arched over entrance gates.
Streets in my town were called Wood, Pine, Olive, and Boule-vard, not Guadalupe and Lavaca.
Go still farther west—to Muroc Field, in California's Mojave Desert, the one place in America that was hard and desolate enough, as Tom Wolfe explains in the brilliant early chapters of The Right Stuff, for the Army Air Force to use when it set out a generation ago to break the sound barrier.
It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since
It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since