A Travel Writer is a Thing

A Travel Writing Workshop – September 2008

At the Sedbergh Festival of Books and Drama, 2008, I stewarded two events, this involved introducing the speaker and rounding off, and facilitating generally.

The two events I got involved in were by Dea Birkett, who is a Travel Writer. I did not know this before, but a Travel Writer is a type of person, it’s a title. There are associations of Travel Writers. Another thing I was not aware of before, is that not only are certain people identified as Travel Writers, but that a large number of other people, who are not currently labelled as that, would like to be one.

Dea Birkett has had a number of books published, and writes regularly for The Guardian, including a column on travelling with children, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly given its subject matter, very popular, or so I’m told. Dea Birkett is therefore quite well-known among a certain segment of the population, though not, previously at all, by me.

The morning’s presentation was a workshop, entitled, ‘So You Want to be a Travel Writer’, and the evening’s was a talk on how travel can change you. In each case, because I was stewarding, I was invited to join in for free.

The morning workshop was attended by eleven people, including me, of wide age range (perhaps 18 to 80) and varied motivation, ranging from those who want to write a book, mainly about an event that has happened to them in their lives or about a project they are currently engaged in, through those who think they want to become a journalist, to those who, like me, found themselves there through some incidental circumstance.

Dea’s main theme is that to be a Travel Writer you do not need to go to far-flung places. It’s how you do it that’s important, not where. For example, she asked, how many of you have been to India? Two of us put up our hands. And how many have been to Folkestone? Perhaps surprisingly, only the same two put up their hands.

I seemed to be slightly unusual among the participants in having a wide range of places that I could choose to discuss and focus on. Mainly, I chose Kirkcaldy, which made many people laugh, including Dea, though I don’t know why it should. Clearly no one there, including Dea, had ever been to Kirkcaldy, so I was at an advantage in that regard.

The workshop was structured as follows:

1. Fear of Travel Writing

We were asked to write, on a Post-it note, what was our greatest fear of becoming a travel writer. This threw me a bit, as not thinking it something that I might become, I had nothing to fear about it, but I wrote, ‘Being Boring’. This was an acceptable response, as it seems to be the response that most people give, and Dea could ask to all, 'Think about it, what’s the worst that could happen?'

I now wish I’d thought fast enough to write, ‘The fear of becoming famous’, but there we are, I didn’t think fast enough.

2. What is Travel Writing?

A brainstorm session where we all contributed to what makes something a piece of Travel Writing. The main point Dea wanted to impress upon us is the word: fiction. Travel writing is a story. It may be based upon fact, but it’s essentially a story. It is the relationship between you and the sense of place that makes it Travel Writing.

3. Notetaking

We should all carry a notebook and write things in it so we don’t forget them, essentially conversations. I tried my trick of saying, yes, but how do you remember where you then put the notebook?, and this always is received with annoyance and incredulity by the sort of people who don’t lose their notebooks, because they have no concept of the mindset, of people like me, who do.

And you should only write on the right-hand page of the double-page spread. Then you can tear pages out with impunity and it’s much easier to find things when you need to remember a reference. Ah! said I, what about using a laptop. That would help overcome the problem of indexing (or could do) and you could write away without anyone getting suspicious that you were writing about them. Oh no, said Dea, I don’t think so.

But one of the other participants said yes, and what about taking notes on the mobile? What about that indeed! (see below)

4. Recording Conversations

Conversation Snatches I Recorded.

On going on a cruise:

“I never wanted to go on a cruise, I like my own space, you have to socialise with people and I wouldn’t like that, people these days like to go off and do their own thing don’t they? I’ve been on the QE2 from top to bottom but I’d never cruise on her, I don’t fancy being made to socialise with all the same people all the time.”

On being a travel rep in Rimini:

“I was a travel rep in the days when it had some status, if you’re old enough to know what I mean, these days they get all these young girls doing it.”

You need to practise recording conversations. So we were put into pairs and took it in turns to speak, then at a signal from Dea we had to record on a piece of paper what we’d heard the other person say. And actually, most people were extraordinarily bad at it. I find I’m probably quite good at it, and what I recorded is shown in the box. When I read it out, everyone laughed. Don’t know why they should.

5. Using All Your Senses

My Using-All-The-Senses piece:

The sea flapping on the beach, the mist from the Firth; a group of dogs running on the flat red sand and crapping; their owners a group of boys with shaved heads and curved-brim baseball caps see me taking a photograph. “Are ye taking a picture of oor dogs?”, they ask, and I think, oh oh – been here before, care needed, “Nah”, I say in my natural London accent, “The mist and the boats on their way out to sea”. They seem to understand only half of what I said, but it worked.

Travelling is a sensual experience: smell, taste, sound, sight, touch. We were asked to write a short piece that used all our senses. The pieces we wrote during this session were very short – only a couple of minutes – as it was a half-day workshop that apparently would normally take one or two days (see Travel Workshops website). Then we read out our pieces and were criticised on it. My contribution is in the box. Dea says that mine started unpromisingly and then redeemed itself, and in fact I was the only one who received no words of advice – I wasn’t sure whether I’m being dismissed as of no consequence.

6. What’s the Story? The Second Journey

The first journey is what happens, the second journey is how you record how you felt. We were each asked to remember a time of some trauma, and to write about it. Then we were asked to write about it again, from the perspective of the other party. I struggled with this, as I couldn’t think of a time of any great trauma in my journeys, though I was sure there must have been. I tried various avenues and none of them were really much trauma, so I didn’t get very far with this, lots of half-finished sentences. Subsequently I remembered the time that I was arrested for stealing a rifle in Zaire, but oddly, incidences such as this failed to come into my mind at that moment.

7. The Business of Writing

Don’t send in unsolicited work, people get too much of it and it won't get read. Enter competitions. Articles first, before books. And you must have an agent, but a good agent is very hard to get on the books of; you need to be very pushy.

To round off, Dea did two things: she first handed out to each person a postcard, and asked us each to address it to ourselves, and to write on it one thing that we promise ourselves we shall do. She will then post this postcard to us at a future date, so everyone in our household can see it, and if we haven’t done what we promised ourselves we would do, we will be ashamed.

On my postcard, I wrote, ‘Learn how to take notes on the mobile’. Upon reading this, Dea said that she didn’t approve of that, but I told her there were to be no judgementals.

And finally, Dea asked each of us what our book, that we were going to write, was to be about, and I said that mine would be a cultural study of national and social characteristics, based upon an analysis of the motorway service stations of Europe. And she seemed to think this was a fine idea, in particular making reference to Italian service stations, which are indeed rather individual, but then so are German ones, it’s probably just that she can cope with the German ones more easily, or perhaps she’s never been to Germany – after all she’s never been to Kirkcaldy.

At the end of the workshop I thanked Dea from my position as officiator – I tried very hard to do my formal bits professionally and only, I think, slipped up once, when during my rounding-off I said that I was sure we’d all learned something, though I don’t know what – by which I should have said that we’d all learned something individual to our own wants and needs, and what I actually said sounded rather rude, but too late, once you’ve made the boob, press on and remember not to make the same mistake next time, if there ever is a next time.

Carole the event organiser asked me if I’d run Dea back into Sedbergh – the workshop having taken place at Farfield Mill some mile or so outside Sedbergh – and I said I’d be delighted to, but it would have to be literally running her back, as I’d come on foot. Dea disappeared shortly after that, no one could find her, but she got back to Sedbergh somehow as I found her in the café when I got back there – I imagine she had visions of trotting along beside me pulling her wheelie suitcase through the cowpats, and so got one of the participants to give her a lift.

The evening presentation was a talk, in which Dea was going to tell us how travel changes you. What she actually talked about though was how she, when going on trips, becomes a different person for the duration of the trip. She had, some 15 years ago, managed to talk her way into joining a circus in Italy, where she became a performer in a skimpy dress who rides round on an elephant. She showed us photos of her in her skimpy dress. She’d also travelled by cargo boat from the coast of West Africa back to the UK, dressed as and behaving more-or-less as a young man. She is also one of the small number of people to have spent time on Pitcairn, where she lived among the locals. In each case, while away, she became someone else. When she got back, it seems, she reverted to being Dea. This is somewhat different from the idea of travel broadening the mind, which is what I, in my naivety, expected to come from the talk, but then I’d forgotten that she is a journalist.

While I was standing outside directing people into the Sedbergh School Library, where the talk was taking place, a transit van pulled up and about twelve heavies got out, dressed in padded flak jackets like you sometimes see the police wearing, and they marched purposefully up the street looking quite menacing, especially some of them who looked like just the sort of people you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of. I couldn’t see who they were from where I was standing but Andrew and Helen were much closer to them so I went over and asked what it was about. Immigration and Border Control, it said on their jackets, they said, and they were, so far as we could tell, marching directly and across the entire street, towards the Indian restaurant. All three of us agreed that, a) we're supposed to be an unthreatening, peaceful English country town, and b) how many Immigration and Border Control officers does it take to check the papers of two chefs and a waiter? It seems that this current fashion by the authorities of hassling Indian restaurants needs a bit of stamping on – the general hope in the pub that evening was that some wrists might get slapped soon.

Checking since, with those who were at either or both of Dea’s presentations, everyone seems to have thoroughly enjoyed them, such that I feel rather a spoilsport for being so equivocal. For me, it was more intriguing than enjoyable. I had no idea that Travel Writing is such an industry, or that it is an industry that so many people want to be a part of. It also raises for me the question of who reads a Travel Writer’s output, and why. I have a few ideas on this that I am in the process of putting together as an article, or a book even, as it does seem to be a phenomenon that has gone largely unreported.