You Can’t Write a Good Travelogue While You’re Still on the Road

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ~JRR Tolkien

Ah yes, some of the most famous travel words we know in contemporary literature (and for the record, some of my favorites), from JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

The lure of travel, and of travel stories, is the sensation, nay, the promise, of change. Those undertaking the journey will be changed, and we readers get to change a little bit ourselves, piggybacking on their story. This, dear reader, is what good memoirs are all about: transformation, and the reader gets to have it relatively pain-free.

But not the writer.

Later, after the fact, we can see our transformations make the best stories. Most of the time, we don’t love the experiences while we’re in the middle of them. It was true for Frodo and Bilbo, and it’s true for us, as well.

You can’t write a road book while you’re still on the road.

The Problem of Perspective

In order to have anything useful to say about our experiences, we need a certain amount of distance from them. Unfortunately, a lot of people make the error of trying to tell their stories while they’re still in the middle of the story.

This isn’t simply a question of not knowing “how the story ends.” I mean something more fundamental: the ability to see the major story arc for what it is.

The need for distance applies to stories of all sorts: the career journey, personal development, any kind of memoir, and most popular these days, the spiritual journey.

No matter what your goal is—you want a cathartic experience; to make people laugh or cry or feel inspired to change their lives—you need to be NO LONGER ON the journey in order to make this work. And I’m talking here about metaphorical journeys (though the same applies to physical ones).

That’s because we don’t typically recognize the important moments for what they are until later. On a day to day basis, we track a lot of details that don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things.

Don’t believe me? If you’ve ever kept a diary or a journal, I suggest you pull out an older volume and read through a week or two of entries at random. I predict that overall, you’ll find a litany of daily minutiae; things you wouldn’t remember if you hadn’t written them down and that you didn’t care that you forgot.

It’s only once we ourselves have changed that we can look back at the journey of our transformation. Once we’ve figured out where we’re going, we can look back from that vantage point. Along the way, everything tends to be a mess.

Diary Versus Travelogue or Memoir

When Bilbo came back from his adventures with the dwarves, he wrote an account of his experiences (we got to read about them in The Hobbit). He certainly wasn’t writing them down while he was escaping from trolls, defeating a dragon, or picking up a magical ring.

If Bilbo had kept a travelogue as he was going, it would have read like a…well, a travel diary! Because that’s what it would be. I can imagine complaints about cold, damp campsites, dubious meals, and the unpleasant habits of his travel companions. Think about the last time you traveled. We spend so much energy packing, planning where we’re going to spend the night, and on what and when we are going to eat. Who back home wants to hear all that crap?

The difference between a diary and the later memoir of our adventures isn’t only about the details that we include, though most people think so. It’s about the details we leave out. When we omit, we also emphasize. This kind of magic is akin to a sculptor creating through subtraction—we find the David by chiseling away the rock.

At the time, the brush with the trolls seemed like a big deal—but not later, after having overcome the dragon Smaug. Can you imagine if Bilbo had stopped the story after the trolls?

We’d have a completely different kind of story, one that misses most of the transformation.

When we know what to keep or omit, we can more easily see how the details and events that remain stand in relation to each other; how they shape each other, and us.

The Seductive Danger of Writing About Your Own Experiences

In a way, writing about our own experiences is easier than writing about other people. After all, these events happened to us. We don’t need to consult or interview someone else. We don’t have to find sources and cite them. It’s ours; nobody can take that from us.

The danger is (other than a faulty memory, perhaps!) that everything that happens to us feels important because it happened to us. If I stub my toe, that’s going to be very important to me (at least in the moment). But while you might feel badly for me, you’re not the one limping, and you’ll probably forget about it right away.

While everything that you experience is important to you, unless it’s actually important, your readers will be bored by most of it. If they stick around long enough to hear you whine about your stubbed toe, they’ll be rolling their eyes. But mostly, they’re not going to stick around.

Bottom Line

Not every event, feeling, or conversation is equally important. Even if, at the time, they seem to be significant. When we are in the middle of the situation, we can’t usually tell the difference.

In practical terms, what this means for your writing is that you need to create time and space between what happens to you, and your writing about these events. It’s the only way you’ll be able to cultivate the outside perspective you’ll need to evaluate what’s important, what needs to be left out, and what the change truly is. Only then can you create your own David.

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Struggling to create some space between what happened to you and writing about it? A coaching session or book structure intensive may be right for you.

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Stories look very different up close, when you’re still in them. CC image “Brave Men on Cables” courtesy of John Loo on Flickr. Some rights reserved.