7 - Travel writing

Summary

Introduction

This chapter introduces techniques that are used in travel writing to create a strong sense of place and a meaningful, engaging narrative of a journey. I raise and briefly define well-established terms of modern rhetoric – that is, exposition, description, narration – with the aim of showing that a distinctive and enduring feature of travel writing lies in the ways it mixes these modes of writing. For example, Clive James, who has built a brilliant career working across genres (from poetry to novels to reviews and essays), has commented that it was in travel writing that he was able to bring his various skills as a writer together. He was able to do so, I think, because the best travel writing is a combination of forms – as Rory Stewart has pointed out, the staple of travel books today is ‘the blend of reported speech, historical digressions, landscape portraiture, theorizing and … comedy’, what he sees as a kind of patchwork ‘burlesque’. As in theatrical burlesques, travel writing is often an extravaganza of parody and mixed forms, and so comes with a playfulness that offers great freedom to writers.

However, like all blends, the key lies as much in finding a strong unifying element as it does in the choice of the component parts. Towards the end of the chapter, I will suggest that humour and analysis offer the travel writer ways of effectively joining the different styles they use, and of establishing an engaged, humanist attitude to the people and places they encounter, even if the journey has been a difficult one. Finally, you will find writing exercises drawn from the key techniques that I suggest.