In his grandmother's dining room, Bruce Chatwin grew up looking at a strange piece of animal skin. He was told it belonged to a brontosaurus, though it had actually come from a giant ground sloth. Years later, this childhood curiosity helped inspire his journey to South America and, eventually, his book In Patagonia. The search for the creature's origins provides one of the narrative threads, but Chatwin soon becomes absorbed in the peculiar stories of the people he meets. His travels lead him through Welsh settlements, remote ranches, and windswept towns, where he collects anecdotes about outlaws, explorers, immigrants, and long-forgotten scandals.
The resulting book is composed of brief, loosely connected episodes, many of which appear to have little relationship to Chatwin's original purpose. Some passages concern his immediate surroundings, while others recount events that occurred generations before his arrival. Characters appear for a few pages and then vanish. A conversation with a stranger might send Chatwin in pursuit of an obscure historical figure, whose story leads in turn to another unexpected subject. The reader gradually comes to understand Patagonia through this accumulation of fragments, each revealing something of the region's history and the various people who have passed through it.
The book's peculiar structure offers an interesting lesson for travel writers. A journey can begin with a perfectly sensible itinerary and gradually become something quite different. Frequently, the experiences that linger in a traveler's memory are those that could never have been planned: an encounter on a bus, an unexpected invitation, an afternoon wasted in the wrong part of town. These incidents may seem like distractions at the time, yet years later they can prove far more interesting than the landmarks the traveler originally set out to visit.
Robert Louis Stevenson understood the literary possibilities of such inconveniences. In Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, his account of a walking journey through southern France, Stevenson finds himself continually frustrated by his donkey, Modestine. She refuses to maintain a reasonable pace, wanders from the path, and tests his patience. Much of the book's humor arises from his increasingly desperate attempts to manage the animal. Stevenson had set out in search of solitude and adventure, but his unfortunate relationship with Modestine becomes one of the defining features of the journey.
Had everything gone smoothly, Stevenson might have written an agreeable description of the French countryside. His struggles with Modestine provide something more entertaining, and perhaps more revealing. His irritation, embarrassment, and occasional tenderness are an essential part of the story. Even the most beautiful landscape can grow tedious on the page if nothing disturbs the narrator's composure. A difficult encounter, meanwhile, may expose qualities of temperament that the writer would ordinarily prefer to conceal.
There are quieter kinds of detours, too. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō records his travels through the countryside in a mixture of prose and haiku. He visits sites associated with earlier poets, observes the changing seasons, and reflects upon the passage of time. The narrative frequently pauses over small experiences whose significance might escape a hurried traveler. A particular landscape calls to mind a poem; an encounter at an inn becomes an occasion for reflection. Throughout the book, Bashō's attention moves between the immediate journey and the centuries of poetry and history that have shaped his understanding of it.
This sort of attentiveness requires considerable patience. Travelers often arrive somewhere with a list of things they intend to see, and the demands of an itinerary can make it difficult to notice much else. A writer might spend several days in an unfamiliar city, visiting its museums and monuments, without gathering material as interesting as a conversation overheard while eating breakfast. Such encounters seldom announce their importance. The writer must cultivate the habit of recording apparently inconsequential details, even when their eventual purpose remains unclear.
Of course, the contents of a traveler's notebook do not automatically make for good literature. A dozen amusing encounters might yield a dozen disconnected anecdotes. An unexpected invitation may be delightful to experience and tedious to recount. During revision, the writer has to examine these memories with greater skepticism, considering what each episode reveals and how it might contribute to the larger work.
Writers are often poor judges of which experiences will interest someone who wasn't there. They may devote several pages to describing a famous destination while passing too quickly over a brief encounter that contains the beginnings of a compelling scene. A writing mentor can identify these overlooked possibilities, drawing attention to moments of tension, unusual characters, or recurring concerns that the author has yet to recognize. Sometimes the most useful advice involves abandoning an elaborate outline and allowing the manuscript to develop around material that emerged unexpectedly during the writing.
There is also the question of arrangement. Chatwin's fragmented approach would suit certain kinds of travel narratives, while others might benefit from the gradual development of a relationship or the complications of a single journey. A writing mentor can help the author experiment with these possibilities, moving passages around, identifying connections between distant episodes, and determining where a digression has exhausted its usefulness. The freedom to wander is valuable, though a manuscript must eventually find a form that allows the reader to follow.
Travel writing has always depended upon a certain willingness to surrender control. The stranger who approaches unexpectedly, the road that turns out to be impassable, the town in which the traveler becomes stranded overnight: any of these might alter the course of a journey. Their literary possibilities are often discovered much later, when the writer begins sorting through photographs, notebooks, and memories. By then, the original itinerary may seem almost incidental. The places one intended to visit have faded, while some unplanned afternoon, remembered down to its smallest details, remains astonishingly vivid.
