The Art Of Travel And The Art Of Writing
By Mary E. Martin

In Alain de Botton’s engaging book, The Art of Travel, he
distinguishes between the anticipation and recollection of
travel versus the reality of actually traveling.

When we anticipate, we study travel brochures and create in our
imagination all sorts of exotic adventures, lying ahead of us.
Once really there, we photograph the Eiffel Tower with our
friends or family, their arms slung over one another’s shoulders
and grinning into the camera. That forms the recollection, the
moments we choose to remember.

Magically gone from memory are the delayed flight, the lousy
food and the hotel room overlooking the alley, where the garbage
collectors banged tins at 5am. But, if we otherwise enjoy
ourselves, we select those ‘good moments’ and photograph them to
construct a different reality from the real reality.

De Botton’s next idea is fascinating. He says that’s exactly
what the artist does. Whether writing a novel, painting a
picture or scoring a symphony, the artist imagines the outline
of the work [anticipates the delights of the trip] then selects
that which is felt to have artistic value [forgets the garbage
men and includes friends at the Eiffel Tower]. Just as the
traveler now has a fine and satisfying memory of the trip, the
artist has a wonderful novel, painting or musical score. The
artist has created art through imagination, selection, rejection
and combination of artistic elements resulting in something new.
The happy traveler has created a wonderful trip.

Then he tells of a man who had a very peculiar experience.
After feasting his eyes upon paintings by Jan Steen and
Rembrandt, this traveler anticipated beauty, joviality and
simplicity in Holland. Many paintings of laughing, carousing
cavaliers had fixed this image in his mind, along with quaint
houses and canals. But on a trip to Amsterdam and Haarlem, he
was strangely disappointed.

No, according to De Botton, the paintings had not lied.
Certainly, there were a number of jovial people and pretty maids
pouring milk, but the images of them were diluted in this
traveler’s mind, by all the other ordinary, boring things he
saw. Such commonplace items simply did not fit his mental
picture. Thus, reality did not compare to an afternoon of
viewing the works of Rembrandt in a gallery. And why not?
Because Rembrandt and Steen had, by selecting and combining
elements, captured the essence of the beauty of Holland, thereby
intensifying it.

This is exactly what a writer or any artist tries to do and as
a traveler, you may do much the same thing

When writing about a day in your protagonist’s life, you don’t
start with what he had for breakfast or that his car wouldn’t
start unless it’s germane to the plot or his character. You
compress. You select and embellish. You toss out. All the
details of your story must combine to intensify real life in
order to create something interesting and of artistic merit.
When I started writing the first novel in the Osgoode Trilogy,
Conduct in Question, I had to learn it wasn’t necessary to build
the whole city with lengthy descriptions of setting and
character, before Harry Jenkins [the protagonist lawyer] could
do anything. But many nineteenth century novelists did write
numerous pages with glowing descriptions of the Scottish moors
or a county hamlet. And that was necessary because, with the
difficulty of travel, a reader might well need help in picturing
the setting. But today, with the ease of travel, the surfeit of
film, web and television images, no reader needs more than the
briefest description. Just write walking down Fifth Avenue and
the reader immediately gets the picture.

In a novel, usually only the most meaningful, coherent thoughts
are included, unless you are James Joyce, the brilliant stream
of consciousness writer. And so, you as the writer can order
your protagonists thoughts so as to make complete and utter
sense apparently the first time. In the Osgoode Trilogy, the
protagonist, Harry Jenkins, does lots of thinking and analyzing
[the novels are mysteries, after all]. But his coherence of
thought is only produced after much editing and revising. Not
much like real life, you say?

Same for dialogue. Interesting characters in books speak better
and much more on point than people really do, partly because the
writer is able to take back words. In real life, we often wish
in retrospect, if only I had said this or that to set him
straight. No problem for the writer. Hit the delete button and
let him say something truly sharp and incisive.

And so, after comparing what the traveler and the writer do,
what can we conclude? I quote De Botton in the Art of Travel.

The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress,
they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to
critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus
lend to life vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the
distracting woolliness of the present.

And so therein lies the difference between Art and Life! And
so, the similarity between the traveler and writer.

About the Author: This is the first in a series of articles
about travel and writing by Mary E. Martin, the author of the
Osgoode Trilogy [Conduct in Question, Final Paradox and A Trial
of One]. To sample her writing, please visit
http://www.maryemartin.com and
http://www.authorsden.com/maryemartin.

Source: http://www.isnare.com

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