George East Column – The Reluctant Traveller!

As promised in the last edition of BWM, here is our first contribution by a travel writer who appears to be on the way to becoming a permanent writer in residence in Brittany. For his first observation on the arts, crafts and trials of writing about foreign parts, George East discusses his role as:

The Reluctant Traveller

Rene and Me

Paul Theroux once told me that travel writers should live in the place they write about. To be honest, he was talking to several million other people in a radio interview at the time, but technically I reckon I can claim he was advising me on my next move. Or rather, my next non-move.

I have always been a static travel writer, which is not such an oxymoron as it might appear As I see it, travel writing should not be so much about the travelling bits, but telling other people what places are like when you get there. Or what you think they are like. This way, readers can either be inspired to go and visit these places and see for themselves what they think of what you think of them, or be a true armchair traveller by staying put in it. Given what we are doing to the planet with all this gadding around, that may be no bad thing.

Armchair travelling may broaden the bum as well as the mind, but sometimes you can actually get a better idea of what a place is like by not going there. I don’t think I need to take a short or even a long walk in the Hindu Kush to know what it was like there at the time the great Eric Newby went there. I have also never been to the tiny mountain village in the Apuan Alps where he lived and wrote so memorably about in A Small Place in Italy, but thanks to him I think I know exactly what it is like there. Or was like at the time he was writing about.

Sometimes, of course, places of which we have read are very much not like we think they are going to be when we get there. This may be because we have read a heavily romanticised account of that place, or do not have the same take as the author on what we find there.

Not a few of my readers have accused me of romanticising or dressing-up the people and places in France I write about. Actually, I think they mean lying. On the other hand, I also get lots of letters from readers accusing me of stealing the characters and situations they have encountered when travelling or living in France. The truth is, I think, that all travel writers look for unusual situations and people and places to write about, and may even dress things up a bit to increase readability. But how could they do otherwise? Can you imagine how boring it would be for the reader if the writer just told the plain facts about his or her trip? Let us look at a small extract from a little-known travel book, and you will see what I mean, and perhaps why the book remains little-known:

Got up, cleaned my teeth, and took a look out of the window. Nothing much happening, so went back to bed.Got up again at lunchtime and went for a walk by the Eiffel Tower. Nothing much happened so went for a drink.

See what I mean?

For sure, I do not need to gild any lilies while living in and writing about Brittany. It really is a truly remarkable ( in the true sense of the word) place to be in, and its history and culture and legends and myths are a gift to any writer. Add to that that Brittany for me is a foreign culture and country within a foreign country and culture , and it may explain why the original year set aside for the writing of my book of ‘impressions’ of Brittany has now stretched into coming up for three. As I struggle to capture the essence of this part of a gloriously diverse country, I am, like the BBC likes to say about its foreign war correspondents, truly embedded here. When ‘here’ is in a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in a peaceful hamlet halfway up what counts as a mountain in Brittany and with a track leading from my back door to a thousand acres of stunning moorland, is it hard to see why I am taking my time on this one? Or why I agree with my mentor that while it may be sometimes better to travel than arrive, it can often be better not to travel at all when writing a travel book…

More about George’s stay in Brittany on www.george-east-france.com

Tags: Brittany Author, column, George East, living in brittany, Travel writing Brittany, Travel writing france, Writers in Brittany

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Authors Lives, Columnists, George East, View all Articles, Writers on writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.