How to Tell a Vacation Story (Without Putting Everyone to Sleep)

So this one time, I was dune bashing in the Wahiba Sands in Oman when…

As we’re entering the summer travel season, the subject of vacation is sure to crop up in conversation: at dinner parties, at the office, at a business lunch.

Wouldn’t it be nice not to bore everyone to tears?  Why yes, it would.  A few years back, I wrote a story about how to tell a good vacation story.  I wrote it because I was really tired of hearing meandering stories about lost luggage, rooms with crappy views, and literal blow-by-blow accounts of food poisoning.

That’s not to say that I always tell a great story — I have sometimes realized in horror that that the story I’m in the midst of telling has no point and isn’t very interesting. At that point, I believe it’s a kindness to change the subject. Abruptly.

Anyway, as you’re trying on your bathing suits and breaking out the flip-flops, here’s how to tune up your storytelling skills.

Rilke’s Failures and the Importance of Thinking Big

“There is only one way. Withdraw into yourself. Explore the reasons that bid you write, find out if it has spread out its roots in the very depths of our heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing was denied to you. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, “Must I write?” Dig deep into yourself for an answer. And if the answer should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question with a simple strong “I must” then build your life according to this necessity. Your life right down to its most indifferent and unimportant hour must be a token and a witness to this compulsion.”

That’s part of the advice that Ranier Maria Rilke famously offered a young poet in 1903 — it’s quoted often enough that it’s basically become a creative process cliché.

It’s still sound advice for any writer, but I think it’s important to understand that Rilke was describing his ideal — not his own writing practice.

At the time Rilke wrote his advice to that young poet, Franz Xavier Kappus, he’d just left Paris, where he’d been working on a monograph about Auguste Rodin, and studying Rodin’s creative process. A few months after he offered his advice to Kappus, Rilke wrote to a friend: “I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! Il faut toujours travailler – toujours – [Rodin] said to me once, when I spoke to him of the frightening abyss that open up between my good days…”

Those good days, any writer will recognize, are the good, productive writing days. Rilke was persuaded by, but ultimately unable to follow Rodin’s rallying cry: One must work always – always.

Rilke wanted to arrange his life around his writing, and nothing but his writing. Two volumes of letters to friends and family show that he was not always able to do it. But it’s important to remember that he did get an awful lot of important writing done in his rather short life.

The take away: If you make it your goal to put writing at the center of your life, and achieve only partial success, you’ll get a lot more written than if you make it your goal to carve out a small space in your life for writing. When setting writing goals, thinking big is better than thinking small.

And why am I thinking about all of this?  I’m prepping for a few classes I’m teaching this summer on the Business of Freelance Writing.  One is at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, on June 2nd, and the other will be at Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, in Sleepy Hollow, on July 14th.

Chekhov is Homesick – Perceptive Travel/USA Today

Midway through Anton Chekhov’s first trip to Western Europe, after he’d been blown away by Venice, pictured above, he started to get a case of homesickness. I immediately recognized this as “that mid-trip feeling”.

“I’ve seen everything and dragged myself everywhere I was ordered,” Chekhov wrote in a letter home.  “When I was offered something to sniff, I sniffed. But all I feel is exhaustion and a craving for a bowl of cabbage soup and buckwheat kasha.”  Read more. Also on USA Today.

Chicago Hotel Stories – About.com

Most travelers book one hotel per destination and stick with it. It’s certainly easier not to change hotels each night, but writers don’t always get to make the easy choices. (I know, I know, your tears of sympathy would fill Lake Michigan.)

I stayed at three different hotels on my recent trip to Chicago. All very different from one another in their food & beverage programs, and in other ways, and all recommended:

• Italian Craft Cocktails: The Radisson Blu Aqua and Filini (Pictured Above)
• Dry Aged Steak: The James Hotel and David Burke Primehouse
• Catalan Tapas: The Blackstone Hotel and Mercat a la Planxa

The Joys of Chinglish – Perceptive Travel/USA Today

The small print says this:

Welcome you to visit Mutianyu Great Wall. For your and others’ security, Please pay attention to the following items:

1. Please don’t carve arbitrarily on the Great Wall. Protect one brick and one stone consciously.

2. For your personal safety, Please don’t climb crenelated wall.

3. Please walk carefully on abrupt slope and dangerous way. Don’t run and pushes to pash violently and the laugh and frolic.

…

6. The fire is forbidden here. Please don’t take tinder.

Let’s just stipulate that giggling at signs in “Chinglish” — poor translations of Chinese into English –  springs forth from a not-very-nice place in the American soul.

Read about this place, and get a few more giggles before you get grim again on Perceptive Travel or on USA Today.

Other stories I’ve written on language and travel:

• There Must Be Some Misunderstanding: My seatmates have an argument during a flight from Shenzhen to Beijing.
• Dissolving the Language Barrier: In Mexico, I find myself speaking a language called “Spench”.

Spring/Summer Teaching Schedule

I’m teaching a few food writing classes at Gotham Writers’ Workshop over the next few months.

In New York City, I teach a one-day intensive class. It’s a long day, but a fun one, and I always bring chocolate. Upcoming dates:

• March 23rd
• May 19th
• June 29th

I also teach food writing online. My next class starts on April 11th, and lasts for ten weeks.  It’s also a lot of fun, but students supply their own chocolate.

Updated: I’m leading a food and travel writing workshop on May 12th, from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at East Line Books, an independent bookshop in Clifton Park, New York.  (Albany area.)

But Wait, There’s More:

I’m also offering two classes at The Arts Center of The Capital Region, in industrial chic Troy, New York.

• The Business of Freelance Writing: June 2nd, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Devouring the World: Food and Travel Writing Workshop: four evening sessions, starting July 9th.

Is Travel Narrative Bullshit?

Las Vegas, as a city, has long been a reliable creative irritant to the sensibilities of travel writers who work in a genre called “literary”, “narrative”, “nonfiction-creative”.

The city’s shiny surfaces candy-shell over a variety of social cankers, plus real people live their lives there, and any of these conditions alone, or all of them together, make for a good subject. See, for instance, Stilettos in Paris, In the Neon Boneyard, The Las Vegas Imposter, Road Trip.

Two years ago, I read John D’Agata’s  “What Happens There”, an essay  about Las Vegas in The Believer,  and About a Mountain, the same essay at book length.

I found them both satisfying, which is a high compliment. D’Agata articulated much of what I’d perceived in my visits to Vegas.  His writing allowed my experience to make larger sense.

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up The Lifespan of a Fact, by D’Agata, and Jim Fingal, who fact checked the essay at magazine length. The book is the back-and-forth between the two, as Fingal reckons with the “liberties” D’Agata took with facts.

The liberties are myriad — massaged quotes, multiple elisions,  and many changes for poetic reasons: the rhythm of thirty-four works better than thirty-one; a description of a van as pink instead of purple, because purple has two beats and pink has one; four deaths from cancer on a particular day instead of the factual eight, because it worked better in a list for the numbers to descend.

Read the rest at Perceptive Travel. I’m still really troubled by the notion that consensus equals truth.  And in case you’re wondering, the photo above is a detail of a ceiling at Wynn Las Vegas, which I took during a 2008 visit.