Getting Ready

The writer abroad needs concrete as well as intangible skills, both of which this book will help you develop. Two capacities are essential: the readiness to embrace a new culture and the discipline to write about it. You may be tempted to just pack and go but advance preparation will foster abilities to help you thrive anywhere from Reykjavik to Vanuatu. Start now, close to home, to explore your own culture, commit to a daily writing practice, and begin advance research.

The Practice of Writing

Notice that we stress discipline over brilliance as essential to a writer. "Talent," said Gustave Flaubert, "is only lengthy patience." Writer and editor Gordon Lish, when asked how he chose students for his fiction writing workshops, said, "I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire." Remember this when the inner critic, that shadowy figure we describe in the craft discussion at the end of this chapter, argues that you have nothing to say. Ignore the voice that directs you to the beach instead of the desk. Pledge to write even when you're tired, frustrated, or depressed. Writing daily is akin to weight lifting and regular hikes to prepare for a backpacking trip. Initially, you may not eagerly anticipate that encounter with the blank page but little by little, joy might creep in.

Some practical considerations: notebooks and journals — and increasingly, laptops and iPads — are critical tools for travelers. Consider several types of journals, including a pocket-sized notebook for on-the-street reporting and a larger one for writing at home or on a train or in cafés. Choose lined or unlined, expensive bound books or cheap school copybooks; writing tools are an individual preference. You might prefer a small computer or tablet to register your thoughts in a safe place. Don't expect your memory to guard details you think you'll never forget. Always include dates, times, and places.

Reasons to write while abroad may seem obvious. Of course you want to remember the mastery of Chinese or those rainforest leeches that clung to your legs. But beyond the need for recall, what compels our writing? Francine du Plessix Gray said, "We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others." In the essay "Why I Write," Terry Tempest Williams includes some widely shared reasons — to record of her thoughts and share them with friends. But she also writes to migrating birds and her own ghosts, as a bow to wilderness and a dance with paradox. When you trust the writing process, unexpected gifts emerge. Tempest Williams ends with: "I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love." Start here with exploring why you write as well as travel.

Writing Exercise One

Dive into your first freewrite with "I write to ..." or "I write because ..." Follow that with "I travel to ..." or "I travel because ..."

The Journey's Narrator

This book focuses on nonfiction, which includes essay, memoir, documentary, travel writing, and other genres we explore in chapter 10. But the person who tells the story is not the living, breathing author. The "I" is a narrator shaped on the page, a partial persona. The voice you develop will also reflect a person changed by travel. By the end of this book, the writer who returns will be different from the one who embarked.

Recognizing who you are before you depart is essential. Writing your personal and social history is one way to make that knowledge visible. Writer and filmmaker Julie Checkoway suggests a model in the memoir Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women. She weaves personal history with the stories of resilience and strength of the women she met while teaching in Shijiazhuang, an industrial town south of Beijing. One woman struggled with a hand disfigured in an accident while working in a truck factory during the Cultural Revolution. Another searched frantically for a foreigner to marry in order to escape China. Alongside the women's stories is Checkoway's chronicle of self-discovery, a pattern common to sojourners abroad. We leave home to seek "the other" but find new parts of ourselves.

Little Sister opens with a description of the small New England town where Checkoway was born the year John Kennedy was assassinated. She lost her mother five years later; her father's silence and inability to face that loss shrouded her world. To keep her occupied, her grandmother sent her out back with a teaspoon to dig to China. This same grandmother would be banished from the house by Checkoway's father, leaving the author bereft. We learn all of this in a few scant pages at the book's start. The setup helps us understand Checkoway's meaning when she writes: "Girls whose mothers disappear can spend their whole lives digging and digging, searching the broad earth for images in near and distant mirrors." We're also prepared for the day when Checkoway, after completing her degree at the Iowa's Writer's Workshop, accepts the challenge from anthropologist Margery Wolf to search for the hidden world of Chinese women.

Checkoway explains further how her heritage and loss of her mother propelled her to seek other cultures. Youth, she says, creates an imprint — a "map" we follow throughout our lives. Depending on the contours of that map, some of us stay in our childhood places; others move outward. But our search is shaped by those internal longings.

As you prepare to leave the familiar living rooms, what is the map you carry? These may reflect the physical world — a deep, mysterious woods where you played as a child compels you to comb forests everywhere. A psychological map charts your place in a large family, or the quest for success embodied in an immigrant story. Cultural maps reflect class and social status. Who gets to travel? Are you the first in your family to go abroad? Where did your ancestors come from — were they fleeing violence or poverty or searching for new work or other opportunities?

Writing Exercise Two

List all the ancestors you remember and where they came from. Write about one, starting with "I am the daughter/son or granddaughter/grandson of ..."

Then freewrite on the map you use to navigate. Begin with, "I carry with me the map of ..." Bear in mind that when we "borrow" a writer's structure, we must later remove the scaffolding and find our own form. For example, if you begin with "I carry with me the map," later cut that phrase from your piece. Alternately, you could footnote Julie Checkoway as your inspiration.

Culture as a Map

Cultural roots. Cultural competency....