Catherine Banner
  • About
  • The House at the Edge of Night
  • YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
  • News & Events

writing and (budget, long-distance train) travel

21/5/2013

3 Comments

 
Picture
When I was growing up, I loved the idea of travelling to different places. I hadn't been abroad very much at all and didn't have a passport until I was fourteen, so I'm not sure why this captured my imagination. But I think probably my wish to see the outside world came from an early knowledge that my way of seeing things didn't always match everyone else's. As a child, I was uneasy in groups based on incidental similarities of age, culture or background. I think I had an idea that by travelling to other places, I could encounter a global community with diverse points of view, a community that I already knew existed because I had already encountered it in books. The American writer Henry Miller said about travel: "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." It was this that I wished for, I think - to encounter many different ways of seeing.

Luckily, I didn't need to travel away from home to get these perspectives, because in many ways the world came to me. Cambridge, where I grew up, may be a small market town but it manages to seem a bigger, more cosmopolitan place than it really should be because it is, in parts, quite multicultural. On my ten-minute walk to school, I used to pass a Chinese, Korean, Indian and Middle Eastern supermarket, followed by a Co-op and an old-fashioned greengrocers'. There was also a church, a chapel, a Hindu temple and a mosque. I don't think I can remember a year when I didn't know from friends at school when Ramadan or Chinese New Year were approaching. University felt like moving to a new town, because even though I was still in the same place, all my friends had travelled to be there from different parts of Britain and the world.

I think writers have always seen themselves as part of a greater world and not just their own locality.  I've written about how my favourite writer, Derek Walcott, who did not leave St Lucia until he went to university in Jamaica, grew up seeing himself as part of a written tradition that spanned Europe, Russia and America. Many of the 19th-century writers I admire saw travel as an important opportunity. Here's Robert Louis Stevenson: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." And Mark Twain: "Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Now, I spend some time outside the UK each year because my family-in-law happen to be spread out all over Europe. I never see them quite as much as I'd wish, although the same is true with my own family who are mostly a few hours away in Britain. But I do get the chance to visit them every summer, and this is something I look forward to and plan for months in advance. The cheapest way to get across Europe, especially if you have to stop in different places on the way, is not by budget airline but by train or coach. This also means the journey is a big part of the adventure. That's a good thing if you like spending a long time on trains, and especially for a writer. As a general rule, the less money you've spent on the trip the more unpredictable the experience, and therefore the better the material you can get out of it afterwards.

Last year, I made a 35-hour train journey from the east of England directly to rural Sicily, during which I met a family from Naples who gave me an entire home-cooked dinner, was elected as simultaneous translator for three confused French women who only spoke French and two train staff who only spoke Italian, saw the sun rise over the back streets and railway sidings of Rome, and was woken at six in the morning (along with my friends the three French ladies, still with me) to be offered 'great deals on jewellery' by a strange man with a bundle of fake watches wrapped up in newspaper. I've crossed all kinds of cities without actually seeing them except for a few early-morning or late-night glimpses from the Metro or bus: Paris, Rotterdam, Brussels, Turin, Naples, Amsterdam, Basel. But I've also got to know many places as a second home that it never would have occurred to me to visit otherwise. On my first long trip, several years ago, I kept excitedly noticing little details - how the lampposts were different, the air was more humid, the food in the supermarkets was unfamiliar. Now, I still enjoy these details but without referring them back to the way things are done in my particular small town in Britain. They are just reassuring signs that the world contains many ways of doing things. And the truth is, identity is such a complex idea that if you travel far enough, you'll find people with whom you may have more in common, at a fundamental level, than the people who on the surface seemed just like you.

This summer, the trip will be just under 2,000 miles and will involve 60 hours of budget long-distance night trains - a new record. I'll be visiting family and friends in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland. And I'll try to record some of the places I see and adventures that take place along the way.

What about you? What is the longest or most eventful journey you've taken?

3 Comments

reading for inspiration

8/5/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Writers are often advised, especially when they are starting out, to read as much as possible, and as many different types of writing as possible, in order to learn their craft. This is often what we do anyway, so it's welcome advice to be given. I think, for me, reading widely and sometimes even quite randomly began as soon as I could read. When I was a little kid, I'd often be found poring over a telephone directory or a dictionary, or reading the advert pages of a catalogue. A slightly strange child... I guess I just really liked printed words!

There are times when as a writer you will purposefully stop yourself from reading too much: when working on a first draft, for example, or fleshing out the first hazy ideas for a book. But generally, reading is pretty essential to the writer's craft. Sometimes writers worry that their own style will be 'polluted' somehow. I think the solution is not to stop reading but to never read one author, genre or style of writing exclusively when you're at a crucial point in your own work. Reading widely opens your mind to all the different ways that words can be used and keeps your own style from getting overshadowed.

So just how wide should this reading be? I began thinking about this, and came up with a list of unusual and strange things I've read over the years in my quest to read as widely as possible. In no particular order, it includes:

- An ancient Bible I rescued from being thrown away, and the Hindu text The Mahabharata, both from cover to cover.
- Several footballers' autobiographies: I was a big Arsenal supporter as a teenager, and reading these books also taught me that there are some very talented ghostwriters out there!
- Plenty of classic long books like Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and Doctor Zhivago
- Plenty of classic short books, like The Little Prince
- Short stories: Raymond Carver is the best writer of short stories I know, if you need a recommendation!
- ...and several books that don't even have words at all, like Shaun Tan's The Arrival
- A Mills and Boon romance set in the Roman Empire: not a genre I'd probably read again, but romance writing definitely has something to teach us about what it's like for authors working in the strictest form of genre writing around.
- Every Greek tragedy and nearly every Shakespeare play - I'm still missing Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry IV
- All kinds of young adult books, from novels in verse (Make Lemonade) to the pioneering classics (The Catcher in the Rye)
- All kinds of 'literary fiction', from Anne Tyler to Milan Kundera. Books which are realist, surreal, magical, down-to-earth, philosophical, prosaic, epic, funny, tragic or absurd, which deal with the individual or the family or with great sweeps of history, which are set in every imaginable location real and fictional and in every time period when humans have inhabited the earth. Which makes you think, in the end, that 'literary fiction' isn't any kind of genre, really, just a collection of writers who don't write in a genre.
- Poetry of all kinds - in fact my favourite writer, Derek Walcott, is a poet
- Books on art, politics, languages, philosophy, history and travel
- Every funny book I can find - but sadly there aren't many out there!
- Writers from every continent of the world - from countries as diverse as France, Italy, Sweden, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Nigeria, South Africa, China, India, America, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad, Australia and New Zealand!
- and of course, all the books I can't even remember...

All this reading, as a writer, comes back to you. But there is one important thing I've learned: you have to remember to read as a writer, which means being alert to how the text was actually created rather than just sitting back and enjoying the show. It's a bit like watching a magician or illusionist at work. Recently, I went to see the great Derren Brown in his new show Infamous. While I was watching, as well as enjoying the performance, I was constantly trying to work out exactly what was going on: how a particular effect came about, what the sleight of hand behind the scenes really was that made the audience feel that specific emotion or reaction so strongly, whether we were being led along by the performance and forgetting to think carefully. Of course, I didn't succeed in working anything out! But with writing, which doesn't take place in real time, we have at least a better chance of figuring out what's behind the magic. If you concentrate and reread, you can often start to dissect what you're experiencing, and work out how it fits together, what was going through the author's mind when he or she created it.

So I think that advice is right: one of the most valuable things you can do as a writer is just to read, and to read as much and as carefully as possible. Of course, it isn't ever possible to work everything out. In fact, some of my favourite writers are the ones who frustrate me because I can't quite work out how they did it! How did George Eliot keep all the threads of Middlemarch in her head while writing one part at a time for serial publication, with only pen and paper? How did Virginia Woolf come up with the particular rhythm of her sentences in the last parts of To the Lighthouse? How did J.D. Salinger first create Holden Caulfield's voice, and how did he know it would jump off the page so convincingly? There will always an element of magic, too: something still to be discovered...

What are the strange and unusual things that you've ended up reading over the years? Do you think writers need to read extensively to learn about their craft? Let me know your thoughts, or even better, write me a list of your unusual reading in the comments below!
0 Comments

    Subscribe for updates

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    March 2021
    October 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from brewbooks, Kurt:S, gruntzooki, quinn.anya, Quasic, Tilemahos Efthimiadis, Vox Efx, Bright Meadow, hjconti