Against Travel-Writing

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Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash

It’s early September and I’m finally leaving London for my belated summer holiday.

I’m not going away to write. I’m going away to escape writing, to swap the London pollution for beaches, Ouzo and trashy crime novels. I used to travel to write, and I used to fool myself that going away to write was a kind of holiday, one with a lofty purpose, the opposite of lowly tourism. That was silly. Writing trips aren’t holidays. They’re work. And not even the work part works that well. Just like professional “away days” feel more an excuse for bosses to trick employees into thinking they care about them, even as their pay and conditions worsen, transporting myself hundreds of miles away to a magical place where it’s just me, a desk and a sea view is a way of trying to dupe myself into becoming a real writer by leading a fantasy writer’s life.

I’m probably not the only author with a travel-writer alter ego who can’t live up to my best image of her. The philosopher Agnes Callard argues that travel “turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best”. As Callard intimates, the enjoyment of travelling (by which she means moving around for leisure rather than migration), and especially talking about travel, are staples of contemporary middle-class existence.

There are many moral arguments against travel, most obviously its contribution to the climate catastrophe and the claim that tourism (in particular, that which takes the monied northerner southwards) is a neo-imperialist pastime. But Callard examines a different kind of moral argument: the assumption that traveling is good because it opens the mind. By way of counterargument she mobilises a handful of writers who despise travellers as smallminded and unimaginative. For Emerson travel was “a fool’s paradise”; the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote that

Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

As for the tales travellers feel compelled to share when we return, fresh-faced, from our jaunts abroad, Callard compares these to “academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer”. No wonder I find travel memoirs so dreary.

I’m inclined to agree with Callard: travel for pleasure can be fun and relaxing, but it doesn’t make us more interesting people. So what’s the attraction of travel to writers? The most obvious answer is that it’s a way of securing the two things no writer can do without: time and space. Making writing a priority when there is so much else going on in our lives – day jobs, domestic duties, caring obligations – is an undeniable challenge.

Enter the writers retreat: that idyllic setting that promises a peaceful place to work without the demands and distractions of everyday life, good food and the wisdom of fellow authors. I understand the lure of these places. I have occasionally forked out a small fortune to head off to some tucked-away cabin, to be surrounded by the buzzing brains of other writers, swap progress reports over dinner, and breathe in brilliant ideas on early morning walks through dew-covered fields.

But there’s more going on than the quest for peace and inspiration. There’s something undeniably glamourous about the idea of travelling to write. It’s tied to the myth of the great writers as itinerant artists whose creative genius removed them from the boredom and banalities of day-to-day existence. I know this myth well: I’ve carried it around with me most of my life, a mascot tucked away in an invisible backpack. As I try to settle into a more sedentary lifestyle, the mascot starts to feel more like a gremlin. I yearn to shake her off because she shames me. It’s not just that the jet-setting writer lifestyle is so obviously elitist and grates against my environmentalist self-image. I feel naive for having bought into the portrait of the travelling artist in the first place. 

So as I sit down to write a defence of staying put to write, I do so with the fervour of a recent convert. I find it hard not to fall into the plot a bad bildungsroman, tracing my progress from wannabe author traipsing around the globe in search of adventure and brilliant ideas to mature settled author who finds meaning and wisdom while watching the grass turn from green to yellow on the patch of yard outside her window. I substitute one cliché for another.

Yet even as a desire to shrink my overgrown carbon footprint drives my decision to find fewer excuses to fly, it’s experience that draws me back to my desk. I don’t write better when I’m far away from home. In a recent interview the poet Eileen Myles recalls that when she first moved to New York in the 1970s she used to read and write in laundromats, because that was the one place she wasn’t constantly worried about where she had to go and what she had to do (the published interview is titled “For Poet Eileen Myles, the Best Writers Retreat Is the Laundromat”. Myles doesn’t use the analogy directly, but it captures the spirit of what she’s getting at.) I love the image of the laundromat, not just because it’s one of the few shopfronts that remains from my early days in my highly gentrified neighbourhood, but because it’s a reminder that time and space to write can be found close to home.

There’s nothing wrong with travelling to write (at least nothing more wrong than travelling as a run-of-the-mill tourist). But there’s nothing particular worthy or interesting about it either. In fact, as Myles suggests, it might be more creative to go around the corner, to be the writer on the block, than to try to insert ourselves into the make-believe world of the “real writer” by going farther afield.

To borrow from Callard’s notion of “the traveller’s delusion” – the fantasy that travel makes us better people – we might say that the belief that we write better away from home is the writer’s delusion. Just as travel is attractive precisely because it takes us away from the banalities of day-to-day existence, travelling to write makes writing into an activity removed from all the other realities of human existence. But whether we’re writing avant-garde poetry or speculative fiction, an article on Ancient History or a post on activist writing, when we leave our desks or kitchen tables – or the bench at the local laundromat – put down the pen or close the computer, we’re back in the real world.

Indeed, we never left it.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. You can support my writing further by buying my book  or getting me a virtual coffee.