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Writing With a Sense of Place: Reflections on My Travel Writing Process
How I read and write myself into a story
‘Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you — or unmaking you.’
Nicolas Bouvier, .
I owe thanks to the Birmingham Express and Star for my first published ‘travel piece’. The newspaper encouraged children to write letters, and it printed at least three of mine, the first when I was aged seven — I wrote about my father driving us over a thousand miles to Poland. In another letter I said I wanted to be an ice skater when I grew up, and my second choice was ‘to be an authoress…’
I’ve rarely laced up a pair of ice skates, and I’ve only recently begun writing seriously. Yet a lifelong friend recently discovered a pile of letters I wrote to her when we were teenagers. ‘Look,’ she said, handing me a 14-page-long letter, ‘you walked to the park to people-watch so you’d have something to write about!’ Page after page of observations of people: what they said, what they wore, the positions they got into as they snogged in the park. I don’t remember it, but the handwriting is mine. So I was always a ‘writer’, but any writing ambitions disappeared as the rest of life took over.
