Voyages of Discovery
Posted on Friday, January 30, 2015 at 12:57 PM
Writers as travel guides for their readers.
By Peter P.
Jacobi
I recall a trip to New York City a couple of decades
ago, this one to serve as judge in that year's National Magazine Awards.
My assignment as part of a panel: to select the best magazine overall,
for the totality of its editorial quality, among publications with
circulation over 500,000. There were five finalists. I no longer
remember the five, only one. I no longer remember which magazine was
selected as winner, if it was the one I still recall or another.
But
my memory clings to Travel + Leisure because of an article in one
of the three issues we were each given for judgment. The article was
titled "A South Seas Adventure," and it was written by Charles Monaghan.
The subject was a far-off destination, New Guinea.
Wrote
Monaghan: "Somewhere there is a place that will change my life. Its
physical beauty will shock me into seeing my own world in a wholly new
way. The lives of the people there will be so sharply different from
mine that they will be a mirror to me, and in that mirror I will see all
my faults and fears and gather the courage to eradicate them. This place
will be so untouched by my civilization that I will be renewed just by
coming to know it. To visit it will be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, a
necessary adventure of the soul.
"That longing for such a place,"
Monaghan continued, "is buried deep in our psyches. It is an idea that
surfaces again and again in our literature and myth. And it surely is a
part -- a small part, sometimes a great part -- of the impetus that
drives us to travel, that makes travel such a poignant and important
part of our lives."
Sitting there, among other judges
gathered in a great hall of the building that houses the Graduate School
of Journalism at Columbia University, and reading of Monaghan's personal
journey, I thought that this longing he wrote of surely is a part of the
impetus that drives us to read because to read, I believe, is to travel.
Writers are, for themselves, travelers. And that means writers are, for
the reader, travel guides.
Traveling with Mind and Heart
It's
not physical travel we're dealing with, of course, even though the topic
might just be that: a trip to New Guinea taken by the writer suggested
as a future course of action for the reader. But reading is MIND travel
and HEART travel. That's what we're about when we put words on a page.
Begins
with the Writer Voyage
What we offer are VOYAGES OF
DISCOVERY. The writer, when he or she writes, makes/shapes/forms/creates
a voyage of discovery. The reader, when she or he reads, then
takes/accepts/experiences a voyage of discovery. There can be no reader
voyage without, first that writer voyage.
Make It an
Interesting Voyage
The task, a complex one, is for the writer
to make a voyage interesting enough, exciting enough, worthwhile enough,
entertaining enough, inspiring enough, compelling enough for the reader
to follow through and actually take the offered journey. It is our task
to find an ever clearer path to the reader's mind and heart. We need to
find the right destination and the right path and the right itinerary
and the right purpose, so to plan and then prepare and present a travel
package hard for the reader to refuse, hard for the busy reader with a
life of multiple other options to refuse.
Plan the Voyage
Know
what sort of voyage you want to undertake, and know why. Know what it
takes to get from here to there, from start to finish; what materials
you require, what directions will get you to the desired destination,
what obstacles might get in the way, what techniques you can employ to
overcome the obstacles and ease the passage, make it a pleasure to
undertake.
Take the Voyage Seriously
It's all about
decisions and consequent actions, this Voyage of Discovery, this writing
project. Stephen King says, "You can approach the act of writing with
nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair.... You can come
to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to
kick ass and take down names.... Come to it any way but lightly.... you
must not come lightly to the blank page."
You "must not
come lightly to the blank page." From idea generation forward, take your
voyage seriously. If you don't, you'll later find that the finished
product is not one that the reader will take seriously enough to expend
energy or time on.
Make the Voyage Purposeful
There
must be reason for what you undertake. There must be purpose. There must
be compulsion: something to drive you through all the labor that's to
come. Have you figured out your purpose? Is it to educate, to entertain,
to make your reader imagine, to make him or her live in the past or hop
into the future?
Map Out the Voyage
And after
you've determined the purpose of your literary voyage, what do you need
then? A map! Without a map, you wander here and there or worse, you
travel down a dead end. Beryl Markham, the respected writer of West
with the Night and noted pilot, addressed the issue of maps. "A
map," she mused, "says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely,
doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand.
Without me, you are alone and lost.'"
The pilot requires
maps. So do you, the writer. You need one for your Voyage of Discovery.
Out of an idea and out of material you have gathered, the collected
information, you must shape order. Your article, your story needs
structure, an architecture, a sense of direction, a logical progression,
a design that brings shape and meaning to facts. This is your map.
Taking
the Reader on the Voyage
An idea purposed for the reader,
then researched, reported, and molded into meaningful form: these acts
on your part precede the actual travel, the actual writing. With the
writing, your imagination must take wing; that is where your destination
comes into focus and where you provide the satisfying journey, the
details that convince the reader he or she has made the right choice to
travel along with you.
It matters HOW you write WHAT you write.
It matters how you choose the details for what you write. It matters how
you sequence the language for whom you have chosen to be your guests on
the journey. Know your audience. Know your reader. Try to enter the mind
of your reader and into the experiential life of your reader. What will
he or she know, not know, care about, not care about, want to find out
about, be enticed by, be excited by, be inspired by, be set to dreaming,
be set to desiring?
Yes, be set to dreaming, to desiring, to
inhabiting, to embracing, to devouring. Writer T. Jefferson Parker says,
"Leave your readers with something experienced, not just something read.
Give them an emotional reality. Make it impossible for them simply to
chuck your book [or article] into the wastebasket when they've finished
reading." Make it linger, haunt, last.
Go at the task step
by difficult step with enthusiasm, vigor, devotion, and belief.
Successful writing does require your enthusiasm for the topic, the vigor
in developing it, devotion to its content and message, belief in its
importance.
More next time on how to make your Voyage of
Discovery the reader's.
Peter P. Jacobi is a Professor
Emeritus at Indiana University. He is a writing and editing consultant
for numerous associations and magazines, speech coach, and workshop
leader for various institutions and corporations. He can be reached at
812-334-0063.
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