Journal With Impact: Travel Focus

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass.” Lewis Carroll

What is your own personal angle or curiosity?

In The Travel Writer’s Handbook, 2^nd edition, by Louise Purwin Zobel, he lists twelve main article patterns that are often developed in travel magazines and books. Each of them can apply to your own personal journals whether or not you want to share with others. Also for those of you focusing on developing a memoir, note if any of these categories might also fit as an umbrella outline for your book length draft.

Notice too that although the material may have a similar foundation in each of these styles, the main focal purpose is the distinguishing difference, whether generalized or viewed under a magnifying class. These descriptive details will affect which category the content will be best presented. He lists four main categories with a sub- point in each.

“From your own Experience: Personal Experience. Advice travel. Humor Article.

Special Audiences: Who travel. How travel. What travel.

Readers On a Journey: Travel Flavor Article. Definitive Destination. Gimmick travel.

Easy Pegs: Roundup. Historical. Here and Now.”

Action Steps: Trip Exercise from a personal experience.

Choose a location from a day or weekend trip you’ve had within the last few months. As you brainstorm through the questions mix up your methods to discover different aspects from different angles.

1. Cluster/brainstorm all you can remember. What did you see? What did you do?  What was planned? Unplanned?

2. Set scene.

Weather

Scenery

Food

Lodging

3. If you were to sum it up in one word or phrase what would it be? What specifically stood out to you?

4. Go back through your brainstorming and add in your feeling/reactions etc. Write them in with different color pens.

5. Choose a format: essay or article. Write your outline. Write your first paragraph. (More details in section 6)

6. Draft entire piece. Let it sit for a t least a week. Read it over and add in forgotten bits. Sit another week. Revise.

Or alternate version: Pick a place you’ve been to repeatedly and then tell it as if a one visit combining different insights.

Share: Were you surprised by a detail you didn’t notice before? What detail made it stand out?

Read deep, marcy

Construct With Memory

“It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight—they are like the attributes of love. … Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world.”   Eudora Welty

When memory is focused on place it has the potential to thread several character and plot threads throughout the story. As with Amy Cantrell, in Bridging Two Hearts by Michelle Ule, she has clear insight as to the emotional pain causing her practical dilemma. However she assumes she can tough out the situation without actually addressing the heart issue. She keeps attacking and failing. Until she stands still from the memory and then the extraordinary happens.

For Central Park Rendezvous, the memory of place threads through multiple stories and several characters weaving a variety of awareness depending on the narrator. As the letters work back in time, the gaze upon the bridge becomes more and more focused for the readers, enabling them to see its impact before the characters themselves. We stand on tiptoe whenever the bridge enters a story, waiting in anticipation. And we are not disappointed. We groan with frustration at the conflicts and sigh with satisfaction at the connections. Our personal memories loop into the narrative. We are drawn in by the close-up.

Journal Prompt:

            Take an important place for your character and make a list according to Eudora Welty’s quote above. Just as attributes of love can be expressed in different ways show how the focus on your character’s place can be a gaze of awareness, discernment, clarity, order and insight.

Share: Which one impacted her/his heart as extraordinary?