As Twitter followers may know, I am currently on holiday in Austria. However, we are currently having an internet break, so I am going to try and honour my blogging commitment by posting about writing.
(It is currently Monday rather than Tuesday, and I`m sorry if this confuses anyone. I decided the wrong day is better than nothing.)
It may not be as long as usual, I can only apologise, but it is going to tackle a writing impulse I get whenever I go away: the urge to try and be a travel writer.
Because, y`know, I write, I think I`m decent at it, and when I go on holiday, I`m seized by the need to chronicle my holiday in a poetic or emotive fashion. After all, for a writer all life is research (unfortunate for anyone trying to date us, but there it is), and holidays cost money, so why shouldn`t I try and get material out of it?
Well, firstly because I don`t exactly have a soaring, poetic style. But more fundamentally, and this is a problem I found when I used to write blog posts about my so-called “real life”, the proper human world is annoyingly reluctant to follow a standard narrative structure. Hence why I now restrict my real world observations to Twitter, where they get all the length and depth they deserve.
And that`s okay. I mean, if people are interested in my holiday, they can ask me (Feel free to do so in the comments!), but I don`t think the world needs an epic work about it. Luckily, this has come to me quickly whenever I`ve sat down to try and write such a thing and just found that… yeah, this is just a list, isn`t it?
I mean, good fun for me at the time, but I`m a fiction writer with a TV-blogging sideline, not a diarist or Bill Bryson. Even The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin who I admire greatly, suffers from a lack of real climax, no matter how much Sorkin tries to play up the events towards the end. And we let him off maybe, because he was adapting someone else`s book about events beyond his control, so he did the best he can. Still, I see no reason to knowingly dive into this problem.
Don`t get me wrong, I`m not saying this is impossible. There`s a lot of great work out there about holidays and travel and so on, the afore-mentioned Bryson for one, I`m not saying no-one is a travel writer. I`m just saying… pretty sure I`m not.