20 Dec 2023

How does travel influence writing

According to singer-novelist Nicolas Peyrac, travel makes all writing possible. It is an opening towards elsewhere. The writing that results from travel can be presented in various forms, like nesting dolls, through photos, texts, songs, words. Writing is all words at once, notes and images.

Traveling broadens our perspectives, our horizon, opens us to new cultures and new environments. We inevitably learn something new about the world and about ourselves, indirectly. We become another person interacting with the world and others.

Travel literature, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, flourished greatly, even though this literary genre has always existed in all eras and in all civilizations. Literature and travel have always gone well together. We think of Pierre Loti whose house in Rochefort in Charente-Maritime is a reflection of his excursions across the planet.

A multifaceted literary genre

The travel story stands out from the novel. The journey can be real or fictional, but a travelogue does not describe an imaginary world. It starts from reality. However, it is not a codified genre and it can take very diverse forms, such as the travelogue, the chronicle, the report, the blog, the diary, and even the major report popularized by Albert Londres.

Even if the travelogue is poorly defined and protean, it is nevertheless characterized by some specificities. It is normally written in the first person singular because it appears to be a direct reflection of the personal experience of the author-traveler. It can combine geographical, political, historical, linguistic, ethnological notions, etc. It adopts a loop structure: it begins with the departure of the journey and ends with the return.

The travel story is developed in two stages. First, it is the time of the trip during which the author takes notes, makes sketches, and takes photos. Then the time of writing follows: this is the moment when the author recounts the events he experienced during his journey and describes what he saw. It therefore demonstrates a concern for truth.

The travel writer, Sylvain Tesson

Sylvain Tesson traveled around the world by bicycle in 1993 at the age of 21 with Alexandre Poussin; he crossed the Himalayas over 5000 kilometers; he crossed the steppes of Central Asia on horseback, then Siberia in the footsteps of escapees from the gulag; he followed in the footsteps of Napoleon’s Grande Armée; then he crossed rural France from which a film with Jean Dujardin was recently made, etc. He became known to the general public with his remarkable travelogue, “The Axis of the Wolf” published in 2004.

From his travels, Sylvain Tesson brings back stories, which have had a certain success. During his travels, he likes to be alone, with a cigar and a book of poetry, especially after a tiring stopover. He travels to write and he makes a living from his writing. So, Sylvain Tesson travels to live. He says he is inspired by travel, which fills him and he specifies that it is not a vacation when he travels.

When he writes, he extends his travel adventures. He always undertakes his journeys with simple means of transport, but some are original, such as the sidecar or the elephant. Very often, his journeys are made on foot, because the steps taken while walking cleanse the body and soul of all ills. It is, in his eyes, the best medicine.

In his travel stories, he seeks to share the unspeakable, to make the silences he hears sing during his wanderings. He writes the experience, his experience. He travels the world to formulate it. He experiences the trip as a sensual adventure, where all his senses are on alert.

Travel is like a school of life. He discovered that slowness, solitude and silence offer the opportunity to know oneself and intensify the experience of life. He travels the world because it is there, within his reach and because life is short. He articulates his life between travel and literature. He doesn't travel in the same way as the rest of us since he knows he's leaving to write afterwards. This perspective allows him to better understand the environment in which he finds himself and to better formulate the ideas that cross his mind.

Having a blank page to fill in following a trip allows Sylvain Tesson to experience his trip more intensely with more awareness and more attention. When he travels he has a huge appetite for discoveries and sensations. In his eyes, travel is the food of literature. He needs his travels to feel alive and bubbling, as he likes to put it. Life intensifies and speeds up during travel. This is material for writing.

Not all travelers are writers. Sylvain Tesson says, for his part, that he feels immense happiness in writing his travels, because he can experience them a second time. He thus has the impression of living a life of ups and downs. Writing allows him to extend the adventure and find the right words to share with his audience.

Indeed, he recorded each of his trips in writing. The life he has lived until now could be compared to fiction, with so many unusual experiences and juicy and romantic anecdotes. Yet it was the reality, his reality, that many writers would dream of imagining.

Why do we read travel stories

A book about a journey often arouses a desire to leave, to leave, to another somewhere else. Reading about the journey allows us to escape reality for a while and at the same time observe it better. Who wouldn't want to go to Venice after reading Proust, in Africa with Joseph Conrad.Chatwin Australia with Bernard Ollivier,, on the Silk Road with Ella Maillart, in Afghanistan (the one before) with

Traveling in the company of a travel writer allows you to establish your own perception of a place without ever having visited it. When you write while traveling, it becomes a way of exorcising nostalgia for your own roots, for the place and for the friendships that the traveler is about to leave behind.

Writing from elsewhere also allows, by noting impressions, emotions and observations, to keep a trace of the spontaneous impulse of discovery, even if it means transforming the notebook into a story, and thus sharing the experience lived with a future reader, whom a book will in turn launch onto the roads...at least, that's what every travel writer wants!

Travel writing in the era of globalization

By globalization we mean the acceleration and commonality of means of transport and planetary interconnection made possible thanks to new means of communication. Does the permanent profusion of images make discovery still possible? All territories on the planet have already been visited.

Yet, like individuals such as Sylvain Tesson, Nicolas Bouvier and others, adventure is always possible. It is possible if we move away from trade routes, mass tourism, and ways of living copied from the Western world. Nowadays, when we travel to isolated areas, we mainly go for self-discovery, since almost all the exploits have already been achieved.

Today, traveling has become so easy that we quickly forget that not so long ago, journeys in the same country could be infinitely long. With the reduction in travel times, travelers can move from one end of the planet to the other almost without noticing it. The travel time remains an intermediate time but it hardly counts anymore. Today, it is almost outdated to ask if one or the other had a good trip.

We can thus say that in a certain way, we have broken with the poetry of travel. The period spent between two points is erased. Ultimately, all that matters is the point from which we start and where we must arrive and, above all, the means we give ourselves to accomplish as much as possible in a minimum of time. That being said, the trip can still remain exhilarating but in a different way.
The constant speed race often neglects quality requirements. By always wanting to go faster, we lose substance. By wanting to discover the cities of the same country or several countries in record time, man consumes the journey instead of making it his own.
The travel writer, for his part, takes another position. He considers time a friend. He immerses himself in the places to translate the images he goes towards into words. The travel writer takes pleasure in making the journey last.

On the road

To travel is to confront diversity, to be interested in others. If in the journey, there is generally first a geographical change, this is sometimes accompanied by an existential movement. To travel is indeed to lose your bearings. Jack Kerouac in “On the Road” describes this feeling in the incipit of the novel when he gets lost on the edge of New York, experiencing violent rain which forces him to turn back.
Every evening while traveling, Sylvain Tesson pins his thoughts in his notebook. A few words placed on the page form an aphorism. The sum of aphorisms will give this wonderful little book “Aphorisms under the moon and other wild thoughts”. This travel writer who is also remembered for “Little Treatise on the Immensity of the World” looks at travel through the prism of our time and reacts . To slow down the passage of time, Tesson chose to travel the world on horseback, on foot or by canoe. He wishes to embrace the earth and restore a scent of adventure in slow motion, at a time when in our societies, travel has become obvious.

Travel diary and therapeutic writing

Travel allows you to discover yourself and writing helps you to free yourself. It is an unsuspected power that we have in our hands, that of discussing with our unconscious, and finding within ourselves all the answers to our doubts and questions.

Alone facing himself and the world, a traveler-writer discovers, on the paths, the magic of writing. He experiences journeys that he records over the days and over the pages, like a sort of diary. He is having a very powerful and undoubtedly overwhelming experience, if we are to believe recent or old travel stories.

We lose our bearings; we are far from loved ones, far from everything, surrounded by the unknown. Any traveler can find in writing a mystical adventure, as if he were confiding in someone who listens to him, responds and encourages him. During this stage where the traveler settles down, he thinks, chooses his words to tell his day, puts his feelings, his emotions and his reactions on paper. He detaches himself from the scenes he experienced during the day, to better analyze them with an outside perspective.

Putting down your stories on paper with the anxieties and doubts that accompany them, even the fears, is an effective way of moving on and moving forward, to calmly consider the rest of the journey.

As a conclusion

There are several fairs dedicated to travel stories and diaries, in Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Malo, Aix-en-Provence, Orléans, and Bordeaux for the first time at the beginning of December 2023, for those I know. The genre of the travel diary, somewhat neglected since the 1960s, is now booming. And that's good!

The travel diary is above all an art of patience, slowness, critical distance, and fraternity. The travel writer is inspired by elsewhere, for our greatest happiness. Joseph Kessel traversed the continents to write. Théodore Monod shared his passion for the desert with his readers, until the end of his life.