Chapter Sample - The Travel Writer's Way

Historic centre of Paris, France

TWW.indb 6

23/01/2019 17:02

1

TWW.indb 7

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

TAKE ME WITH YOU

23/01/2019 17:02

TAKE ME WITH YOU

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 8 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 8

There’s a narrow street in Paris where I like to walk. It has tall white houses with wooden shutters and pigeons flutter on the mansard roofs.

Halfway down is a townhouse where a famous sculptor called one afternoon in 1883 to teach a young woman whose usual teacher was away. She had fierce eyes and a fine talent for sculpting bodies and within months she was sharing his studio and his dreams. Their passionate affair inspired the world’s most famous sculpture, The Kiss. But she died in a lunatic asylum after he abandoned her.

Further along is a boulevard filled with cafés, including a pretty art deco place full of gilded mirrors, where the wooden tables carry brass plaques for the famous bohemians who once drank here. You can sit opposite Baudelaire and lean across to Edvard Munch, avoiding Jean-Paul Sartre.

Imagine the conversation you’d have with them. On the counter, by a silver bucket filled with champagne, is a plaque for the café’s most famous client, Ernest Hemingway. He used to write and drink here in the early 1920s when he was learning to be a writer.

In those days he lived in a cheap flat above a sawmill, back in the little street. You entered it through a yard full of timber that smelled of forests and summer. Today the sawmill has gone, replaced by the concrete blocks of a school where children’s voices burble through the windows at break time. And Hemingway moved on too, to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At the other end of the street is a turning to an alley where ‘Every city is I often pause. Behind an old an anthology of green door is an art school stories. Places are where many famous painters an endless index trained. And you can learn here too, at one of their dropof beginnings.’ in classes where amateurs like A.A. Gill you and me gather around a

23/01/2019 17:02

TWW.indb 9

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 9 TAKE ME WITH YOU

nude model to draw or paint. The studio is large and cold, lit by huge windows and heated by a single ancient iron stove. But it’s warm enough on a spring morning and I like to walk in the footsteps of Gauguin or Modigliani or my mother, who trained here in the 1950s when she was a young and very striking Swedish student who had run away from home. When the door creaks open, a woman wanders out, sketchbook in her hand.

I’m writing this – and remembering it – in a terraced house in London on a snowy day at dawn. It’s a time of day when many writers get their writing done. Hemingway said you warm up with your work. Outside the world is white and cold, cars and dustbins muffled with snow. Inside the house is quiet with the sleep of children. The only sounds are the padding of a cat and the tapping of my keyboard. This is how it begins.

How do you describe a place? How do you weave in its stories, your stories, the things you’ve seen and felt and want to share?

What do you keep in or leave out? And what about the people you’ve met? Above all, how do you take the great rush of your experiences and shape them into stories that people want to read?

This is a book about how writers do this and how you can do it too. In this first chapter, we’ll introduce the subject as a whole and focus on the basic skills for writing about a place.

Let’s begin by considering the story at the start of this chapter – my walk in Paris. I’m not claiming that what I’ve written is War and Peace, or even In Patagonia (more on that one later). But it does illustrate some key questions in writing about places. So forgive me if I talk about what I wrote for a while. It’s not my ego: it’s just useful to show you what goes on backstage.

The first paragraph (‘There’s a narrow street in Paris…’) is very simple and aims only to be descriptive. It’s trying to take you down that street by offering straightforward observations in language so plain that you don’t notice the writing, you only notice the street. So the colour is called only ‘white’, not fancier names such as ‘ivory’ that might distract from the sense of being there. The content is simple too – shape of the street, colour of the houses, some birds on the roofs. The sentences are very easy, with no punctuation to clutter your walk down that street.

23/01/2019 17:02

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 10 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 10

I mention this because it can be tempting to write in a complex ‘If a writer fashion, to reach for fancy phrases stops observing and clever effects. These have their he is finished.’ place but that level of cleverness Ernest Hemingway can get in the way of the story you’re trying to tell. Does my first paragraph work alright as it is? If so, it’s an example of how straightforward your writing can be. And if you’re a beginner, writing simple can teach you more than writing clever.

Meanwhile, notice the precision of the detail. The shutters are ‘wooden’ not wrought-iron, the birds ‘flutter’ as pigeons do.

Every time you make your observations sharp, your overall scene gets sharper. Calling them ‘pigeons’ makes them a certain sort of bird. Imagine if I’d called them ‘vultures’.

So paragraph one is a scene-setter. We know where we are.

I’m taking you there. That’s an easy way to start a story.

Moving on, things get more complicated. We walk down the street and pass a house where something happened. This is one of the gifts of writing travel: you can go to places where other stories happened, and bring them into your own. Finding those places is one of our tricks, and using them brings an extra dimension to your description of a place. This is no longer just a back-alley in Paris: it’s a place of romance and regret.

But note how compressed that story is. The encounter between those sculptors lasted three decades, and I’ve got it down to four sentences. People have made entire books and films about the affair between Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, but I didn’t even give you their names. Yet it still works as an element in my wider story. And that’s because I didn’t let it swamp the rest.

I kept it short by being highly selective. So much has been left out. That single paragraph started out as four but I scrapped the other three. They were just too much for the remainder of the piece. So having a sense of the wider story you’re trying to tell is important. This is my story about my walk down a street: it’s not Camille’s story about her whole life. I’ve kept my story focused by resisting temptation.

23/01/2019 17:02

TWW.indb 11

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 11 TAKE ME WITH YOU

Look how much has been left out of my story as a whole.

The name of the street itself. The café. The art school. I chose to do that. My plan was to make you focus on the material not the labels. Names can be useful as points of reference, like the plaques on the café tables. That part wouldn’t work without.

Mentioning ‘Paris’ is fairly essential to give the story a frame. But names can also be a smokescreen – an excuse for not describing something, just slapping on a label instead. It’s worth trying to write about somewhere famous without using the name at all: the effect is more powerful, as the reader sees it afresh.

Then my story moves on down the street. This is another gift for travel writing. If you’re making a journey, the places you pass can provide the structure for your material. Each stop on my walk provides an excuse for a story, because that’s the place where it happened. Rodin, Hemingway, my mother…

Those stories apparently have nothing to do with each other, but they’re sufficiently entertaining – I hope – for you to excuse this and read on.

But the structure is not accidental. If you look carefully, you’ll see that my story of a single street actually takes in two neighbouring streets as well. I’ve cunningly detoured to them by saying ‘further along’ and ‘at the other end of the street’. Those are ‘hinges’ that allow me to slip around. And I’ve selected those other places because they let me bring in other stories. This apparently random journey is actually a carefully chosen excuse for what I want to talk about. Most professional travel writing operates this way: the journey has been planned to yield the material the writer wants.

In fact, the selection of this particular street was made so that I could tell the inner stories that it links. They’re all stories of people learning to be writers or artists. As you are.

Some end reassuringly in great success. Rodin carves The Kiss. Hemingway wins the Nobel Prize. Lesser characters like Gauguin and Modigliani become famous. Other stories offer a warning. Camille dies insane. My mother – well, what do you know? Her story is left untold. In imaginative terms, she’s left where we last saw her, a learner on the path. As we all are.

23/01/2019 17:02

A WRITER’S ADVICE WILLIAM DALRYMPLE DESCRIBING THE WORLD 12

William Dalrymple is an internationally famous writer and broadcaster on travel and history, winner of many literary prizes, and co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival in India. w williamdalrymple.uk.com.

Is travel writing relevant today?

TAKE ME WITH YOU

I’m a great optimist for travel writing. I think it remains as relevant as it’s ever been. It can do things that the anthropological report from the field or the PhD or the crisis relief report can’t do. There are still huge areas of the globe that are very untravelled and where our information on things is tenuous. You can get a better idea of Iran from a really good travel book than you can from any other source. I don’t think that the advent of the internet or Google Maps changes the value of a really incisive and intelligent piece of travel writing, a first person portrait of a country or a place or a town.

The value of that still stands. But everything does depend on the quality of the writing. A bad and silly travel book is as pointless as a bad and silly novel.

What makes a good piece of travel writing?

A really good piece of travel writing works on a number of levels. For example, reading recently The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, I felt I was reading as good a piece of non-fiction prose as has been written in the English language anywhere, by a wonderfully poetic, talented writer who is capturing a whole world and creating a whole world, as successfully as any contemporary novelist. And yet he’s writing non-fiction, so it has a sort of educational value – about geology or botany, a whole range of subjects. The pleasure of reading any first-rate piece of non-fiction

TWW.indb 12

23/01/2019 17:02

is that it’s informative and educational, and has as strong a plot drive and as beautiful a prose as any work of fiction.

13 TAKE ME WITH YOU

One of the problems of travel writing is that there are only two or three plots. Some people say there are only about ten great plots for the novel. If that’s true, then there are only three plots for the travel book: travel from A to B, stay in one place, or dot about. But all of those can be made to work.

Travel writing is not fashionable at the moment. Like other genres, it goes through phases. But it only takes one outstanding talent to kick off a fashion. There are moments – as in the 1880s, 1930s, 1980s – when suddenly there’s a surge of interest in travel writing and a rediscovery of it. In the 1980s, a whole travel-writing boom started from a combination of Bruce Chatwin’s extraordinary talent, with his very minimalist sketches for In Patagonia, coming out in the same year as Patrick Leigh Fermor was producing purple waterfalls of spectacular prose in A Time of Gifts, and shortly after Paul Theroux had done The Great Railway Bazaar. All those books suddenly opened up the world for readers.

At the moment there is a whole new sub-genre, which is a cross-fertilisation of the English traditions of travel writing and nature writing, which is very interesting. There are people who within the past decade have produced spectacular first flowers, narrative non-fiction involving travel, that is as good as anything that has been written in the last 30 or 40 years.

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

What are the challenges for travel writers?

What is your advice to a new travel writer?

Many of the best travel books lie in a really extraordinary author following some extraordinary passion – Robert Byron on the trail of Islamic architecture, or Patrick Leigh Fermor discovering the pleasures of walking and vagabonding, or Redmond O’Hanlon with his own form of nature writing, or Ryszard Kapuściński on international politics… So I think if you have some sort of obsession, and can demonstrate to people why you’re passionate about it, you can make it communicate to the reader. Or else you could choose just to be a fine writer on the move, communicating the pleasures and passions of travel.

TWW.indb 13

23/01/2019 17:02

THREE BOOKS ON THIS THEME The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane. The author is the best-known exponent of the recent wave of New Nature Writing that still fills our shelves with books about Britain’s countryside. He’s notable for finely wrought evocations of remote places and how it feels to be out there.

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 14 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 14

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, by Laurie Lee. Wonderfully poetic descriptions of Spain as it was when Lee tramped through in 1937, carrying only a knapsack and a fiddle. The author was originally a poet and his use of image and phrase to conjure a world is inspiring.

A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. The inventor of the simple sentence captured the sounds and smells of Paris in this memoir of the 1920s. See how much he leaves out while still evoking a mood. And careful readers will discover the places mentioned in my opening story.

And that’s the theme of my little Paris story. It’s about learning an art, the possibilities and pitfalls. I’ve chosen particular stories to build that theme in that place. It’s a structural format. It can be applied across so many of your travel stories, to create a form and meaning from the random reality of a travel experience. Turning your travels into tales is the theme of this book. The challenge is to shape a real journey into a satisfying story shape.

That’s why my Paris passage jumps to London, to the moment when I’m wondering how to create that shape. We all do. The blank page is always terrifying. But as in the story, you warm up with the work, you start to get the words down. That’s what it takes. The difference between remembering and writing is the difference between what actually happened (I walked down a street in Paris) and the story I shape on the page (I walked down a street and met the ghosts of Rodin, Munch and friends). By being selective, of what you leave out or add in, you can build an interesting travel story from even a tiny travel event.

23/01/2019 17:02

This is a real old chestnut but if you haven’t heard it before, it can transform your writing. When we write about a place – or a person or event – we have two tools at our disposal: the ‘show’ tool and the ‘tell’ tool. Both are useful but in different ways.

‘Show’ is when we describe something as it appears to us, blow-by-blow, like the pictures in a film. We don’t give abstract information, just observations and impressions. For example: ‘The forest was dark with palm trees and I saw 13 elephants walk down to the waterhole, each one holding the tail in front with its trunk. The babies splashed and romped while the fathers stood in the shallows, touching foreheads together like old friends.’

‘Tell’ is when we impart some facts or information, without attempting to picture anything. It’s the voiceover to the film footage. So: ‘The Dzanga Bai, a lake in the forest in Central African Republic, is visited year-round by vast herds of forest elephants, safe from the attention of poachers.’

In these examples, the same place is being described but using different tools. The ‘show’ version is visual and dramatic: it paints a scene. Whereas the ‘tell’ version is concise and informative: it carries contextual facts.

So you can use ‘show’ to picture a place or person, and ‘tell’ to give us information about them. You can zigzag between

TWW.indb 15

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

TOP TIP SHOW OR TELL?

15 TAKE ME WITH YOU

When the old green door of memory creaks open, someone interesting walks out. Is it your mother? A woman you will fall in love with? A famous artist or a failure? That depends on what you see and what you bring.

In this way, travel writing is a form of memoir – what I remember and care to tell you. Making the leap from writing down everything that happened on your trip, to writing a little of what happened in an interesting way, is a huge step towards becoming a readable travel writer. I hope this book will take you there.

As to whether it will lead you to the Nobel Prize or the madhouse, that’s up to you. Let me know when you find out.

23/01/2019 17:02

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

the two, showing us a scene in one paragraph and telling us some relevant facts in the next. You could do that with the examples above, placing one after the other. The zigzag gives variety and interest.

But be careful not to mix them up. If you use the wrong tool, it won’t work and you may get blocked. In that case, try redrafting with the other tool. And if you shift from one tool to the other too quickly (for example, in the same sentence), you’ll be lucky to make the prose work.

Each tool carries a risk. ‘Show’ can go on forever, because it’s such fun to write. So keep it in proportion to your whole text.

‘Tell’ can be dry and abstract, so use it sparingly and keep it for ‘killer facts’. What if you could say, ‘Dzanga Bai is the best place in the world to see herds of forest elephants’?

In terms of what this chapter’s about, ‘show’ is the tool to take the reader into your scene.

16

KEY POINTS

TAKE ME WITH YOU

1 Start by writing simply.

2 Make your details sharp, significant and selective.

3 Use all your senses.

4 Find places where there are stories.

5 Leave a lot out.

6 Build a shape.

7 Get the words down.

ASSIGNMENT 1 START OUT WITH A NOTEBOOK We’re going to start with a simple exercise about describing a place. This is the basic building block for all travel writing.

It doesn’t matter where you go, but it always starts with this: a blank page and a pen. That’s the simplest and scariest thing a writer ever faces.

TWW.indb 16

23/01/2019 17:02

TWW.indb 17

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

So go anywhere, open your notebook and start to write notes on what you see around you as I did in the Chicago jazz café. I suggest you use an old-fashioned paper notebook not a computer: it allows you to be messier and is what you would likely use on a real professional assignment. You’re going to stay in one place for 15 or 20 minutes: so maybe find a comfortable seat.

It helps if you’ve chosen somewhere interesting, that has a bit of character and something going on. It also helps if you haven’t been there before. But wherever it is, look at things as though this is the first time you’ve ever seen them. Travel writers are always arriving.

Notice and note down, that’s the rhythm. Don’t worry about writing running prose or beautiful sentences: the first thing you need is material. You’ll be writing it up later. So just make scrappy notes – scrappy but detailed. Catch what you ‘I could spend can see on the fly. my life arriving The notes you want to each evening in a create are carefully observed new city.’ details about the place that Bill Bryson you’re in. What you can see –

17 TAKE ME WITH YOU

Writing practice in a Paris café

23/01/2019 17:02

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 18 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 18

and also what you can hear, smell, touch, taste. Note these down as precisely as you can. Exactly how many elephants can you see, what kind of boats are in the harbour, how does that stir-fry smell or taste? Look hard. Look beyond your first impressions. Fill five pages of your notebook. Fill more.

When you’ve gathered a useable amount of data, stop taking notes and prepare to write a simple prose description of the place, in full sentences that lead one to another. You could do this in that place or back home. The former will be more vivid, the latter more considered. It’s up to you.

Either way, use only what you have observed. You’ll find you can’t use all your notes. So use what strikes you as interesting or characterful about that place, and leave out the rest.

Don’t tell us factual information about it, don’t include inter­pretations, just lay out what you’ve seen. ‘I saw this, I heard that…’ Show us the place, share with us the simple experience of being there.

A good way to start this is to re-read your notes, underlining key details to imprint them into your mind, then put the notes aside and write freely. Other people will prefer to have the notebook open as they go, as a memory prompt, though this may slow you down.

Use plain, fairly simple sentences without lots of clauses or punctuation, so you can focus on the scene itself. Keep the sentences short, maybe 10–15 words, so that each sentence is about only one thing. This will give you clarity and force you to focus on the scene.

Don’t spend your time deleting what you’ve just written. You can always edit and polish later. Just get something down and keep the sentences moving forward. Allow yourself to write rubbish. But write something. As you write, you may find the sentences coming easier, like a car engine warming up.

At this stage, don’t try to give us a plot with action and structure.

Just give us a picture of the place. Take us there by showing us as clearly as you can what it looks, smells and feels like.

This is the truth of what you have actually experienced. It’s the foundation of writing travel.

23/01/2019 17:02

When you’ve finished, read it back uncritically. Add anything that’s missing but don’t judge it yet. You’ll probably think it’s terrible – that’s normal just after drafting. So wait a while. Take a break, have a coffee. Give yourself ten minutes for the dust to settle. Then read it again. You might just think it’s alright.

LOOK HARD We’re not used to looking so hard, spending so long, peering into places and lives. Some people find it fascinating, others find it creepy or just dull. But if you want to have something to write about, you need material. More than that, you need some understanding of the place you are describing.

For example, if you were describing a restaurant meal, it would be adequate to say, ‘At Shiva’s crab-shack I ate a tangy curry.’

But it’s much more interesting to say, ‘In a wooden shack by the harbour, I ordered a crab curry in coconut sauce sprinkled with coriander leaves. The crabs are bought daily by the owner, Shiva, from bright blue canoes that tie up behind his kitchen. The canoes are dug-outs made by hand in a bamboo clearing beside the beach.’

You get that fuller picture by looking harder – at the menu for what’s in the dish, at the area for what’s going on. If you want to be an effective writer, you may just have to get nosey.

19 TAKE ME WITH YOU

FEEDBACK ON ASSIGNMENT 1 How did the assignment go for you? Although this sounds like a simple assignment, many of my students find it difficult. That’s often because the activities involved are unnatural.

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

Feedback on this assignment and tips for improving what you wrote follow below. Assignment 2 will take these ideas a little further.

SHOW NOT TELL Nor do we normally say things in a descriptive way. When a friend asks, ‘How was Zanzibar?’, you don’t go into detail about the colour of the boats. You tend just to say, ‘It was great, there were so many beach cafés and such a traditional way of life.’ We often speak in shorthand.

TWW.indb 19

23/01/2019 17:02

But describing a place on the page and bringing it alive for the reader is a different way of describing things. It requires you to ‘show not tell’. ‘Showing’ or ‘telling’ are two crucial and different tools for writing. In the crab-shack example above, you can see them in use: first a ‘tell’ and then a ‘show’. (Top Tip: Show or Tell? page 15) The assignment needed you to use ‘show’. But that’s not how we talk to our friends in conversation. It’s a learned skill. Doing it for the first time can feel odd.

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 20 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 20

THE PIECE YOU JUST WROTE Assessing your assignment text will be easiest on paper. So print it out, or make a photocopy if you wrote it by hand.

Make a practice of doing that throughout the assignments in this book. Things on paper look different from on screen: the errors leap out.

Now get two coloured pens, one blue, one red. Go through your piece, underlining in blue where you used ‘tell’ and in red where you used ‘show’. Then spread the pages out so you can see them all together. Have a look not at the words but at the balance of blues and reds.

If there are mainly blues, your piece will be very informative but not very descriptive. If you have mainly reds, it will be much more vivid. That’s because we use ‘show’ to build a picture of a scene.

If the reds and blues are mixed up together in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence, you may find the tone is uneven and the description loses power. That’s because you’re stepping in and out of the picture all the time.

If you found the assignment hard to write, it may be because you were using the wrong tool to do the job – using ‘tell’ when you needed to ‘show’, or vice versa. That may have blocked your ability to say anything.

The parts you found hardest to write may well be where you used the two tools so close together that you couldn’t work out how to say what you wanted. That’s because these tools create different tones of voice, and it’s hard to speak with two voices at once.

23/01/2019 17:02

ASSIGNMENT 2 TAKE A WRITER’S WALK If you want to develop the ideas in this chapter further, you could take your notebook for a walk and try to capture the character of a whole area.

For this you’ll need a notebook that you can carry as you walk, so not too big. Ideally choose somewhere interesting – maybe a marketplace, a historic neighbourhood or a busy working area. A half-hour walk is plenty: if you do this in detail, it can take an afternoon.

Now set off on your route. Take notes as you go along – the same sort of notes as in the previous assignment. But these will be messier, because you’re on the move: don’t worry about that.

There should be more of them too, maybe 10 or 15 pages. This kind of data is the heart of your writing: it’s the material you can sculpt into a story.

TWW.indb 21

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 21 TAKE ME WITH YOU

You can experiment with all ‘No computer this. Create a new draft of this same text simply by deleting can substitute all the blues, or all the reds. for experience on You’ll get a clearer sense of the ground, the the power of each tool. traveller’s raw Or separate the blues from the reds more distinctly, maybe intimacy with the into different paragraphs. This sensuous texture will create a clearer sense of of a place: its structure and tone. Then vary smells and tastes, the proportions of blue and its street life and red and see the effect. You’ll be surprised by the difference conversations.’ this makes to the overall feel Colin Thubron of the piece, and the tools that this reveals for you.

Next time, challenge yourself only to write reds. Resist the temptation to go blue. The result will be a more powerful description.

23/01/2019 17:02

DESCRIBING THE WORLD 22 TAKE ME WITH YOU TWW.indb 22

The key is to go slowly, so you can note down as you go ‘The first condition of understanding a anything that is special to this place – its buildings, street foreign country is signs, people, shops, mood. smelling it.’

Look for things you wouldn’t T.S. Eliot find elsewhere. These are the ‘significant details’ that capture the character of a place.

Stop and take notes, then walk again. Sit down for a coffee, taking notes. Make your observations as specific as possible.

(How many stalls? Selling which herbs?)

Don’t forget to look above your head or into windows and courtyards. Pop into shops and cafés. Close your eyes to catch what you can only hear – police sirens, birds singing – or what you can smell – wafts of coffee, mud flats on the river…

Look for little details that seem to be significant – the baker’s fading shop sign, the wine bottle on a window sill, the cherry tree in bloom.

Notice the people especially and what they’re doing. Smile at them. Talk to them. These will be the characters in your story.

We’ll hear more about them in Chapter 2.

At the end of your route, write it up, using all the descriptive tips in this chapter. You might want to go home and do this on a computer. Or you could stay in the area and keep it fresh in your mind. But find a quiet spot and spend 30 minutes writing a description of where you went. At this stage of your writing career, keep it simple and honest to what you’ve seen. Actually, at some level, always keep it simple and honest.

You can write it as a journey that you took. Remember to ‘show’ more than ‘tell’. You won’t be able to use all your material, for reasons of space and interest. So be selective. Leave out the ten chain stores that could be anywhere and the car park where nothing happens. Give us the details that belong to this place alone.

For example: ‘I walked down the village high street. It was lined with half-timbered houses that seemed to lean against each other. The baker’s shop had old, gold lettering above the door and a queue of schoolchildren buying doughnuts. Cherry

23/01/2019 17:02

DESCRIBING THE WORLD

trees spilled pink petals across the pavement. A street stall was selling mounds of fragrant herbs: rosemary, sage and mint. At the far end was a river. Its banks smelled of mud and nettles and a blackbird sang in a willow. I crossed it on a white wooden bridge and found a ruined house. The door step was littered with empty bottles of wine…’

What you’re doing is taking us on your journey with you, through a place and what can happen there. With luck, you’re describing a whole community and its life.

TAKE ME WITH YOU

23

TWW.indb 23

23/01/2019 17:02