The Journey

I mentioned the other day that I was reading John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. For those of you who don't know, it's the story of how Steinbeck, who wrote about Americans in America, reached the ripe old age of 58 and realized he'd been trapped in New York for too long, he hadn't seen or interacted with the rest of America in twenty years. So with his Standard black Poodle, Charley, he left on a driving trip that took him a year to cross the country to his home haunting grounds of Salinas, CA and then return, making a loop through the country. It's interesting to note that he wasn't recognized even once in that year. Well, you know, it was pre Internet.

I'm almost finished with the book and it has taken me a long time to read. Months, I think, and it's not a big book, I have just turned into a very slow and sometimes infrequent reader. Or maybe it's the kind of book best read slow, better to absorb the images. I don't know, but when I read the following (near the end of his book), it struck me.

He writes, " I speculated with a kind of wonder on the strength of the individuality of journeys and stopped on the postulate that people don't take trips -- trips take people." A few sentences later: "Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased."

What struck was not only the truth of this statement concerning actual trips. I, myself, have been on both those types of journeys, the sailboat trip to Mexico that still lives on or the vacation to Florida when I was sick with a sinus infection -- that trip never really started.

But what his words also reminded me of was the journey we take with a book, and that can be both as a writer and as a reader. As a reader, for instance, we all know of books that linger with us a lifetime while others are hard to recall the day after we finish them. Perhaps those were books that were finished before they ran out of words, books that failed to engage us, books that we plowed through out of some kind of feeling of obligation to some unknown discipline.

As a writer, I think this sentiment may be even more true. A story is a journey in every sense. For the characters, for the writer creating their paths, for the reader engaged in learning how it all turns out. Think of Samwise the Hobbit and his speech, I believe at the end of the second LOTR movie, when he asks Mr. Frodo to remember the stories that were the best ones, the ones where everyone had to know how they ended, what happened next. Those were the best stories of all because it all mattered. (I heard btw, that they filmed that scene a year after making the movie because the ending needed something to carry the hobbit's part of the story forward, to give it importance, maybe a summation, even.)

We all know what kind of books we want to write and read. This is hitting home hard right now as I founder around in the plotting of my current work -- I want it to matter. I want the story to pull my characters and pull me and pull my readers. I want more than bullets and chases and yet I want excitement and adventure. I want the journey within my books to continue until the last word on the last page -- and maybe even beyond an hour or two. That's my job and it's a challenging one.

Obviously, Travels With Charley will be the kind of book I think about for a long time. Do you have one like this in your life or any thoughts about the internal journey in your own work?