Book Stirs Up Debate About Travel Writing

Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson is a self-styled exposé about the real state of travel writing and the magazines that publish travel features. He "reveals" the link between publications' reliance on revenues from travel advertisers (airlines, hotels, resorts, car rental companies plus entire cities, regions or countries) and the sunny, positive, cliché-ridden prose in said publications. Well, duh! Does he really think that even the most innocent reader believes that those Publishers' Clearing House subscription deals keep magazines afloat?

In my opinion, magazines fall into two main camps when it comes to covering travel. Those that cover accessible places that real people actually visit -- including the high-end glossy publications that cover places that rich real people, or really rich people, actually visit. They do make every place from DisneyWorld to Denmark, from Honolulu to Hungary, form Miami to Moscow sound interesting, enticing, safe and manageable. They also tend to include a lot of nuts-and-bolts service information on how to get there, how to get around, where to stay, where to eat and what to do. Call it tourism. Other magazines go for the exotic, dangerous, remote and adventurous. The articles focus on the courageous, adventuresome writer, not on the reader and the experience s/he might ever have. Since relatively few publications support this approach, this kind of tale usually ends up as a book. Call it armchair travel. Special-interest publications are a sub-genre of tourism writing, with the occasional fantasy/armnchair piece. Such niche travel articles appeal to, say, skiers, golfers, scuba divers, anglers, spa-goers, art or music lovers and so on -- and to the advertisers who want to attract those people.

The first camp is of that idyllic dream travel, where everything is beau-ti-ful and wo-o-o-onderful. William Grimes, a present or perhaps now retired travel staffer at the New York Times, wrote in his review: "Somewhere out there, right now, everyone’s dream vacation awaits. It is a collective dream, created by travel journalists who describe, in a cascade of clichés and superlatives, a world of white-sand beaches, quaint villages and smiling locals eager to share their secret knowledge. It is a world in which all places, regardless of location, history or culture, embody a 'bewitching blend of the ancient and modern.'

"Chuck Thompson demolishes the dream in...his acidic take on travel journalism and the multitudinous horrors that lie just beyond the airline check-in counter. As a longtime freelance travel journalist and the founding editor of Travelocity’s short-lived magazine of the same name, he knows the score and he tallies it accurately."

The other magazine camp likes to demonstrate its hipness by writing about the high adventure and even danger that some trips bring -- and how its contributors stare down death and disaster every time they travel to research a story. Writer Bronwen Dickey started her San Francisco Chronicle review with this anecdote: "While Chuck Thompson was features editor for Maxim, he traveled to Colombia as a photographer for an article the magazine was running about a soft drink made from coca leaves. The story he and the piece's author pulled together was one pulsing with drugs and danger, a familiar vision of Latin American lawlessness that the magazine was only too happy to perpetuate. The problem was that he saw no drugs and felt no danger. Out of the dozens of countries Thompson had visited in his tenure as a travel writer, Colombia was perhaps the most beautiful and hassle-free of them all. 'But,' as Thompson notes in his darkly humorous collection of essays, Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, 'who buys magazines to read that?'"

Thompson's revelation is neither the total idyll nor the total riskiness described is necessarily true. What interested me a lot have been the responses to these and other reviews, in print and online, from other writers (including travel writers) and readers (including those who travel). Noted writer Rolf Potts wrote a long, insightful review on World Hum, a website offering "Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet."

Potts notes early on that Thompson's book "purports to skewer the travel writing industry from the inside," and later observes that "Thompson does indeed write candidly and honestly about his travel experiences in places like Thailand, Alaska, Latin America, and the Caribbean—as well as his stint as editor of the short-lived magazine Travelocity. In its better chapters, “Smile When You’re Lying” thus reads like an engaging (and often hilarious) travel memoir. At other points it comes off like a hyperbolic and unfocused blog entry, with occasional moments of insight buried amid strange digressions...

"What is oddly missing amid the personal yarn spinning and opinionating, however, is a compelling, well-rounded analysis of why so much modern travel writing is so bad. And, in this way, Thompson’s book unintentionally reveals how most broadly stated travel-writing criticism ultimately ends up as a weird vessel for venting personal obsessions on the part of the critic."

I think that Potts gets to the crux of the travel writer's reality when he writes, "Indeed, the trouble with modern travel writing is not simply the result of lazy writers, compromised editors and dastardly corporations: It is the cold demographic spawn of magazine consumers, who—in greater numbers than not—happily buy into the illusion of 'on-time departures, courteous flunkies, sugar-white beaches, fascinating cities, charming locals, first-class hotels, golden days, purple nights, and ‘an exotic blend of the ancient and the modern.’” If readers snapped up magazines to read insightful 8,000-word essays on Eritrea with the same enthusiasm they devour inane 500-word sidebars on 'Honolulu’s Hippest Hotels,' the state of modern travel writing would probably be a whole lot healthier. Unfortunately—as any experienced travel editor will attest—they don’t."

Potts's entire review is worth reading, and so are the comments that follow his analysis, including mine. Some comments agree that most travel writing is banal drivel. Others look to it for useful information for their own trips rather than deep insights into other cultures.

In my view, Thompson's book is a bit disjointed but is zippy and snappy, makes compelling reading and puts most of us travel writers (the Pico Ayers, Bill Brysons and handful of bestselling authors aside) and the editors for whom we write in less than a flattering light. It also explains why some of us have staked a claim in the blogosphere to write what we want, when we want.