Zealand, and I had a great time. I drank a lot of beer and hung out with sailors and took a day off to go snorkeling with dolphins just for my own pleasure. Then I came home and wrote the story of the giant squid in about two days—
BAM
, done. Nailed it! Easy peasy. What’s next? Where’s my next plane ticket?
But my editor (the indomitable Ilena Silverman, who now presides over writers at the
New York Times Magazine
) didn’t love the story. She found the story to be, as they maddeningly and constantly say in the magazine business, “not yet there.” She gave me some thoughtful and careful advice for how to get the piece there, and I dutifully plugged in her ideas and returned the story to her a few days later. She still didn’t like it. She asked me to rewrite it again. I rewrote it. I took two weeks this time. But she still didn’t like it. She didn’t like my next rewrite either. Nor the next. Nor the next.
Now, Ilena Silverman is not an editor who wastes people’s time, so I knew she wasn’t messing with me on this. She was earnestly searching for ways to help me make this story come alive, but even she seemed uncertain as to precisely what magic was missing from my prose. By now, even I could not deny that my story was leaden, and only getting heavier with each pass. Ilena was confounded by it; I was confounded by it. We trudged ahead, though it felt like we were trudging backward.
I wrote 11 painfully executed drafts of that goddamn giant squid story—which was supposed to be the easiest thing I’d ever written—and I still wasn’t getting any closer to it. Finally, after the 11th draft, my intelligent and gracious editor, who had always delivered her criticisms in the most articulate and gentle manner imaginable, became exasperated. She cracked. I had broken her spirit. She called me up one day and said simply, “Why don’t you try writing this story once more, Liz. Only this time, why don’t you see if you can figure out a way to make it . . .
not so boring
.”
There it was, the dreadful proof: I was the journalist who had just written (11 times in a row!) a completely boring story about a mysterious sea creature, an obsessed scientist, and unexplored crevices in the deepest trenches of the ocean. And the reason my writing was boring was that I was still laboring under the grave misconception that the story itself was
automatically interesting
—in other words, that the story didn’t really need me.
Wrong.
No story is automatically interesting; only the telling makes it so. Every narrative needs a fully engaged narrator. And it was only when I charged myself at last with my proper mandate as a writer (
to make things interesting
) that my giant squid article at last drew sputtering breath and came to life. For my kind editors had not sent me to the other side of the planet to drink beer and hang out with sailors; they had sent me there to infuse marvel into a potentially fascinating tale that only I would be lucky enough to witness with my own eyes. And once I regained hold of that sense of astonishment—once I inhabited that rightful feeling of
You aren’t going to believe what I just saw!
—everything lit up at last.
Which brings me to my second point—that there is no story so boring that it cannot, over time, with the right amount of love and passion and work, be told marvelously.
The travel stories I’ve selected for this anthology are the ones that I believe were told the most marvelously in 2012—by which I mean, quite literally, told with the biggest sense of marvel by writers who took the most personal responsibility for infusing wonderment into their tales. Some of these stories find their authors flinging themselves into mad acts of danger and some do not, but every piece contains awe in strong enough doses to render the reader enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled.
I read a lot of travel stories in order to select these 19. I sat on a beach under
BAM
, done. Nailed it! Easy peasy. What’s next? Where’s my next plane ticket?
But my editor (the indomitable Ilena Silverman, who now presides over writers at the
New York Times Magazine
) didn’t love the story. She found the story to be, as they maddeningly and constantly say in the magazine business, “not yet there.” She gave me some thoughtful and careful advice for how to get the piece there, and I dutifully plugged in her ideas and returned the story to her a few days later. She still didn’t like it. She asked me to rewrite it again. I rewrote it. I took two weeks this time. But she still didn’t like it. She didn’t like my next rewrite either. Nor the next. Nor the next.
Now, Ilena Silverman is not an editor who wastes people’s time, so I knew she wasn’t messing with me on this. She was earnestly searching for ways to help me make this story come alive, but even she seemed uncertain as to precisely what magic was missing from my prose. By now, even I could not deny that my story was leaden, and only getting heavier with each pass. Ilena was confounded by it; I was confounded by it. We trudged ahead, though it felt like we were trudging backward.
I wrote 11 painfully executed drafts of that goddamn giant squid story—which was supposed to be the easiest thing I’d ever written—and I still wasn’t getting any closer to it. Finally, after the 11th draft, my intelligent and gracious editor, who had always delivered her criticisms in the most articulate and gentle manner imaginable, became exasperated. She cracked. I had broken her spirit. She called me up one day and said simply, “Why don’t you try writing this story once more, Liz. Only this time, why don’t you see if you can figure out a way to make it . . .
not so boring
.”
There it was, the dreadful proof: I was the journalist who had just written (11 times in a row!) a completely boring story about a mysterious sea creature, an obsessed scientist, and unexplored crevices in the deepest trenches of the ocean. And the reason my writing was boring was that I was still laboring under the grave misconception that the story itself was
automatically interesting
—in other words, that the story didn’t really need me.
Wrong.
No story is automatically interesting; only the telling makes it so. Every narrative needs a fully engaged narrator. And it was only when I charged myself at last with my proper mandate as a writer (
to make things interesting
) that my giant squid article at last drew sputtering breath and came to life. For my kind editors had not sent me to the other side of the planet to drink beer and hang out with sailors; they had sent me there to infuse marvel into a potentially fascinating tale that only I would be lucky enough to witness with my own eyes. And once I regained hold of that sense of astonishment—once I inhabited that rightful feeling of
You aren’t going to believe what I just saw!
—everything lit up at last.
Which brings me to my second point—that there is no story so boring that it cannot, over time, with the right amount of love and passion and work, be told marvelously.
The travel stories I’ve selected for this anthology are the ones that I believe were told the most marvelously in 2012—by which I mean, quite literally, told with the biggest sense of marvel by writers who took the most personal responsibility for infusing wonderment into their tales. Some of these stories find their authors flinging themselves into mad acts of danger and some do not, but every piece contains awe in strong enough doses to render the reader enchanted, delighted, compelled, or forever unsettled.
I read a lot of travel stories in order to select these 19. I sat on a beach under
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