Afterword for “Glass Houses”
Although travelogs aren’t usually my cup of tea, I really like the story I wrote. I personally hate travel books full of little more than facts and figures about a place and its people. I much prefer a travel writer who can weave an entertaining narrative around factual details and make an unfamiliar place feel familiar, without souring whatever romance made the unfamiliar place worth exploring in the first place.
The Seattle Architecture Foundation’s tour did a great job of providing the historical, cultural, economic, and architectural context that manifested the building we were looking at. And the tour guide added color to his monologue by telling a few well placed jokes. However, I realized that if I was going to write about the architectural tour, I needed to come up with a narrative of my own.
My solution to the literary problem was to take advantage of the most unusual thing about the tour: the naked man in the window, and make that a framing device for the narrative. However, springing a naked man on the readers felt too abrupt. Consequently, I decided to use the unusual tactic of easing into the first framing device by wrapping it inside second framing device: the only slightly fictionalized conversation with my wife.
I think most literary experts would frown on structuring a story inside a story, inside another story. But if the framing stories are short, relevant, and unwind at the end, then I think such a device is acceptable. It’s also the case that at the time I couldn’t think of a better solution to the literary problem. Even to this day, I’m not averse to nesting stories or flashbacks when needed, as is attested by my Excerpt from What Little Girls Are Made Of.
As for the outcome of my experiment, it was obvious to me that even though I meant to write a short piece, my natural tendency is to “write long.” Writing long is problem because I first imagined selling this story to an airline magazine. Although I thought the finished article wasn’t too long for a short story, I believed it was far too long to sell to an airline magazine where print space is at a premium. For that matter, I believed it was probably too long for any travel magazine.
With that sales avenue closed in my mind, I even thought about trying to sell, or even donate, the story to the SAF as advertising copy. But the prospects for even that idea seemed vanishingly small. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what I thought at the time.
Furthermore, when I read the professional travel writer’s book, it became obvious that writing for a travel publication is like writing for any other publication: If you want to sell an unsolicited travelogue, first write a proposal to prospective publishers stating where you intend to go, what you intend to write, what you expect the length of the finished product to be, and how long you think it will take for you to deliver the product. Then, if a publisher even considers your proposal, and you negotiate agreeable terms, you can start writing. And, by the way, since you and your publisher must agree on where you’re going, your freedom to wander to exotic climes whenever and wherever you want, is severely limited. Alternatively, you could write a story on spec and hope you can sell it later, but that strategy is risky.
Considering all this, my romantic notion of travel writing was beginning to tarnish.
As I said before, I was using the travel writer’s book to learn about the real-life business details of being a travel writer. The author’s prose was good so I expected his explanations to be much the same. With wide-eyed anticipation, I flipped back and forth through the pages of the travel writer’s how-to book as if it were a bible. Page after page, chapter after chapter, the author detailed how he scrupulously scheduled every moment of his itinerary and meticulously tracked his every business expense in copious spreadsheets. When I finished reading his account, I finally understood that the business minutiae of travel writing was…the most boring thing I’d ever known.
My romantic notions of travel writing had already begun to tarnish, but now they were crumbling into flaking heaps of rust. Or to paraphrase my wife, “I know you love the romance of travel writing, but I don’t think you’d actually like to be a travel writer.”
That was the end of my experiment. I was despondent. For that reason, and others, I never seriously thought about being a travel writer again. And since there didn’t seem to be anywhere for Glass Houses to be published, I shoved it into my metaphorical trunk where I keep my monsters in a box. And that’s where Glass Houses stayed…
…Until I dusted it off and published it here, in Tim Allen Stories. I’m still happy with the story, and I hope you enjoyed it too.
What am I thinking about for my next post? I’m not sure. I’m considering either another excerpt from a novel; a revised, straight-up, fantasy/mystery story; an essay about the importance of finding a writing community; a slew of short story fragments; or the early draft of one of two(!) Lesser Heroes stories. Most of those projects will take a bit of time to complete, but when I’m done you’ll find them here, at Tim Allen Stories.
See you then.
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