“All of the best stories are traveling stories.”
So proclaimed the tipsy Texan on the night train to Munich. We were sitting on the floor in the bicycle compartment, drinking Heineken out of glass bottles supplied by the steward. It was an hour and a half before my 23rd birthday.
I asked him to explain.
“Stories are interesting when the characters change, right?” he asked me. “Well, what’s the easiest way to get characters to change? Send ’em away from home. They can’t help but change if you do that.”
We exchanged traveling stories until the small hours of the morning (one of which carried the germ of an idea that turned into Lela’s American Cafe). Later, the train broke down, and I lost track of him in the shuffle of carriages and replacement locomotives. The next night, propped up on an air mattress in a Vienna basement, I noted what he had said in my journal.
“All of the best stories are traveling stories.”
And you know what? I firmly believe that this anonymous Texan (I neglected to note his name and the beer makes things hazy) was right.
Now, of course there are lots of good stories that don’t stray from their home counties. I’m not going to argue that (although many are at least internal journeys). But time and time again, I’ve found myself sucked into books at exactly the moment that the protagonists are forced or finally allowed to hit the road. The pretense can be flimsy, the setting shallow, or the characters flat, but if the author can just get them out the door I’ll forgive a lot.
That’s the essence of storytelling: change. Everything else is details.
–
Tolkein wrote thousands of years of history for The Lord of the Rings, and yet the trilogy covers only the few months in which Frodo and Sam are on the path to Mordor. Coincidence? I think not.
Luke gets less than one day on the moisture farm before George Lucas burns the whole thing down and sends him out into the galaxy. Do we care about the years of agricultural drudgery that preceded Star Wars? Of course not.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a traveling story, else why would we have the iconic red-line-on-map scene breaks?
Treasure Island has a few static chapters at the beginning, but they’re just setup. The parts of the story that everyone remembers happen after the map is found and a ship is procured.
And Brian Jacques (whose Redwall books I consumed voraciously in intermediate school) always features a brave hero who must make a difficult journey in time to come back and rescue the good creatures of Redwall Abbey.
Watership Down is a traveling story. Ender’s Game has a strong traveling subplot (the Dream Game). Paulo Coelho’s career-maker, The Alchemist, is a traveling story. Huckleberry Finn is a traveling story. On The Road and Roughing It are traveling stories. Looking at my bookshelf right now, I see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, In Patagonia, Shantaram, and Two Years Before The Mast. You get the idea.
Storytelling is change, and traveling stories can’t help but change.
–
So I decided to write a traveling story.
Of course there are swords, horses, power struggles, ancient ruins, and the shambling brain-hungry undead that have run the risk of becoming a little stale as of late (they’re overused, but I don’t care). I was reading World War Z and A Song Of Fire And Ice around the time that I started this manuscript, and both of those influences are there. I’d also visited a few of the old Templar fortresses in Spain, built to protect the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, and that’s in there too.
But it’s really a traveling story. A young woman leaves the only life she’s ever known in order to save her friend, ignorant of the fact that the journey will change her in ways that are both permanent and unavoidable. It’s the same story that’s been told a million times and will likely be told a million times over again; the story of a hero on a quest for their deepest desire.
The zombies are incidental.
So that’s what I’ll be putting up in this space, section by section, starting next Friday. Two-Minute Tuesdays will continue as well. Enjoy, and I’ll see you then!
(Update: get started right now with Part 1).