A trip on cards, and what the map shows you

A trip comes back as a heap. There are photos on a phone, a notebook with a coffee ring on it, clips that run four minutes and hold ten good seconds, and a memory that has already started tidying up. The usual advice is to start at the beginning and write what happened next. That gets you an account of a trip, and nobody asked for one.

What you want first is the heap in a form you can look at. Cards do that, and travel suits them better than almost any other kind of writing, because every card has a fact on it that does not depend on your opinion: where you were, and when.

One stop, one card

A stop is a place on the trip and what happened there. The title says what happened, not just where: "Pont de Montvert" is a label, while "Twenty at dinner by eleven, and all of them talking" is a card you could do something with. Then four things, every time:

• The place: the town or district, in words someone else could find.
• The date, and the time if you know it. Use the clock on the wall where you were, not the one back home.
• The landmark, if there is one: what stood there. The inn, the bridge, the third bench along the sea wall.
• What happened, in a few lines. No meaning yet.

Robert Louis Stevenson kept this up across the Cévennes in 1878. His book still has the bones showing, with the date set in brackets as he wakes: "(Monday, September 23rd)." He notes that it was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea. Those are not ornaments. They are what let you trust the rest.

Write the card that day

Details go faster than you think. Within a week you remember that the inn was cold. You no longer remember that the landlady was combing her daughter's hair in the kitchen, and that is the part a reader would keep.

So keep the bar low. On the road, a stop card can be three lines written in bed. A photo or a clip gets its own card with one line on what it shows, because in six months the picture will not tell you why you took it. A phone usually records where and when a picture was taken, so you can often fill in the card's place from the file and spend your attention on the line about what it shows.

Do not write up the day on the card. Write down what you would otherwise lose: what was said, what it cost, what it smelled like, the thing you got wrong. Keep what you made of it on a separate card, or leave it for later, because you do not know yet.

Dates tell on you

Set a date on every card, even when you have to work it out, and you will find things.

Stevenson's own book shows what happens otherwise. It has him waking on "Wednesday, October 2nd," and then, a day's walk later, on "Thursday, 2nd October." The morning after that is "October 3rd." He was writing it up, and three days had become two. It does not matter in that book. It matters a great deal in a piece where a reader might follow you, or where you are saying that one thing happened before another.

Nellie Bly went the other way, and printed the record at the end of her book: for each stop, the day and the hour she reached it, down to "3.51 p.m. Arrived New York." The times were the story. If your story depends on time, the way hers did, the time goes on every card from the first day.

Put it on a map

Now take every card with a place and put it on a real map. A paper one and pins will do. Draw the line through them in the order you went.

You are looking for four things, and none of them can be seen in a list:

Where you actually spent your time. Most trips have a thick part and a thin part. Writers tend to give each day the same space, so a week in one valley gets the same words as an afternoon on a train. The map shows you the thick part, which is usually where the piece is.

The gaps. A long line with no pins on it is a stretch you have nothing on. Sometimes that is fine, and you can say "three days later" and move on. Sometimes it is the most interesting country you crossed, and you have a day of notes to find.

The turn. Look for where the line changes. Stevenson goes north to south, and at the top of the Lozère he says as much: he has crossed into a different country, and the people, the rivers and the religion all change on the way down. That was the hinge of his book before he wrote a word of it, and you can see it from where the pins are. Find yours.

What is out of place. A pin far from the others is either a digression you should cut or the reason you went.

The order you went is only one order

A diary keeps the order you went in, and that is its virtue. An article almost never should. Once the cards are laid out you can try others without rewriting anything:

• Arrive at the turn first. Open on the moment it changed, and then go back.
• By subject, not by day. All the meals, then all the arguments. This works when the place is the story and you are not.
• Around one place. Pick the richest stop and let the others come in as what you had seen before you got there.
• The route, with the middle removed. Departure, the turn, the end. It is shorter, and you will be surprised how little you miss.

Keep the first order, so that trying a new one costs nothing. Then, looking at the map, ask how each order would draw: a story that doubles back on itself can confuse a reader, and it can also be exactly what you mean.

What going did

Up to here you have been working out where you went. The piece is usually about something else, which you only find on the cards.

Stevenson says it himself in Luc, a place he can see no reason to visit: "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go." He bought his donkey for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy, and three days in his heart "was still as cold as a potato" towards her. The last lines of the book are on a coach out of St. Jean du Gard, when he realizes what he sold that morning: "I had lost Modestine." None of that is in the route. It is on the cards in between, and you only see it once the route has stopped taking up all your attention.

So write one more card, last, and keep it short: who left, and who came back. If nothing changed, you may have an article about a place, and that is a good thing to have. If something did, that card is what your opening is for.

Before you share it

Everything above treats a place as just another fact on a card. Once other people are involved, it is not.

• A place can put someone at risk. A source's house, a shelter, a family's street, the café where someone meets you every week. Decide what goes on the page and what stays in your notes. Often "a town in the north" is the honest and the kind thing to write.
• Your files talk. A photo or a clip off a phone may carry the exact spot it was taken, and anyone who downloads the original can read it. Check before you send originals to anyone, and be careful with a picture of your own front door.
• Publishing a date tells people where you were. It can also tell them where you will be, if you post as you go. Many writers publish a few days late for that reason.

The map is for you. Your reader gets what you decide to give them.

Try it

Take your last trip, even if it was a weekend. Make a card for each place you stopped, with a date and a line on what happened, and put them on a map. Then look at where the pins are thickest, and ask why you have written about everything except that.