What I Learned from Paul Theroux

Here are a few recent lessons I’ve drawn from my reading and our conversations. My list won’t be your list, but you might find it useful.

How to turn my life into fiction

I reread six of Paul Theroux’s novels, plus several short pieces, before a trip to Hawaii last year. Between my reading and long talks with the author, I came away with a much clearer sense of how he's drawn on his life in his fiction. He gave me ideas for taking my writing in exciting new directions that I hadn’t considered, and for writing about periods of my life that I’ve long wanted to tackle but couldn’t see how to do as memoir.

My Secret History and My Other Life are two of my favourite novels. If you’ve only read Paul’s travel books, start there.

Stay active and stay curious to stay youthful

Paul writes every morning, and gets outside in the afternoons to swim in the sea, bike up a mountain or paddle an outrigger canoe in the Pacific. This isn’t some open-air Hawaiian version of mall walking. We went biking together on the North Shore, and I know his mountain route is no joke. That’s pretty damned impressive for a guy of any age, let alone 84, but he’s stayed active all his life, and it shows.

Paul is also one of the most curious people I know. He questioned everyone we bumped into, from walkers on the trail to the barista at the coffee shop afterwards. He’s a voracious reader, a prolific writer, and this past spring he drove from Cape Cod up to Toronto, out to Vancouver and back again on one of the many road trip’s he’s taken for a new book about Canada.

“All you have to do is keep moving and keep your mind active,” he said. “Stay in touch and don't be cynical, because there's more to discover, there's more to see.”

I find these qualities tremendously inspiring. Our book talks in particular brought fresh excitement and new directions to my work.

How to make a living writing

In one of my all-time favourite books, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Paul said, ”Even before my books sold in any numbers, I had found a way of making a living as a writer: publish a book a year and never say no to a magazine assignment. And, out of a horror of destitution, I lived within my means.”

He told me it was possible to make a living back then, when prose-hungry magazines paid decent rates, but that those days are over. My bank balance is proof of this.

I got my start at the end of the travel writing boom, when magazines still sent writers on assignments. I could contact my publisher and say, “Could you find me a Bedouin and three camels? I want to improve my camel handling skills” and within a month I’d be sleeping rough in the desert in Jordan. A kitted-out Land Rover Defender in Namibia? No problem. Here are the keys. Give us a 12 to 15 page feature when you return. Assignments like those vanished, pay-per-article dropped year by year, and the magazines I wrote for vanished, too. As Paul said, writing is a terrible living, but a good life.

The old outlets are gone, but the desire for great writing isn’t. I have an idea about where it’s going next. If you want long-form writing about place, then please support it by joining my Member’s Club. I have bigger plans for Personal Landscapes.

If you want to become a writer, leave home

Paul said in one of our podcast conversations, “I have an abiding belief that the only way to become a writer is to leave home. You don't have to go to the Congo or India. All you need to do is go away, cross the border.”

Part of it has to do with detaching yourself from your family. “A family is a terrible thing if you want to find out who you are or what you want,” he said. “It's an imprisoning, fractious thing. Even happy families. Maybe happy families are the worst.”

Writing demands solitude and independence. Going out into the world alone is the best way to achieve this.

In his 1976 novel The Family Arsenal, Paul wrote, “To live abroad was to create a mythology about yourself, more than a new personality. A liberating fantasy that you could believe in, a new world.”

I asked him if it’s necessary to go away to reinvent yourself. “it's not simply that you're inventing a person, he said. “You are becoming the person that you're meant to be. That's who you are.”

If you’re a writer, going away also gives you a subject. That’s an experience Paul and I share. Writing was never the problem. The problem was finding something to write about. Going to Central America gave me my subject, and living in Africa gave Paul his.

Go far away, go alone, and go for a long time

That’s how we used to travel in the analog era. We dropped off the map for months at a time. No one knew where we were. We were unreachable and out of touch, forced to rely on our own resources.

“Put yourself in a precarious position where you're small and you need to be a watchful,” Paul said on my podcast. “Watchful like an animal that's under siege by other animals. All your senses will be alert.”

What happens? You see everything. The colours are more vivid and the smells are more intense. Small details you’d never notice at home leap out. As Paul said in the novel Picture Palace, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”

That isolation allows you to develop at your own pace. Paul wrote about going to Africa with the Peace Corps in his collection Fresh-Air Fiend: “That decade of being off the phone, which is the most extreme condition of being cut off, was formative for me. In most respects it was one of the best things that could have happened in my passage toward becoming a writer because it forced upon me a narrow sort of life.”

But don’t bounce around — live there

“There's a lot of nipping from place to place,” Paul said to me on my podcast. “There's much more movement, but they don't take root.”

He advises going to a place, getting a job and learning the language. He worked as a teacher in Malawi, Uganda and Singapore, and lived in London as a working writer for 18 years.

I followed a similar path, working as a teacher in Japan for two years, and then living in Malta for six and Berlin for nine. In between, I traveled alone through Central America and large parts of East and Southeast Asia, staying away for months at a time and writing about what I saw.

The idea that you know a place is a delusion

Part of the reason you might want to live in a place is because the impression you had from social media is almost certainly wrong. We talked about this on my podcast.

Paul said, “What you find out on the Internet is so inaccurate, it's so distorted, it's so loaded that when you get to a place, it's never the place you’re expecting. You haven't arrived in a known place. It's still an unknown place. And so the delusion that you know it, or the sense that you know it, is a delusion. And you find out.”

The world is still out there for you to discover, Instagram be damned.

You learn about the world through work

I discovered this through years of part-time and summer jobs, starting with my first paper route in fifth grade, and pumping gas at Sunoco in high school. It also applies to expat life.

“My childhood and early adulthood was all tied into trying to get away from home and finding out how the world works,” Paul told me on my podcast. “How do you find out? It's not by sports or anything like that. It's having a job and working with other people. So I discovered what people discover when they work, which is that work is social. Yes, you're making money, you're learning a trade, but also you're with other people, and you're with a lot of other different people, and they've got stories, they have lives, they have issues, they have crises.”

Read his story ‘Stop & Shop’ in The Vanishing Point for more. It’s based on his experience working at a grocery store as a teenager.

Risks can make you wise

We’ve lost the taste for risk in our sheltered digital age. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s was very different. We were often left on our own. Our parents had no idea what we were up to when we left the house. We built bike ramps to jump over other kids, lit fires in the woods, and tried rappelling off bridges. We had secret lives in the real world, not just on some website.

The same is true of travel. It was different in the analog era.

Paul told me, “When I went to Africa [with the Peace Corps as a young man], if anyone made a suggestion, any offer no matter how outrageous, I thought, yeah, I'll try it. I was the opposite of risk averse. It was as though I was programmed to take risks. And I'm telling you, any one of them could have turned so, so bad. It was a time when… I won't say it was easier to take risks. There were more risks to take, but there were more rewards from them.”

He sums it up well in his most recent collection, The Vanishing Point. This is from the short story ‘A Charmed Life’: “The young know almost nothing, which is why the best of them take risks, while the others go off to work. Hard work yields a sort of knowledge through experience, but risks can make you wise — crisis as enlightenment.”

Think pessimistically but act optimistically

I’ll share some writing advice from Paul in a moment, but here’s one last piece of travel and lifestyle advice that stayed with me. Paul said in an online interview:

“I think pessimistically, but I act optimistically. And I think that's what you've got to do. You can't say the world's going to hell, although it's pretty obvious that it is. One of the values of travel is that you see how other people have solved the problems of old age, of transportation, of employment to understand the direction of the world and solutions.”

Read a writer, not a book

I started doing this in my mid-twenties. I didn’t learn it from Paul, but it’s a practice we both share.

“Rather than read a book,” he says, “I read a writer. […] “The only way to know a book, to know a writer, is to read it all. You read everything, and you realize that a writer often writes bad books. He writes boring books. He writes books that maybe he shouldn't have written, but that's the way to another book.”

Whenever I found a writer I resonated with, I read all the books by that writer, and then the biographies, collected letters, and finally critical works about them. I did this with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Paul Theroux, and so many more. I look back on that time as an intense period when I made a big leap as a writer. Paul would agree.

“If you want to become a writer,” he said, “if you want to be a real reader, do that. Read all the books, all the poems, then read the autobiography, and then read the biography. And then you could say, I know that writer. And that becomes a period in your life too, when you're reading, when you're completely immersed in that writer.”

But don’t stop there…

Write book reviews

It isn’t enough to just read those writers. Paul told me that V.S. Naipaul encouraged him to write book reviews as a young writer because it helps you form clear opinions.

Reviews “force you to make a judgement on a book,” Naipaul says in Sir Vidia’s Shadow. “It’s important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they’ve read it.”

Having to write what you think — clearly and concisely — makes you a better writer.

How you write can also help…

Write two drafts in longhand

When asked how to improve a piece of writing, I’ve often heard Paul tell people to copy it out again in longhand. They inevitably balk at this — “It’s too much work!” — and he says, “You’ll never be a writer.”

I’ve always written the first drafts of my books longhand and typed up the second draft. I asked him what writing the second draft in longhand adds to the process. He said, “It makes you slow down.”

This was quickly followed by, “No one ever listens to me.”

Until now, that is. I’m working on a new book, so I decided to modify my method to his: write the first and second drafts in longhand, and type up the third. I was excited to get started, and I’ve enjoyed the process so much.

Don’t write too fast

I’ve only written travel books and feature articles. Slowing down is something Paul emphasized several times when I told him I was attempting a novel:

“Excellent that you have a specific idea. It's always a long haul with me, but pondering, note taking and sketching are essential. My advice is not to get too far ahead of yourself. Just move from Point A to Point B, and onward because surprising and unexpected things happen when you do so. It’s always a bewildering process and I don’t think you understand the full meaning of it until you’re done.”

I found many other pieces of advice when re-reading Paul’s fiction, including…

The delight is in the details

In his story collection The Consul’s File, Paul wrote, “Truth is not a saga of alarming episodes; it is a detail, a small clear one, that gives a fiction life.”

It’s one of the things I like best about his work, his eye for detail and revealing scraps of dialogue. Take these two examples from the novella Dr. Slaughter:

“What was there about karate that attracted undersized people?”

And: “He was clumsy — banging, thumping, throwing things down. There was a kind of noisemaking that was a clear sign of stupidity in a man.”

I’ve filled my reading notebooks with observations like this, copied from Paul’s work. I like to think they’ve made me a better observer.

Sentences like these also ring true for another reason…

The truest expression of life is humour

That’s a line from Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a wonderful book about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul and his own coming of age as a writer.

“The truest expression of life was humour,” he said, “especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce.”

I tried to capture this in the first half of my book about Malta, in my earlier Central America book, and in nearly all the feature articles and columns I wrote for Outpost magazine.

Sir Vidia’s Shadow was called a hatchet job by the same lazy reviewers who apply “the grouchy traveler” to Paul’s travel books, completely missing the absurdity that dogs our clashes of culture.

They also missed the deep reflections on friendship contained in the book. “Character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship,” Paul wrote. In another section, he mused on the solemn, undiscussed understanding at the heart of friendship: “With your ego switched off, you accept this person — his demands, his silences — and it is reciprocated.” I think about that often. I’ve been fortunate in having very good friends.

These are just a few recent lessons I’ve learned from reading and talking with Paul Theroux. I hope you found it interesting.

You can listen to two of my conversations with Paul on Personal Landscapes: Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib and Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points.