A L S O +T O D A Y "A Walk in the Woods" By Bill Bryson An almost-encounter with two big animals in the middle of the night T A B L E_T A L K Visiting Bankok? Travelers discuss places to go, people to see in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Student protests bloom By Rolf Potts Spring is here -- time to put on the riot gear! (05/19/98) The tomb of the unknown soldier By Roxanne Nelson An unforgettable encounter in southern France (05/18/98) Mondo Weirdo Tales of Koh Samui Readers' adventures on Thailand's fabled -- or is it just mislabeled? -- island (05/15/98) Don't go there By Tim Barrett Way off the beaten track in Mexico (05/14/98) There'll always be a London By Douglas Cruickshank A wandering wonderer ponders the passions of collectors and cabbies (05/13/98) Browse the Wanderlust Features archives		BY DON GEORGE | Bill Bryson's new book, "A Walk in the Woods," is a delightful and enlightening account of the author's attempts to hike the Appalachian Trail. The work is distinguished by its vivid depictions of the landscapes and the people Bryson encounters -- and also by the writer's engaging combination of reverence and wit, qualities that are also abundant in the interview below, which was recorded by telephone earlier this month. You are usually referred to as a "travel writer," and your books are shelved in the "travel books" area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term "travel writing" mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go somewhere and having an experience out in the wider world. Are there travel writers of the past whose work you really admire? There's a lot of travel writers whose work I admire very much. But it's really their writing that I admire. They're not inspirational to me in the sense of me reading them and thinking, "Oh, I'd like to go make that trip myself." I'm very glad they've made it for me. I think it's very interesting to read about places that I'm unlikely ever to go, or circumstances under which I'm unlikely to see them. I know how hard it is to write descriptive passages in a fresh way. If I go to a mountaintop and the view is great, whatever I write, in the first draft, always sounds like something you'd write on a postcard: "Mom, it's breathtaking. It was stupendous." This is one reason why I admire the work of Paul Theroux, for instance. He can describe a landscape in a very original and novel way. It's impressive. Everyone in the world has done travel writing after a fashion, because everyone who has gone on vacation has written somebody a letter or a postcard. And most of those phrases that spring to mind have been used. It's very hard to describe something that's particularly beautiful or majestic or whatever in a way that's fresh and original. Is there a secret to that, do you think? It's just really hard work. I mean, there are other parts of putting together books that are relatively easy compared with that. But the parts that I always struggle over are the parts where I'm describing the landscape and describing the way things look -- particularly if it's beautiful. It's much easier for me to describe something that's ugly. Then you don't have all these clichés tumbling out at you. Yes, I'm approached by so many would-be writers who say, "All my friends tell me my letters home are so good, I should write travel stories." Well, I try to gently tell them, good travel writing is an art -- it's more than just a letter home. I think a basic error that is made with travel writing, particularly by aspiring travel writers, is the same mistake that most people make when they want to show slides from a vacation -- just assuming that everybody's interested in it. You have to work from exactly the opposite assumption: Nobody is interested in this. Even your wife is not interested in this. You have to somehow make it so that they become interested in it. Every travel writer does it in different ways. And I suppose my trick is to try and make them laugh so that they feel that there is going to be some reward in terms of amusement. Some writers are tempted to fictionalize their writing when it suits their purposes. How do you feel about that? How closely do you stick to the actual facts of a trip? In a book like "Mother Tongue," where my purpose is to convey information in as accurate a way as I can, I'm very rigorous and careful. But with the travel books, my approach is much more relaxed -- though I still try to be accurate, it's not paramount in the way it is with a book that's presenting itself as the history of the English language. So, I tend to write without much of anything on the desk -- and then I get up and wander off and go look at a map or check a note or go to the library. I'm focusing much more on the writing and on trying to re-create the experience mostly from memory. And it's just a completely different kind of book. I'm sure that in doing that, I make mistakes. In fact, I've gone back to places that I wrote about in the travel books and realized that the motel was on the southeast corner of the route, not the northwest corner. To tell you the truth, this doesn't bother me terribly much because they're not guidebooks. If I get a detail like that wrong, it's an honest error. It's not my purpose to give people guidance to where they can go and how they can retrace my steps. You're not really expecting someone to set off with your book in hand and say, "Oh, let's stay here. Let's eat here." Right. The book is absolutely faithful to my memory. Anything I've written in "A Walk in the Woods," for example, I have a very clear memory of. But I just went up on Mount Graylock this week in Massachusetts, for example, and there's a lookout point up there, and it was much farther on than I recalled. But none of that seems really too important in a work of literature like this. That's the view I take. There are obviously certain times when you have to tend to accuracy. There are times when it is important. But as I say, it's not important in the same way it is in a book that's a history or biography. When you set off on the Appalachian Trail, you knew you were going to write a book. But did you have something framed in your mind about how the book would proceed? I realized very quickly that the book was going to be very different from the way I had loosely imagined it. First of all, we weren't having encounters on the trail with a lot of other people. There weren't a lot of other people out there. And Katz [Bryson's hiking companion] was a lot less communicative than I expected. I thought the guy was just going to fill me up with great anecdotes and great stories of what he'd been doing for the last 20 years. And he didn't. As I say in the book, our relations were very congenial throughout once we sort of got through the first day or two. We settled into a routine. And there was no stress or tension or anything, but also there wasn't much conversation. And I just thought, Oh, God, all day long we're doing nothing. We're moving forward, but we're not actually doing anything that you could write home about. And at the end of the day, he puts up his tent and crawls into it. Quarter after 6, and he's gone. So, I realized then, I'm going to have to do a lot more work on this to make a book out of this, which involved doing a lot of research once I got back, doing a lot more reading and finding out about geology and history. Much of the time I was struck by my ignorance when I was out there. And on the trail I couldn't do anything about it. I mean, you couldn't carry a set of encyclopedias or even a good reference. There were lots of times on the trail I would have really loved to have had those books for 10 minutes to read about various dogwoods or whatever. N E X T+P A G E | Irrational fears