In Search of the Elusive Right Word

Posted by 4amWriter

Welcome the fourth installment of my guest blogger, Tony Cappasso. He is the author of a self-published travel narrative, America’s Highway: A Journal of Discovery Along US Route.

Here’s a bit of writing advice you’ve no doubt seen: Read all the time, read everything.

I’ve always been skeptical about advice that is so absolute. But this bit has really worked for me.

Writing is description. It is putting words together to create an image, a sensation, an emotion, in the reader.

It’s what I love the most about reading the works of other writers. It is what I find the most difficult to do in my own writing.

All my experience is in non-fiction. I wrote for newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and the web. All the topics I covered, all the subjects I wrote about were real. No making things up allowed.

It’s tough to be flowery when you’re describing a surgical procedure or a mass immunization.

But I like brilliant, descriptive writing; that is, I like reading it. I’d love doing it, too, but it has never been my forte. Oddly, it doesn’t come naturally to me in my writing although it does in my speaking. But I’ve gotten better.

Before setting out on my trip from Maine to Florida on US Route 1, I reread three of my favorite travel writers. Paul Theroux (Kingdom by the Sea), Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island), and William Least Heat Moon (Blue Highways).

All three are masters of description.

This is Theroux describing trains: “It was man’s best machine traversing earth’s best feature — the train tracking in the narrow angle between vertical rock and horizontal water.”

Or William Least Heat Moon from his book Blue Highways: “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.”

Here’s Bill Bryson musing about tourism: “What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.”

I try to imitate them; to learn from them.

I look for inspiration in description. I carry a notebook and a pen to jot down observations about persons or places, and practice sharpening my skills at describing what I see and hear, taste and smell, so my readers can also.

What about you? Is it easy for you to write description? Which of your favorite authors do you think write great description?

In Search of Elusive Facts

Posted by 4amWriter

Welcome the second installment of my guest blogger, Tony Cappasso. He is the author of a self-published travel narrative, America’s Highway: A Journal of Discovery Along US Route 1.

IN SEARCH OF ELUSIVE FACTS

I’ve been approached by a publisher to write a book on the history of US Route 1 in Maine. This means lots of digging for old photos and other kinds of images of places along the road.

Oh, goody. Research, my favorite.

You might want to write this down on your hand so you don’t forget it: Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, the fruit of research is authenticity.

Job one for my project: Track down old photos.

This did not turn out to be as easy as I had thought it was going to be.

Route 1 in Maine stretches some 527 miles from Fort Kent to the New Hampshire border in Kittery. On its way south, the road passes through myriad small towns, and cities such as Caribou, Presque Isle, Calais, etc. Many of these places have a historical commission or some such organization, whose job is to preserve the history of the place. I’d have to contact them all.

Old magazine articles mentioned the names of construction firms that had worked on Route 1. Did any of them still exist? If they did, would they still have the old photos?

It turned out that one company, called Wyman and Simpson Construction, was still in business.

Time to get on the phone and start making calls.

It is during times like this that I realize that signing up with Comcast for a home telephone took me within shouting distance of genius. I can make unlimited phone calls for one monthly fee.

Fifty – yes, that’s 50 – calls later, I had sources for photos of work being done on Route 1 in Maine going back to the early 1900s.

But I wasn’t done.

The University of Southern Maine in Portland has a collection of old Maine guidebooks that date back to the early 1900s. They were mine to peruse, a reference librarian told me. But I’d have to go up there to see them.

More fun – a road trip.

Oh, and by the way, the librarian warned me, these are not images of the guidebooks. These are the original guidebooks themselves.

“If you want pictures of them, bring your digital camera,” she said.

Guest Blogger: Tony Cappasso

Posted by 4amWriter

Welcome my guest blogger, Tony Cappasso. He is the author of America’s Highway: A Journal of Discovery Along US Route 1. It is an ebook on Amazon.

HEAD LIKE A BUMP

In the late 1790s, a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall invented a system for estimating human mental abilities. He measured peoples’ skulls, and then felt skull surfaces for bumps. Each bump, so Gall’s theory went, corresponded to a different area of the brain from which originated a specific ability or interest.

If the old boy had ever gotten to feel my skull, he would have found it to be a bodacious big bump of curiosity. He might also have gotten a punch on his nose, emanating from my bump of annoyance at others trying to feel my skull, but that’s another story.

I was a reporter for 30 years. It left me with an insatiable urge to find out. It hardly mattered about what; I just wanted to know. That’s why I started two years ago on a quest, the outcome of which was a four-month-long trip from Maine to Florida on US Route 1.

Naturally, having taken the trip and assuaged my need to know, another bump kicked in — the need to tell someone. I wrote a book about the trip, the road and the people and places along it called, America’s Highway: A Journal of Discovery Along US Route 1.

The idea for the trip and the book sprouted from the need to answer a question: How did Lafayette Road in Portsmouth, NH, get its name? For the benefit of the uninitiated, Lafayette Road is the name given to Route 1 as it passes through Portsmouth and Hampton.

My research revealed that Lafayette Road got its name in 1824, when French Revolutionary War Hero the Marquis de Lafayette made his farewell tour of America. Then in his 80s, the aged warrior, riding north from Boston, was given a cavalry escort north though Hampton and into Portsmouth. The road he traveled on was renamed Lafayette Road in his honor by a grateful citizenry.

My curiosity was off and running.

I searched libraries for maps from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These showed a road that followed the general path of Route 1, but with a different name, The Atlantic Highway. Information from the Federal Highway Administration, dating back to 1927, revealed more of the road’s past.

Gradually, the idea of writing a book about this road began to take on definite form. Then, trolling through the web, I found that a group of intrepid depression-era writers had driven the road and written a book of their own in 1937. It was called, US Route 1 from Maine to Florida.

A Google search turned up a copy. I bought it. When the book arrived, I devoured it from cover to cover.

I was hooked. These guys had done it, why couldn’t I? The rest, as they say, is history.

Later, scientific study revealed that Dr. Gill’s theories about brain functions and skull bumps to be a lot of bunkum. The idea that feeling skulls told anything useful about the skull’s owner gradually faded away. Shame, really. The concept was sort of colorful. I’m not too bothered, though. My bumpless curiosity is still going strong.

Sunday Spin: The Blonde Coyote

Posted by 4amWriter

Welcome to Sunday Spin, where I bring your attention to a fellow blogger’s work, be it an article, photography, recipes, or anything that tickles my fancy. You can find all of my Sunday Spin mentions on my Sunday Spin Page.

My family often fantasize about what we’d do if we had a whole summer to ourselves, with no commitments or obligations. What if we could rent out our house, or at least find a reliable cat-sitter and plant-waterer and wild bird-feeder? Where would we go? What would we bring? Would we make a plan, or would we just roam? What sights, sounds, and smells would we imbibe? And most importantly, at least for me, how would I write about it? Would I write a travel narrative? Or would I turn my road trip into a fictional adventure tale? Or would I recast it all into poetry?

Alas, life at this stage in the game does not permit us to make this particular dream come true. So, I have to live vicariously through someone else–other family members or friends or fellow bloggers whose lives are less tethered than mine.

Today I was pleased to discover that one of my favorite travel/photography blogs, The Blonde Coyote, has posted about how to plan a “killer road trip.” Even though I can’t put her suggestions into practice in the immediate future, Miss Coyote’s brilliant photos and her scrumptious tale has stirred my wanderlust to the surface.

Maybe someday.