Script - From Journaling to Publishing

This talk explores the journaling process. You can use the process in travel writing projects and in tourism destination branding. We look at how to use Microsoft OneNote to capture and keep your journaling in a method that is similar to sketch-booking for creatives. (You can view the Slides below in Powerpoint or in Google Slides)

Narrative journaling is proposed here as a methodology for writers who are researching a specific destination. You can use the process during your Masters study or during your doctoral research. The process will mature into a productive method for your professional writing in place-making and literary travel writing. The object is to help you create literary travel stories. These travel stories will be cultural artefacts. Readers will want to keep them, and read them again.

Writers have kept their own journals for many years. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote up her Grasmere Journals from her walks in the Lake District. Her journal entries served as pretexts. Pretexts are rich in scientific and emotional data. They can become catalysts for literary writing. Dorothy’s brother used her journal entry here as a catalyst for his poem on Daffodils.

We will look at two lakes. Lake Garda in Italy, and Lake Annecy in France. Lake Garda inspired journal-keeping in Franz Kafka, and earlier travel notes by Stendhal. The French lake, Lake Annecy, is the setting for a novel by Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano.

Sebald’s travel writing creates sites for literary tourists to visit. His writing acts as an interactive surface between Sebald’s experiences and Kafka’s journaling in the diaries.

W. G. Sebald is a literary travel writer, in Vertigo he takes along with him, his Kafka and his copy of Stendhal. 4 features make Travel Writing literary:

First, that movement is in evidence. She walks. The wind moves the ripples on the lake.

Next. the past tenses are employed signalling a completed narrative and a first-person narrator guarantees the ethical dimension of eye-witness testimony.

The fourth feature is the immanence of the story; all that the readers have is there, and this total testimony is evidence that the narrator lived to recount the tale. Thus it is considered heroic in literary terms.

Your own desk research and literary reading build an emotional map of the new destination that you are deep-mapping in your project. Discover and analyse existing stories, including literary fiction and the journals of others, set in the destinations. This preliminary reading is to build the map of a new hexis; the armature on which the new travel story will be written. You must also include Geography, climate and the geology of the place you are researching. Keep all your notes in the pages of your journal. Use Microsoft OneNote as your journaling space. I will explain a template for you to use in OneNote later.

For example, the tourist office of Lake Garda provided a list of the winds that blow across the lake. This scientific knowledge of the lake’s microclimate was known to, and experienced by Kafka. He includes the effects of these winds in his journaling in his diaries. Sea-bald includes this in his hexis, in his route and story around Lake Garda.

This is how I conceive of the hexis. For me, the writer’s hexis is both conceptual and physically mappable onto the city or tourist resort. You arrive at the point labelled one. This can be the railway station, the ferry terminal, or even your hotel. Then what I have called, the plateaus. These plateaus represent the stopping points where you can see a site or experience an emotion in the urban space. usually, 5 more plateaus are sufficient for one walking tour around the town.

Sebald’s hexis starts with Stendhal's travel notes and with the diary of Kafka. At the resort town of Limone sul Garda; it is here that Stendhal explores the idea of love for Madame Gherardi on the lake. Sebald is forced to end his unfulfilled quest for Kafka. here at Limone. Sebald had planned to travel on as far at the town on the northern point of Lake Garda, called Riva del Garda. Kaff-car stayed here in Riva, and experienced a realisation of love’s emotions. Thus the hexis is both geographic and emotional.

The researcher today can build a hexis as Sebald did for his destination. It requires literary reading, journaling and the realisation of a theme, an example of a theme that I use is that of ethnobotany. This is where locals use plants in a cultural way. The theme might evolve in your own journaling or from the catalyst of another writer’s journal entry. Remember the rich ideas concisely stored in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry. 'they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake'.

I designed an MS OneNote template to store and share concepts and emerging plans for your travel story. It is based on the idea of the Zettelkasten, or card index file. I have made a table of cells with icons. You can paste-in quotations that become catalysts. In this OneNote page I have pasted-in that quote from Wordsworth’s journal of Grass-mere. In the cell below write your Affirmative notes to develop this idea into a theme. Ask yourself. Where will I go to find these daffodils during my walk around the town? The final cell, labelled Dialogue. This is where you can ask questions of the stakeholders you meet on your work in the field.

Quotations and the ideas generated by them during affirmative journaling will give you a map of your route around the town. In this slide they are the locations around Lake Annecy used in novel of Patrick Modiano novel, called, the Villa Triste. You create a literary geography of the destination with potential plateaus to explore in more detail during fieldwork.

‘Fieldnotes from Fistral’, is my example of a travel story that I made around the Cornish town of Newquay. I used this processual methodology to develop the rich content. I used dialogue with a hotel owner and with the director of a heritage museum. Notice the movement of the ocean in the opening lines and the use of first-person eye as the narrator. Notice, too, please the past tenses used to recount the story.

You can upload your travel stories as e-books to the Google Play Book Store. You will need a trusted Google partner account and a bank account. I present my digital books and audio books on the Google Play Book Store.

I use the free software called Calibre. Calibre makes dot e-PUB files from your Microsoft WORD documents. Google Play requires dot e-PUB files to put on sale in its book store online.

When you are writing longer texts. For example, books or dissertations then it is useful to know your own daily word count. I call this productivity. For me, a uninterrupted hour of writing, without consulting any reference material gives me a word count of 340 words. This word count is for handwriting on an A4 ruled, lie-flat notepad. I use Google Lens to scan-in handwritten texts and convert them to word-processor text.

For book-length writing projects I use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with a row for each chapter. I can update the spreadsheet with my day’s production. I can use it to calculate how many more days and how many more words I need to write in order to meet deadlines. For your dissertation use sections instead of chapters to manage your production.

Word-count from wordcounter.ai. This free web software lets you paste-in even whole book to study the stats and word frequencies. This helps you see your writing productivity.

Here is a list of references to the published book chapters where I explain this methodology in more detail. Your university library may already have some of these in their e-Book Central store online.

Thank you for watching my presentation. Please follow my updates and new projects on my Google Blogger pages at travel writers online dot blog-spot dot com or scan the QR code with the camera of your smart-phone.

References

Mansfield, C. & Potočnik Topler, J. (2023). Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding Urban Place Writing Methodologies. Abingdon: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003178781

Mansfield, C. (2021). 'Way-Tales: An Archaeological Topophonics for Emerging Tourist Spaces', in Piga, B., Siret, D., & Thibaud, J. (Eds.). (2021). Experiential Walks for Urban Design. Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment. London: Springer. pp 323-332. Chapter 19. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_19

Mansfield, C. Shepherd, D. & Wassler, P. (2021). 'Perry – Deep mapping and emotion in place-writing practice' in Scribano, A., Camarena Luhrs, M. & Cervio, A. (Eds) Cities, Capitalism and the Politics of Sensibilities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 6, pp. 97 –114. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58035-3_6

Mansfield, C. & Potočnik Topler, J. (2021). 'Building the Ethnopôle: Eliciting and Sharing Ethnobotanical Knowledge in Tourism Development' Annals for Istrian and Mediterranean Studies - Annales Series Historia et Sociologia, 31(2), pp.197-208. Full text

Modiano, P. (2016). Villa Triste, London: Daunt.

Sebald, W. (1999) Vertigo, London: Penguin.