There are already so many memoirs about walking this trail – is there space for mine?

Kia ora,

I recently saw someone ask this question online: “There are already so many memoirs about walking Te Araroa. Is there even space for mine?”

They’re right about the first part. Here’s an incomplete list of Te Araroa memoirs:

• Adventures with Emilie, by Victoria Bruce
• Northbound: Four seasons of solitude on Te Araroa, by Naomi Arnold
• Routes, glutes and two pairs of boots, by Holly Kipling
• Te Araroa: the New Zealand trail, by Geoff Chapple
• Not alone: Walking Te Araroa trail through New Zealand, by Tim Voors
• Bewildered: Leaving everything behind for 3000km in the wilds of New Zealand

And here’s the answer to that person’s question: YES! There is space for your story! It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about Te Araroa or the Pacific Crest Trail or the Camino de Santiago or any other popular trail. There is space for your story.

The writer is what makes each story in this list unique. Each writer had a different reason for taking on Te Araroa, and each writer had a different experience of the trail. That internal journey is just as important (if not more important) an the external journey. By that I mean that what went on in these authors’ heads is just as important as what happened to them on the trail. 

It’s that internal journey that makes reading about long trails like these so compelling. I want to understand what makes someone up sticks and put on a backpack for months at a time. I want to know what months on the trail does for them: how they change, how they cope, if they find what they were hoping to find. I want to know if I could be the type of person who could do that. Maybe if I did a trip like that, I’d change too (for the better, I hope).

That’s why writing about your travels needs to be so much more than a chronology of where you went and what happened. You need to take readers on that internal journey as well.

There’s also joy in the shared experiences. When I read a Te Araroa memoir, I look forward to seeing how each walker deals with the Longwoods, a notoriously muddy section in Southland. Northbound walkers encounter it early on; southbound walkers encounter it almost at the end. The difference in attitudes always delights me (maybe there’s some schadenfreude going on there). 

Some northbound walkers start by gingerly picking their way around the mud, not ready to go full pig-mode just yet. But for southbound walkers, they’ve embraced pig-mode by now and charge into the mud.

So if you’ve walked a popular trail and you don’t know if you should write about it when so many other people have written about it, I say go for it. Use your external journey as the structure that you hang your internal journey over. 

Only you can tell the story of what when on inside as you walked. And it’s that internal journey that will make your external journey compelling.

If you need help working out if you’ve got the balance right, give me a shout. I offer manuscript evaluations to help you see what’s working with your story and where you could go deeper with that internal journey. And if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of your story, I offer free sample edits to show how editing can strengthen your writing.

Cheers,

Deborah

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📚 What I’m reading

I whizzed through An Open Door: New Travel Writing for a Precarious Century, edited by Steven Lovatt. I particularly loved the final piece about pilgrimage to Bardsey Island in Wales.

I’m enjoying The Wind at My Back by Paul Maunder. Some gorgeous metaphors and turns of phrases in this book.

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📅 Availability

I have space available from mid-July. Get in touch if you want a sample edit so you can see what editing can do for your story.

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