Letter to Chuck

Hi Chuck,

Really glad to be able to write to you. I guess the main purpose of this is to ask you what it was like writing your book as it was actually happening. In class we've read a lot of peoples' accounts of their travels, but most of the time they're reflective and written after the fact. Of course they kept notes on their travels, but America Day By Day, Blue Highways, and Travels with Charley were all written after the authors had completed their journeys which I suppose makes you unique. I'm sure that you edited your material after the trip had happened to emphasize certain things, and you made sure to highlight the fact that not everything is necessarily true in your book, but still you had the proximity to the events. 

Do you think that you were able to produce a more cohesive piece of work because you wrote a lot of it while it was happening? I would imagine that it makes for a more honest emphasis than you get if you're writing it reflectively. By that I mean that you're a lot closer to what's happening so the things that are most important to you as they happen are also the most important in the writing. You don't have an expectation upon yourself to write something more profound out of an experience you had that was influential when it happened, but perhaps not possessed of everything that you ascribed to it later. 

I guess a possible example of some things that you did which I felt was not entirely honest, as in it likely happened but wasn't as fully realized when it did as when you wrote it. One of these was when you were in South Carolina I think it was. Your run over the hill where you imagined what would happen if you were to die at that precise moment. The web of connections that it would bring out to pass the information along to everyone. I don't doubt that you considered what it would be like if you died. I think that the nature of your trip almost ensured that you would think about death being so involved with writing about it, but I don't honestly think that you made all those connections while you were out there on your run, it seemed like the sort of pensive reflective moment which could only occur from a retrospective look at what you were feeling while you were there.