Welcome back to Odyssey Week! Today we’re departing from our cinematic analyses (example 1, example 2) to see what The Odyssey has to tell us about travel writing.

In the middle of 2010, just after I stepped down as the New York Times’ “Frugal Traveler” columnist, I began pitching my editors on a new series. The idea was that I would travel the world without any of the tools we’d all grown to depend on: no maps, no guidebooks, no smartphone, no Internet. I would not even do any practical research on my destinations, though I allowed myself movies, TV shows, novels, and nonfiction books. I called this series “Getting Lost.”¹ For some reason, my editors gave it the green light. I was off, to who knows where!

My initial destinations were diverse, and designed to disorient me: Tangier, Ireland, Paris, Chongqing, Las Vegas, Jerusalem. Of these adventures, none was more epic than my attempt to recreate Odysseus’s journey back from Troy (located outside Çanakkale, Turkey) to Ithaca, his home island in the Ionian Sea, on the other side of the Greek peninsula.

My 11-day trek was an odyssey of sorts. There were no Sirens, no cyclops, no monsters or gods to delay and disrupt me, or to hurry me on. Instead, I had to contend with the “capricious whims of bus and ferry schedules,” locals who knew little of what lay on neighboring islands, and my own intentional ignorance. But just like Odysseus, I experienced hospitality and kindness, too — leftovers, perhaps, from the ancient days when xenia was divine law. On Chios I met a restaurant owner raised in Queens; on Samos chatted with old Little Jim, who’d spent most of his life in Australia; and at a bar on Kythira:

When the story came out, though, I was conflicted. Although my own odyssey had been successful (spoiler alert: I made it to Ithaca!), the article itself felt overly long and overly linear, bogged down in the details of getting from Point α to Point β, repetitive in its descriptions of the islands and its references to Greek myth. The central tension, as it has been in almost all of my travel writing, was: Will he make it? But even for me, that was getting old — and I didn’t have the payoff of The Odyssey’s suitor-slaughter to give my arrival in Ithaca a violent freshness.

I had wanted, of course, to write not an odyssey but The Odyssey. (Good luck getting that assignment!) Because The Odyssey wasn’t just the founding work of Western literature. It was a travel narrative, and a skillful one at that, employing all of the clever tricks the best writers use to transform their adventures — thrilling or quotidian, far-flung or familiar — into stories you actually want to read. Now, many years and many re-reads of The Odyssey later, I’ve tried to distill its wisdom into these handily number, easy-to-digest lessons:

The Odyssey begins in media res: Odysseus has been away from his home in Ithaca for ages, off fighting the Trojan War for ten years, wandering for three, and now stuck the last seven on the island of Ogygia, where he’s consort to the sea nymph Calypso. The epic’s 24 books not only follow him as he makes his circuitous way from Ogygia to Ithaca, they also flash back, again and again, to the episodes he’s already survived. And those flashbacks contain flashbacks, too — stories within stories within stories.

This is essential, perhaps the most important part of the travel writer’s craft. First of all, it lets Homer frame the action of the overall story within a reasonable window. As a narrative, The Odyssey takes place in the span of, say, a few months, from roughly the day before Odysseus flees Ogygia to roughly the day after he and his son, Telemachus, kill the suitors plaguing their home. For a writer, that’s a less daunting task to approach than trying to encompass the previous ten years of wandering, plus the ten years of Trojan warring, plus the origin stories of everyone involved, from start to finish. It lets a writer keep moving the action forward, bit by bit, looking for moments to flashback to — the choicest moments, the most important ones, the most entertaining, the most illuminating.

This nonlinearity is also what lets a writer compress. The sort of important but not super important adventures get truncated — like the mere 20 lines Homer expends on the island of the lotus-eaters. Other adventures get summarized, or turned into lists (like the Catalogue of Ships that fought in Troy, from Book 2), or excised entirely because, in the end, they didn’t really matter. Nonlinearity allows travel writers greater perspective on their experiences, a perspective that can be hard to achieve when the experiences are so fresh and vibrant that they can be hard to sort and rank. Perhaps that was my failing after my odyssey, that my deadline meant I couldn’t quite summon up the perspective I needed to escape the linearity of my narrative.

The Ancient Greek world ran on hospitality. The laws of xenia dictated that you must treat strangers and travelers well, feeding them and sheltering them as you were able, and that, on the other end, a guest should not take advantage of that hospitality. Zeus himself was the god of strangers, enforcing the rule of xenia.

So you’d think that xenia would make Odysseus’s journey home an easy one. Yet time and again he runs into characters for whom Zeus’s law feels, well, optional. The cyclops Polyphemus, for instance, does not seem bound by it — after all, he devours alive several of the “guests” he finds in his cave. And the suitors hounding Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, back in Ithaca seem neither to realize nor to care much for xenia.

And so whenever Odysseus encounters true hospitality — this or that king or swineherd inviting him in, however regal or weather-beaten our hero looks — it feels like a kind of miracle. He gets bathed, fed, clothed, and he receives gifts of treasure and conveyance from his hosts, and returns their kindness with gifts of his own: wonderful stories of his adventures.

This is how I’ve tried to approach hospitality myself in my travels and in my travel writing — as something expected but also miraculous. I’ve received enough kindnesses (food, lodging, advice, friendship) wherever I’ve gone, from Decorah, Iowa, to Urumqi, China, that I know there exist strangers willing to help me out. Yet I try never fully to assume that’s the case. I don’t want to be the kind of person who gets himself in a fix because he figures someone will always bail him out. I want to be the traveler who understands that’s possible but remains surprised, and a bit awed, when it finally does.

And I’ve always tried to include that in my travel writing, partly because I know that readers appreciate those anecdotes but also because I want them to believe both that it could happen to them and that they themselves could be the kind strangers offering a free meal, a bed for the night, a fine if ephemeral connection.

The primary duty of a travel writer is to go out into the world and report things as they are. Not only shouldn’t you flat-out make things up², but you should always question your own experience and interpretation of what you’ve seen, to make sure you’re reporting accurately on the world, and not out of some skewed perspective.

But The Odyssey shows how a little, let’s say, embellishment can serve the narrative without distorting reality. First, start by imagining the tale without any of its fantasy elements: No cyclops, no whirlpool monsters, no murderous giants, not even any gods. Instead, it’s the story of a warrior-king just trying to find his way back home.

This should be pretty easy. For one, the monster-based adventures take place entirely in Books 9–12, when Odysseus relates them all in a banquet speech to the Phaeacian king and his people. There’s a decent case to be made that everything he says there is made-up — of the twelve black ships full of sailors he began with in Troy, he is the only survivor. Who can gainsay him? And who would believe him, were he not such a master liar storyteller?

Likewise, the gods themselves can easily go. When they do show up, it’s usually Athena in disguise, conveying vital information to Telemachus or, undisguised, changing Odysseus’s appearance to make him look older and more haggard or younger, more royal. Without her, we can attribute Odysseus’s change in appearance to his mood, his health, his age — sure, why not? Without the gods and without the monsters, the broader story still stands. Maybe not quite as captivating, but it’s believable.

But with those elements, it’s The Odyssey! These embellishments elevate the journey, the politics, the longing, the vengeance into something more, something timeless.

The ethical travel-writer to do this is not, of course, to make things up, Odysseus-style. Instead, you can depart from the objective, observed reality by acknowledging the departure. Write not just what you saw but how you wanted to see it. Deploy unmistakable hyperbole. Reference the cultural works that framed your expectations and make clear the gulf that can separate imagination from reality. Be outrageous, then deconstruct those outrages.

Those fantasy elements we remember most from The Odyssey are few and far between. Our hero’s big adventures battling monsters and resisting (or not) the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso don’t show up until more than a third of the way through the epic. And even then, they take up only 4 of its 24 books, gone in the span of an evening’s storytelling.

Homer knows what he’s doing here. Those stories are there in the first place because they are what his audience wants most — amazing tales of triumph, through cleverness and bravery, over supernatural forces. Would you have listened to it sung, 2,500 years ago, without them?

It’s the same with travel writing. You can’t write a story about Paris without at least mentioning baguettes and wine, the Louvre and the fashions. No recounting of Rome is complete without its pasta, no Tokyo tale without sushi. Those elements may not be the focus of a story, they may not even interest you, but your readers, I guarantee, care. The expected delights need to be there.

There’s psychology behind this, I think, although I may have just invented it. It’s this: Travel can be disorienting. That’s kind of the point — to find ourselves in a strange, new place and to attempt to seek out comfort, pleasure, meaning. But to do that, we need landmarks, familiar phenomena to reassure us that, yes, we do know this place a little bit, and if we know it a little bit, maybe we can know it more. An aside about a baguette, an easy reference to Frida Kahlo or Nelson Mandela, an appreciation of bullfighting or sumo wrestling — these ground the reader, they fulfill expectations, and they give the reader strength to absorb what’s fresh and unfamiliar. You don’t have to have a lot of them; in fact, too many drags the story into stereotype. They don’t need to be extensive — a mere “rosy-fingered dawn” functioned as a landmark for the Ancient Greeks. And when they are going to be lengthy, you can make the reader wait for them, hinting and foreshadowing as Homer did with Odysseus’s monster tales.

But along the way, Homer also had another strategy up his sleeve — to make his audience want what he wanted to give them. Because while he was hinting at and delaying the grand monster adventures, he was also setting up everything else: the 108 suitors besieging Penelope, Telemachus’s flailing attempts to grow up, the Trojan War veterans’ messy, imperfect lives. All of that happens while we’re waiting for Odysseus even to appear on the scene, and once he finally does, once he tells his tales and lands back on Ithaca, those setups culminate in The Odyssey’s epic final-act battle scene, where Odysseus, Telemachus, and two servants kill every last suitor. That fight and the release it provides are what Homer is able to build up to, precisely because he’s first gratified his audience with the fantasy.

The Odyssey is, obviously, a story that is all about the idea of home: what home is, what it means to be separated from home, how home changes while you’re away, how you come to grips (or not) once you finally return. Home motivates, colors, and elevates everything Odysseus is trying to achieve. Without it, he’s just another Greek hero — a Theseus or Perseus³, whose deeds we recall but whose character feels flat.

For travel writers, home can be a tough topic to address, particularly when editors insist on writers’ leaving personal elements out of their articles. But even when we are allowed first-person musings, our writing tends to drift backward — when we’re on the road (in our stories), home is the place we’ve come from. It’s our past. It explains why we’ve become interested in birdwatching, or knitting, or Ancient Greek literature. Home goes in the nut graf.

Rarely do we get the chance, or even remember, to look forward from the midst of a narrative to what it will mean to go home. Great travel pieces seem designed to readers in the places they describe, seeing the lush jungles of the Golden Triangle or smelling the smoke and fat of street tacos in Mexico City. It’s one of the embellishments we make that everyone accepts: You are there! But we rarely flash forward to what happens after: What is it like to have been somewhere? How is home different? How are we? Because we are different, travel has changed us, even if there’s no space (or editorial willingness) to include it in the piece. And we may not even know it ourselves, not till years after our deadlines.

Even Homer doesn’t deal with it. He does bring Odysseys home, he allows him his revenge, and then he (through Athena) brings the action, and the epic, to a halt. Peace is declared, and the credits roll. Was this intentional, or did he too have an editor who said, “Enough”?

Perhaps this is simply a recognition that there is always a next story, that no travel narrative is ever complete — and that the next story may be written by a different writer. For Odysseus, we have Cavafy and Tennyson, Madeline Miller and Zachary Mason, and surely many more to come, telling and retelling the story, in whatever order and with whatever embellishments they feel appropriate, of one man’s journey home. 🪨🪨🪨