Zitat des Tages von Tim Cahill:
I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
For me, to find a place that doesn't have an organized tour going to it is becoming more and more difficult. A lot of times it involves danger of a political nature - places where the adventure-travel trips can't go because they can't get any liability insurance.
Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.
A lot of the physical flirtation with fear I did early on in my career, when I was a much younger person - stuff I wouldn't do now. But I was very interested in the mechanics of risk and fear in those days. And I found out fear pretty much always feels the same, whether it's doing a rock climb or speaking in front of an audience.
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.
Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn.
You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.
The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.
I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.
For many years I thought my job was to go to places where it would be difficult for most of the readers to ever get to. Now, in the more than 20 years I've been doing this, the concept of adventure-travel trips or expeditions by groups has sprung up. The places I went 20 years ago now have adventure-travel trips.
New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
Adventure travel existed before I started, I just didn't know it.
The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.
