The Tourist and the Artist
On Writing About Experience
Note: This piece originally appeared as “The Tourist vs. the Artist” on my WordPress blog in 2021. I have revised and expanded it here.
I took photography all through high school. Though I enjoyed the classes and excelled in some advanced technical processes (e.g., color slides, silk screening), I never developed an intuition for taking good photos. I grew into what I call a "tourist." I thought the subject matter alone would make a "good" photo.
Each semester, my photo teacher took students on a field trip to the Oregon zoo in Portland. I went every time, eager to get photos of exotic animals. I would burn through my two rolls of film quickly (I was grateful when, in my junior year, we started moving toward digital and I could take more photos). Mostly, I got elephant butts, distant sleeping tigers, and crocodiles distorted through thick glass.
I was especially proud of a side-profile of a zebra behind a tree (see above). It might make a good album cover or something, but it’s not all that interesting of a photo. I took it because I wanted to prove I had seen a zebra. I was functioning as a tourist, not an artist.
I wonder how many people go to famous monuments or artworks or landscapes and take the exact same photo. They put the photo in a slideshow on social media (or in an actual slideshow they present to friends or family). They prove they have been some place, seen some thing. As if this same photo were not available via a quick Google search. It’s hard to resist snapping a photo or filming something interesting when the camera is built into the phone in my pocket.
The tourist tendency also shows up in writing. To be a tourist is to believe that the subject matter makes a piece “good.” That no matter how poor one’s writing is, the subject matter will make people want to read.
A few years ago, I was at a gas station near my house. It was raining. The attendant came out of the mini mart and called me over. She pointed at the sky. There was a double rainbow in the clouds, forming two perfect concentric circles. “This is for us right now,” she said.
I’ve been trying to write a poem about that experience for a while. It never seems to work. Part of the issue is that I want people to know I saw a double rainbow in concentric circles. I want to prove I saw a thing, a thing that is cool and unique. My inner tourist crowds out the artist every time I try to write about the experience.
When I was in high school and college, I was jealous of those poet-peers who always won competitions or got published in the local newspaper with their poems about death or depression or tragedy. I hadn't experienced hardship to that degree, and so felt like my poems about my hometown or eating a hot dog weren't good enough—their subject matter was not tragic enough to be called a poem at all.
I didn’t read enough poetry to see that poems about all sorts of subjects have been published and celebrated. And my jealousy probably masked the fact that my poems had room for improvement. It’s possible my attitude toward poetry—that only tragedy sells—turned me off to writing more poems as a young adult.
This is, of course, a false notion about poetry, and about art in general. The subject matter is not what makes art “good.” The subject matter is what it is. Art is something that is made, something that is crafted out of the material of the subject and from the artist’s vision. Art creates interest beyond the simple existence of a thing.
Verlyn Klinkenborg argues that “authority arises from the way you write, not from the subject you write about. No subject is so good that it can redeem indifferent writing. But good writing can make almost any subject interesting” (Several Short Sentences About Writing 129).
I wish I had understood this earlier. The tourist in me claimed that subject matter was the important thing. My inner artist was forced to wait for the right subject to appear before starting to work.
I stopped writing fiction and poetry when I went to seminary. Biblical exegesis and translation became my creative outlet. In my final year, I started my thesis. I used the tools of narrative criticism to examine Genesis 27, the story in which Jacob receives the blessing intended for Esau. The narratology books referenced novels and writers I had never read, so it was a challenge sometimes to understand their examples. Once I graduated, I started reading some of these writers: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol.
But it was Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard,” which rekindled my creative writing. The basic plot is about wealthy landowners who must sell their property to pay the mortgage. How boring, right? The subject matter is not that interesting. But the way Chekhov writes the play makes it come alive. “Good writing can make almost any subject interesting,” indeed.
I started writing fiction again after that. I wrote a lot, mostly imitating the style of whatever writer I was reading. At a certain point, I knew I needed mentorship and structure if I wanted to “take my writing to the next level.”
Then I experienced tragedy. My first-born son, aged eighteen months and nine days, died unexpectedly in his sleep. It felt like the world had been ripped out from under my feet, that I was falling into an abyss, that I was being swallowed by a dark fog.
I tried to document the experience of grief—events as they happened, decisions that had to be made—but I could not write prose. It was too challenging to create whole sentences when nothing else in the world felt whole. I wrote notes, fragments—and poems.
I returned to poetry to process my grief. It felt like I wrote a poem every other day. I wrote a sestina and read it at the graveside. I started reading some poetry and discovered that I was not the first person to write grief poems. I read Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” a very long poem he wrote over seventeen years after the death of a friend. I tried to imitate the form (iambic tetrameter, abba rhyme scheme) and style for a poem of my own.
I began my MFA program. I had planned to apply in fiction, but I ended up applying in poetry instead. When I got to the first residency, I learned my first-year poetry mentor had also recently lost his (adult) son. We were on similar grief timelines.
He was sympathetic to the grief poems I was writing. But he was honest about their quality. In our first meeting, after thirty minutes of talking about our experiences of grief, we turned to my workshop pieces, and the first thing he said was, “Now, see, the problem with your poems is that you ….”
In that moment, I learned the difference between being a tourist and being an artist. My mentor taught me that experience and art, no matter how entwined they are, are separate things. The goal of art is not to represent experience exactly, but to frame or express or reveal or transcend or understand experience in a new way.
Actually, I didn’t realize that until much later. At the time, I had fallen into the trap of touristy writing. I had experienced the loss of a child. Bereavement was my subject matter. I believed, at least subconsciously, that my grief gave me authority as a writer, that it made my writing interesting. My inner artist now had a subject worth writing about.
But it was my inner tourist that took over. I wanted to prove that I had experienced a thing, a terrible, tragic, overwhelmingly terrifying thing. More than that, I wanted other people to feel what I felt. Isn’t that what tourists do when they return from a trip? They share their photos with friends, explaining all the interesting things they saw—they want their friends to be as excited about it as they themselves are. But it rarely works that way. As someone who has shown travel photos to friends and family, and as one who has seen the photos from friends and family, I can assure you that the tourist is much more excited than the friend of the tourist.
Grief is more than an emotion. It is like a posture, a framework, a way of being in the world. Every emotion appears in the cloud of grief. In the early days after my son died, I mostly felt sadness and fear and anger. But I also felt joy, disgust, gratitude, wonder, envy, guilt. I wrote poems about these emotions, and I wanted others to feel what I felt. I wanted to shock people. I wanted them to feel the pain of sudden loss. I wanted them to fear losing their own loved ones. I wanted them to feel anger at the injustice of a child dying.
“This is a powerful feeling you’re writing about, but it’s not really a poem.” My mentor gave me this feedback several times over the course of the year. Sometimes, he offered suggestions for how to approach a piece differently. Other times, he told me to set the poem aside, to come back to it after some time had passed.
Eventually, I learned to consider poems as something other than snapshots of experience. My inner tourist was trying to replicate my experience for a reader. But poetry—art—attempts to make something new from experience, something distinct from that experience.
When I experience something, there is an immediacy to it. When I reflect on that experience later, there is a temporal distance. When I write about the experience, I translate it into words that are often inadequate. Language, the written word, now becomes the locus for experience. A reader does not encounter my experience directly, nor my inner reflections, but my words, only my words. And the reader has their own experience when my words meet with their life. I can’t control how they respond to my text.
So I had better do my best to write well. Here’s Klinkenborg again, this time at length:
The subject can never justify your prose or redeem its failures. When it comes to writing, the intensity of the writer’s feelings and the power of the subject mean almost nothing. We only glimpse that power and intensity in the power and intensity of the prose.
Yet somehow we believe that subject is everything. We believe the writer is her story and that her authority somehow depends on what’s happened in her life, that her authority is authenticity. People clamor to tell their stories in words. That doesn’t make them writers. Nor does it make their stories matter. …
If you understand how to build silence and patience and clarity into your prose, how to construct sentences that are limber and rhythmic and precise and filled with perception, you can write about anything, even yourself (Several Short Sentences About Writing 130).
Writing that depends on the subject matter for its authority is self-focused. It says, “Look at me, this thing happened to me, let me tell you about it.” The author’s experience becomes central. This is touristy writing.
Good writing transforms experience into language. In good writing, language becomes central. Authority comes from the quality of the writing. Good writing is not solipsistic, but invites the reader to consider their own life. Touristy writing says, “Here is my experience. Isn’t it interesting / moving?” It invites the reader to be a voyeur. Good writing says, “Here is my experience and what I’ve discovered through writing about it. How might you discover something about yourself, too?” Good writing invites the reader to self-reflect. This is to write as an artist.
Patricia Hampl claims that “the great contract of literature consists in this: you tell me your story and somehow I get my story” (The Art of the Wasted Day 183). So how can touristy writing be transformed into artistic writing? How can the tourist become the artist?
It is challenging to write about pain. How do you articulate what often feels inarticulable? Pain is intensely personal, so how do you write about it in such a way that others will find meaning and connection with it? What makes my writing about my grief meaningful to readers?
Pain is non-transferrable. I can only feel my own pain. I cannot feel another person’s pain. I can imagine what another person’s pain feels like, but this imagining is based on my own experience with pain. Pain is entirely unique to each person.
At the same time, pain is the most universal human experience. We all feel pain, even if it is not the same kind or degree of pain. My particular pain is part of the universal Pain. This has consequences for how we act toward one another. Jack Kornfield writes, “The pain we each must bear is part of the greater pain shared by all that lives. It is not just ‘our’ pain but the pain, and realizing this awakens our universal compassion” (A Path With Heart 75). Because Pain is universal, I can have empathy or compassion for another’s pain. I know what it is to experience pain, even if I have not known the particular pain of another.
Stephen Dobyns, speaking about poetry, touches on one of the mysteries of writing: “The work belongs to the reader. Its hidden subject is the life of the reader. It is through structure that the writer moves the work from his or her life to the reader’s life, that the metaphor is moved from the quirky specificity of the writer’s life to the greater universality of the reader’s life” (Best Words, Best Order 52).
The work of the writer is to recognize and articulate a common humanity through the particularity of their own experience. A reader can then find in the text that’s written (not in the author’s life directly) a connection to their own particular experience.
Inside me is a tourist and an artist. The artist, who writes about experience to create something new, who writes about particular experience to connect with the “universality of the reader,” is preferable. The inner tourist has its place, though. It cannot be totally banished from my writing process.
The tourist reminds me that “I have experienced a thing.” The tourist, in its eagerness to write about that experience, helps me to get something on the page, some sort of record, no matter how shallow and basic. The tourist helps keep my inner censor at bay. The tourist is great for first drafts.
Once something is on the page, the artist can sift through the writing to find what might be reimagined, what can be transformed. Perhaps it is the tourist who deals most directly with experience. The artist writes at a distance, responding not to experience directly, but to the words about experience, shaping them into something that transcends the experience and connects to the lives of readers.
One of my colleagues introduced me to the idea of having students write a “reaction and response” to a piece of art. The reaction includes the first thoughts, feelings, observations, etc. a person has. The reaction is raw, unfiltered. The response is more measured, thoughtful. The person asks questions of the piece of art. They ask questions of their own reactions. They ask why and follow their train of thought. This model allows students to have the unfiltered, incoherent, immediate reactions, to not feel shameful or stupid about having them. But it also calls them to move beyond the initial reaction. “How will you now respond to the piece?”
The tourist might be understood as the “reaction.” The artist, then, is the “response.” The tourist has its place, but we shouldn’t stop there. The writing the tourist does must be shaped by the inner artist into something new.
We all have our pains, our griefs, our sorrows in life. We shouldn’t write about them to prove that our pain is unique. Pain is already isolating. Instead, we should write to demonstrate the commonality of our pain. Ross Gay, in his book Inciting Joy, defines joy as the sharing of sorrows. In response to one of his guiding questions—what does joy incite?—he writes: “My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love” (9).
Writing about grief, pain, sorrow, isn’t about telling the most compelling story. It’s ultimately about solidarity. If we can recognize our common experience of pain, perhaps we can show more compassion and move beyond the “initial reactions” we have toward others.
So here is what I propose about moving from tourist-writing to artist-writing:
Consider what you’ve learned / discovered as a result of reflecting on and writing about your experience. Don’t stop at narrating the facts of the events or the intensity of the emotions. Ask questions of your experience, ask questions of your writing about that experience.
Consider your audience. What reaction do you hope they will have to your writing? If (like me at times) you want them to feel what you felt, to think what you thought, ask yourself why that is. How might you invite your audience to consider their own lives in light of what you’ve written?
Thinking about the tourist and artist dynamic has been helpful for me as I write and revise my grief poems. Instead of trying to shock or scare my readers (now that I say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous), I focus on how my poems might invite them to connect with their own grief experiences.
When it comes to my photography, however, I’m still mostly a tourist. I want to prove to you that I saw a thing.