Paul Hackett

A friend said to me: “Traveling is suffering.” It’s not a bad description.

Traveling is waiting out the single line check in at the airport for a flight that is going to be delayed several hours. Traveling is also the 12 hour bus ride that is nauseating enough to make a robot feel car sick. It is dealing with foreign languages, sleeping somewhere different every night, trying foods you can’t identify and battling tropical storms. When you add all the small things together any respectable trip entails a fair amount of struggles.

But ultimately, a good trip is one you come out of with new insights and perspectives. It’s only natural that it should take a little suffering to make that leap.

I’m getting ready for another trip to Viet Nam and was checking my passport to make sure everything was in order. Viet Nam is a country most visitors need a visa to enter.

On my last trip to Viet Nam I thought it was slow going getting through customs. I don’t mean the line in front of me was slow; I was at the front. The guy checking my passport was just taking a really long time. I thought it might be because of my passport photo. When it was taken my hairdo was something akin to Henry Rollins’. On the day of my arrival I was sporting something more like an unwashed Pat Metheny.

Anyway, I started to suspect there might be a real problem when the young officer went off in search of a supervisor. That’s never a comforting sign at the border. Fortunately, he soon returned with no further questions or delay. He stamped my passport, smiled at me, and let me in. It was only as I getting ready for this trip that I realized what was the matter.

On my last trip to Viet Nam, my visa to enter the country was valid from June 16th. I hadn’t paid careful attention to this point and arrived in Hanoi on June 15th!

I’m sure there were all sorts of unpleasant scenarios that could have followed. Instead, they treated me like a welcome guest and made my arrival hassle free. They didn’t even say anything about it. Now that I’ve clued into it three months later, it has me thinking about the all little things people do when you’re traveling to make your stay in their country better. Quite often we don’t even notice the ways in which people go out of their way to accommodate us.. I’ll certainly enjoy this trip that much more, knowing the kindness that was extended me last time.

For me, there is something almost as important as keeping a daily writing routine – it is knowing when to break the routine. Creative work is probably the hardest to finish when you’re trying to force yourself. My standard three hours a day, six days a week of writing can at times feel like an attempt to manufacture the goods on an assembly line. A well timed day off works wonders.

Lately it seems as if I’ve been traveling as much as I’ve been working. Travel is the greatest of escapes. It sure beats that other favorite writer’s excuse for not working – cleaning the fridge!

Not only does a trip take me outside the box, it also stimulates me with new ideas and experiences. It’s more likely that a real life situation I wouldn’t get in my regular writing space will produce that key line that transforms a scene and saves the story. Whatever I’m working on, inevitably, turns out better for a little time spent on the road. It’s not always possible to go away mid-project, so I make a point of going somewhere after completing each draft, and again before starting a new one.

I see why the writers from the classic Hollywood era did a lot of their work in hotels. I’m thinking of Robert Riskin writing for Frank Capra in Palm Springs, or Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur churning out scripts for Howard Hawks in Manhattan hotel rooms. For some reason, it’s just easier for me to get work done in hotel rooms. (Yeah I know, the above writers were all notorious for partying it up – but they completed some of their most famous work under those conditions.)

This advice, if it can be termed advice, should come with a warning. Travel can offer some great inspiration; but inspiration only accounts for two percent of a great story. The rest is perspiration – hard work!

When I settle into the hotel room after a long day of activity, I can do a whole day’s work in less time than usual. Most of the time the work is better too. If I had to guess, I’d say it has to do with the fact that while my mind was busy doing other things, the subconscious had all day to work on the story by itself. We writers carry our stories around with us for a long time, sometimes years. The mind simply can’t put it to rest because you’ve gone into escape mode. As Graham Greene wrote in Ways of Escape, “the unconscious collaborates in all our work.” I think I’ll have more to say about this later.

I’m in Hong Kong at the moment. I come here a few times a year to do something like business and staying here is one of the few times I actually watch a little TV. At home I almost never tune in. For some reason, every time I’m in Hong Kong I end up seeing the same program – Crash Scene Investigation.

This rather sensational program does a pretty good job of laying out the mountains of evidence from plane crashes. In under an hour it illustrates the tiny details that resulted in a shocking loss of life.

I always thought it was an odd show to watch in Hong Kong. Most people in hotels here are probably like me – they’re flying in from one place and will soon be flying off somewhere else. Hong Kong has one of the world’s busiest airports and the average visitor only stays here for 1 or 2 nights. The day after watching Crash Scene Investigation at the hotel, they could be in a plane waiting for take-off, and start looking around the cabin for some tiny flaw that could lead to disaster.

The day before I left for Hong Kong, a 737 owned by China Airlines burst into flames after landing in Japan. It was a spectacular scene, and fortunately no one was seriously hurt. As I waited for my flight to Hong Kong, all the free newspapers in the waiting lounge had full color photos of the burning plane. No one seemed to mind these shocking images. Maybe it’s time to start showing movies with plane crashes as part of the in-flight movie.