Authors of course draw on experience from travels for fiction. They can’t make up everything from scratch, after all. This isn’t a revelation: Hemingway’s adventures in World War I informed his novels and Melville’s trips at sea informed his, and so on. But I read two articles today discussing a novel and a screenplay centered around spur-of-the-moment journeys, each of which were written based on trips taken explicitly to inform said novel and screenplay. Which also probably isn’t unique, though I find the coincidence appealing.
In a review of the Beats in general and of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in particular, reviewer Louis Menand writes in the October 1st issue of The New Yorker that although Kerouac began the book before his first cross-country drive with Neal Cassady, the trips for On the Road “were made for the purpose of writing On the Road. The motive was not tourism or escape; it was literature.”
Likewise, in a profile of Wes Anderson this week in New York magazine (“The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson”), author David Amsden writes that Anderson and his cowriters, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, reserved a month to travel through India by train in order to write most of the script for the director’s newest film, The Darjeeling Limited:
“I guess we went to India as research,” says Anderson, “but the more precise-slash-romanticized description would be that we were trying to do the movie, trying to act it out. We were trying to be the movie before it existed.”
A USA Today article further notes the trio ended up in the Himalayas with a bulky printer in tow, just like one of the characters in the movie. “We literally finished the script on the highest mountain we went to,” Anderson says.