A Place I've Never Been (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of A Place I've Never Been Tuesday, August 11 2009.

• Having written so often about the places I've seen, I find that the places I've never seen have a special attraction for me, a curious pull. I have to see them with my eyes shut, or begin to make my way around them through reading and research, conversation and intuition; the whole process is exhilaratingly different from the travel writing I'm used to, in which I go to a place, scribble down notes and then, back home, try (and usually fail) to decipher my notes and make sense of what I've seen. Writing about somewhere I've never been involves calling upon a different and more interesting part of me, and a journey into the unknown of a subtler kind. As soon as Amazon offered me, therefore, the idea of writing on a place I'd never been, I knew I was hooked: I'd written a whole novel set around Iran, and yet had only visited it in imagination and at the desk. But my thoughts about why I had chosen not to see it, and how I could see it differently from afar, were already formed inside me, waiting to come out. So this project pressed the right button, in a way, and the curtains parted to reveal a piece that I had inside me for years, perhaps, but had never written down. And writing about this different kind of travel seemed a perfect way of writing for this interesting new medium, which traffics in an invisible realm that links the world. For me, writing an Amazon Short was an invitation to write a different kind of travel piece, which would be much more compelling to me than the kind I'd done before. Ask me to go to North Korea, Easter Island or Bhutan, and I'll say no (because I've been to all of them before); invite me to go on an expedition into the unseen, and I'll be on the next train (of thought).