Moore: travel writing with Vespa

Peter Moore | The Secrets of Travel Writing

It’s a problem I still face. My last book was about buying an old Vespa in Italy and riding it from Milan to Rome. I had a fantastic scene where I go and visit an old Vespa mechanic in Sydney. He has a great workshop with old posters, little old Italian guys hanging around a beat up coffee machine. But I couldn’t use it without slowing down the whole narrative. So I had to cut it free. It’s like movies. A lot of scenes end up on the cutting floor. A boring all day bus journey can be easily pared down to ‘By evening we were in Esfahan …’