on-writing-well

268 ON WRITING WELL
Gordon Laing in 1826 and the Frenchman René Caillié in
1828—must have felt cruelly mocked for their efforts. The
legendary city of 100,000 people described by the 16thcentury
traveler Leo Africanus—a center of learning with
20,000 students and 180 Koranic schools—was a desolate settlement
of mud buildings, its glory and its population long
gone, surviving only because of its unique location as the
junction of important camel caravan routes across the Sahara.
Much of what got traded in Africa, especially salt from the
north and gold from the south, got traded in Timbuktu.
So much for the history of Timbuktu and the reason for its
fame. It's all that a magazine reader needs to know about the
city's past and its significance. Don't give readers of a magazine
piece more information than they require; if you want to tell
more, write a book or write for a scholarly journal.
Now, what do your readers want to know next? Ask yourself
that question after every sentence. Here what they want to
know is: why did / go to Timbuktu? What was the purpose of my
trip? The following paragraph gets right to it—again, keeping
the thread of the previous sentence taut:
It was to watch the arrival of one of those caravans that I
had come to Timbuktu. I was one of six men and women
bright enough or dumb enough—we didn't yet know which—
to sign up for a two-week tour we had seen announced in the
Sunday New York Times, run by a small travel agency of
French origins that specializes in West Africa. (Timbuktu is in
Mali, the former French Sudan.) The agency's office is in
New York, and I had gone there first thing Monday morning
to beat the crowd; I asked the usual questions and got the
usual answers—yellow fever shots, cholera shots, malaria pills,
don't drink the water—and was given a brochure.