On Writing The Twenty: One Woman’s Trek Across Corsica

We were about to turn sixty, ready to retire. While friends celebrated professional achievements and milestone birthdays with a dinner or cruise, the prospect of leaving our careers and our fifties made my husband, Joe, and me restless for adventure. The backpacking-around-Europe days of our youth, remained our standard for travel, and so we opted to tackle the GR20, a 124-mile desolate, mountainous hike across the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. We wanted to challenge what it meant to be sixty years old, and I wanted to write a book about it. 

I’ve been a Francophile since high school and so the combination of a tough challenge and a French island little-known to Americans was particularly intriguing. We knew we would make the trek with people we didn’t know from other countries–another interesting angle. Also, as an aging woman in a youth-focused culture, I imagined that sharing what I experienced and how I felt as my physical limitations were getting the best of me could make a good story. 

The Twenty is my second travel narrative, and I wrote it because I’d enjoyed the process of penning my first (Gap Year Girl: A Baby Boomer Adventure Across 21 Countries) and hoped to share our adventure with others. Traveling is my muse and writing about faraway lands is my happy place because it lets me relive the journeys many times over, which only adds to the joy. And I thought, maybe, just maybe, my story might propel others to embark on their own adventures or simply enjoy ours from an overstuffed chair. 

I began writing while we trained for our trek, eight months before we boarded the ferry for Corsica. Every day I free-wrote about our workouts, how our bodies were faring, and the process of disentangling ourselves from the workaday world. I started carring a tiny 3” x 5” spiral notebook and pen with me, the lightest I could find, wherever I went and jotted down ideas when they came to me. 

We did extensive research online, read guidebooks, and studied maps about trail specifics. And pre-hike, I set aside a day a month to compile my journaling, notes, and research, and did a first pass of massaging it all into first chapters. 

Once we arrived in France, I wrote copious notes when on the train from Paris to Nice, on the ferry to Bastia, at the inn the night before we started, and in the van that drove us to the GR20 trailhead. I mostly wrote about how nervous I was to attempt what is nicknamed “Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath,” and my impressions of the hikers we’d met so far. Over the two weeks of the hike itself, I wrote in our tent in the morning, on picnic tables at breakfast, on snack and lunch breaks on rocks, and at dinner in a refuge canteen.

I wrote in our tent before the sun was up and on outcroppings as the sun set before turning in. I filled my notebook with details of the trail, Corsican food, the weather, and most important, our dialog. The exact words we and our hiking companions exchanged were key. I had the hundreds of pictures we took and illustrated maps to fill in the blanks of scenery and other tangible details lost to memory. But I wanted to capture accurately, the words that made us laugh, groan, and cry over our fourteen days together. I cannot emphasize enough just how critical my little notebook was to my writing process. It gave me the raw material that, combined with memory and a collection of artifacts, allowed me to turn my scribblings into a plausible narrative.  

Back home stateside a month after our hike ended, it took me another year and a half to complete the first draft of The Twenty. What was by far most difficult was making sure I faithfully rendered what happened, the people I met, and what went on inside my head. Going back and editing, adding, expanding, and softening are much more pleasurable for me than the initial writing. But you have to tell yourself the story first before you can make it better for others, and so my “shitty first draft” was tough.

I do my best to wait until I get to the end of a long section or a chapter to edit. Each time I sit down to write, I usually reread what I’d written the day before, make minor tweaks, and then move on with new material. And so that’s what I did with this book. I took a step back and then two steps forward and tried to save the substantive restructuring and polishing until after I had that first draft. 

I’m one of those people who can write almost anywhere: in a coffee shop, a hotel lobby, a car, or a tent. I was the eldest of eleven children and learned at an early age how to find my own quiet space amidst the chaos. But now I usually write either at my desk or sitting up in bed and try to write for at least an hour a day. If I can find more time, I take it. And I must confess that when I’m working on a project, be it a book, an article, or an essay, it’s all I can think of. It’s like when you’re considering buying an electric car, all you see are electric cars. I see everything through the lens of my story and so when writing The Twenty, everything I saw and everything I heard seemed to relate to our Corsican experience and my writing about it.

A first draft of my manuscript in hand, it took another year working with a professional editor to turn The Twenty into a final draft, ready for submission. A total of three years in my happy place.

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About the author: Marianne C. Bohr, published author and award-winning essayist, married her high school sweetheart and travel partner. She has two grown children and is the eldest of 11. She follows her own advice and hits the road at every opportunity. Marianne lives in Park City, Utah, where, after decades in publishing, and many years of teaching middle school French, she skis, hikes, and writes.

The Twenty: One Woman’s Trek Across Corsica on the GR20 Trail

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Category: On Writing