Naser Khosrow's "Useless Detail" Technique for Travel Writers
You open Nasir Khusraw’s travelogue and expect to encounter mountains, bazaars, and mosques; and encounter them you do, but not in the order your mind had arranged. In the middle of describing a mosque, he suddenly stops to say how many steps its minbar had. In describing a city, he also notes the price of a maund of fruit. Information that no passerby needs—and precisely what, nearly a thousand years later, still keeps the reader at his side. This technique can be called “useless detail”: recording what does not help advance the narrative and, for exactly that reason, makes the text credible.
What did Nasir Khusraw not consider necessary to omit?
The problem is not the volume of information; other ancient travelogues are also full of data. The difference lies in the kind of data. A large part of the details in Nasir Khusraw’s travelogue were not written to serve any purpose:
- The number of steps of the minbar and the number of bays in an arcade, where knowing it helps neither pilgrimage nor trade.
- The size of the dome and the height of the building according to his own estimate, with no comparison to follow and no conclusion in view.
- The prices of foods and everyday goods in cities he merely passed through.
- Precise dates: the month, year, and sometimes the day of events, in such a way that today his route can be reconstructed on a map.
None of these is a pillar of the narrative. But when, after dozens of pages, he arrives at an account of an important event, the reader does not doubt that the author himself stood there. The credibility built on those first pages is spent right there. Saadi does this in his stories with a single name or a small number; Nasir Khusraw with steps, farsangs, and prices.
“The Reality Effect”: why the mind believes these details
Roland Barthes, in his short essay “The Reality Effect,” mentions a barometer hanging above the piano in Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart” that plays no role in the story. His question is: why has such an idle object remained in the text? His answer is that the function of these details is “realness” and nothing more.
The logic is simple. When a text contains details that do not serve the narrative, the mind concludes that this detail came from somewhere else; from the real world, not from the author’s plan. If everything falls into its logical place, the reader imagines they are facing a designed construct.
In a travelogue this effect is multiplied, because the reader already knows that the narrator was somewhere far away and wants to gauge his truthfulness. Jan Morris and Paul Theroux take the same route: menus, fares, the first name of the innkeeper. Jalal Al-e Ahmad does the same in Khasi dar Miqat by recording the lines, fares, and small grievances of the Hajj journey.
Three ways this technique gets ruined
Useless details, like any other tool, turn into decoration when used without rules. Three common mistakes:
- Adjectival details: “a peerless sunset and warm-hearted people.” These are not data, they are judgments, and judgments can be faked.
- Ostentatious details: when the author makes a spectacle of his precision and the reader feels they are looking at an observer’s résumé, not a journey.
- Clichéd details: the very things anyone knew before the trip; repeating them adds nothing to the text.
The test is simple: if you remove the detail, does anything get lost from the narrative? In Nasir Khusraw’s travelogue, nothing. But if removing it only reduces the “beauty” of the text, then that detail was decoration, not observation.
| Type of detail | Example | What it does in the text |
|---|---|---|
| Numerical and nominal | The alley behind the sangak bakery, no. 17 | Moves the place from imagination into reality |
| Sensory and physical | Wet paving stones, the smell of diesel in the inn’s corridor | Puts the reader’s body in the scene |
| Behavioral and irrelevant | He moved the tea glass twice and said nothing | Separates the person from the type |
What should we note down while traveling that will remain “useless”?
These details are not made at home; they must be captured in the moment, otherwise they later turn into adjectives.
- Write down raw numbers and names. Not “the price was reasonable,” but the exact amount, the street name, the bus number.
- Ask people’s first names. A first name separates a driver from “a local man.”
- Record the state of your body. Hours of sleep, blisters on your feet, the taste of water. The reader believes the narrator as a flesh-and-blood person.
- Write down the things that caught your attention for no reason. These are precisely the ones that later become the most vivid lines.
- Write on the same day. After a week, memory replaces details with clichés.
When writing, however, restrain yourself: one or two per scene are enough. If twenty unrelated details come one after another, the reader gets distracted and the effect of reality becomes background noise.
Before editing: The city market was crowded and full of color, and people cheerfully invited us to buy.
After editing: The greengrocer was wiping the eggplants with the corner of his shirt. Every few steps, someone asked the price of tomatoes and continued on their way without stopping. On the right, a man raised and lowered the scale three times.
Conclusion: Today’s “Useless” Details, Tomorrow’s Evidence
Nasir Khusraw did not know that anyone would read his travelogue a thousand years later; perhaps that is exactly why he wrote it. He recorded things that were meaningful to him and would become evidence for the future reader. The important point is this: these details do not replace the narrative; they support it. If you have no story to tell, no number or name will save you; but if you do have a story, that one mann of dates and that raising and lowering of the scale three times are the difference between travel notes and a travelogue.
