Imagining the Landscapes in Your Stories
How does landscape, real or imagined, rural or urban, influence your stories?
Spring growth. Photo: Tanya Clarke 2022
The narrow path I walk most days is changing. Bright green leaves and ferns have sprouted almost overnight making every curve along the trail a blind spot of foliage.
A fellow dog walker tells me there'll be as much rain today as usually falls in the whole of June. A little later a seven-month-old puppy, already the size of my adult dog, barrels into me, jumping and panting. My dog drops her ball in anticipation of a race through the trees. The puppy picks it up and I have to reach into this dog's mouth to retrieve it. The things I do for my dog. I wash my hands in the cold water of the creek once we've climbed down from the ridge. The other dog's saliva slips across my hands thick and slimy until the creek water washes it away.
What is the Landscape of Your Story?
I've been thinking, this week, about landscapes in stories. I mean geographical landscapes, not a metaphorical landscape of story form and structure. When I read creative writing advice, much of it discusses characters and the relationships between one another, and the importance of this in driving a story forward. Yet characters not only exist in relationships with others but they also exist in relation to their wider world, be it real or imagined, in cities or mountains or by the sea. I'm wondering how might these landscapes influence the stories and the characters you might be writing about?
If where you live implies your economic status or the way you speak or your culture or your age or your race, perhaps you should be paying attention to this in your creative writing too. Connecting your characters to their world will fully embed them into your story.
A Landscape Shapes a Community
Watching The Essex Serpent, I'm reminded of my years growing up in the wilds of the Norfolk countryside. The mud flats and winding waters through the salt marshes of the Thames estuary, for me, are the main characters in this story, the real stars of the show. The people are trapped in the gloom of this landscape. Trapped by a landscape that has shaped the community with its stories of serpents and witches.
With my family, I lived in Thetford, a place of ancient flint mines, a ruined priory, medieval churches and a large pine forest. There are stories here buried in the land. From Thetford, we moved to a house in the countryside near the city of Norwich. At the top of the lane stood a church - it's still there - dating back to the Anglo-Saxons. As a teen, I liked to sneak in, if the door was unlocked, and sit on a pew by myself taking in the feel of the building, its ancient self. Not because I'm religious but because I liked feeling the cool air, I liked the quiet and I liked watching the light carve through the dim interior as it found its way through the stained glass windows.
We had a black labrador called Twinkie. Sometimes she'd escape our garden and head straight to the dykes, the narrow channels of still water that crisscross the Norfolk landscape.
Long ago peat was dug here for fuel but when the digging went too deep and hit the water table, the pit had to be abandoned and another started elsewhere. Slowly, over time, the water filled the empty channels. Some are so wide and deep you can take a boat and a holiday all along the Norfolk Broads.
We'd search for Twinkie, calling her name, taking care not to get too close to the water. It was easy to slip between the long reeds into the softer, silted ground at the edge losing a boot along the way. Eventually, we'd find her, her oily coat repelling the water, showing her teeth, grinning from ear to ear and smelling like dead vegetation from swimming in the stagnant water.
Wild Winds and Hot Summers
The coastline of Norfolk holds many memories for me. I went to a boarding school that sat on a cliff looking out over the North Sea where the wind would blow harsh and wild off the water and the summers were hot and dry. We collected mussels at low tide, cooking them in a pot over a bunsen burner in our biology lesson. The school is closed now but a fossilised skeleton of a mammoth was found nearby buried in the cliffs almost complete.
Connect Your Characters to a Place
Your characters don't exist in a vacuum. They are connected to a place. Whether an urbanised landscape or a natural one that remains untouched, these landscapes influence your characters, their relationships and their decisions. How can you engage the landscape with your characters?
It might be helpful to start with your own experience. Ask yourself these questions about where you've lived, what you remember and what you don't.
Make a list of the landscapes and places you've lived in.
What are the geological qualities of these places?
What's the weather like?
Are there hills, mountains, rivers, the sea?
Where do the winds come from? And the rain?
Are there any landmarks?
What are the animals and birds of these places?
Is there anything about where you were you can connect with now?
How do you think you might have been shaped by them?
What is the human history of these places?
Who are its original peoples?
What events have happened here?
Who are the human inhabitants now?
How did they come to be here?
What are the stories of your place? The myths and folklore?
Have you made any up yourself?
How do these stories relate to your creative writing, if at all?
What Do You Remember?
When I think of Norfolk, I remember the vast open skies in the countryside at sunset. With no hills or mountains to punctuate the view, the sky appears enormous. The light is different: open and bright on a sunny day, bleak and thin when it rains. When I left and moved to Scotland, I missed those open skies but I didn't realise it until many years later.
Norfolk has few fairy tales compared to the Celtic regions of the UK. This surprises me. The landscape with its bogs and marshes and dykes fills my imagination with imps and fairies. I imagine how they might hop and buzz in and around the still waters making mischief with the boats that slip gently through the Broads.
There are ghost stories here though. Many. Black Shuck, the Shrieking Monk of St Benet's Abbey, The Hethersett Faines and The Lantern Men. These things bury themselves into your soul and find their way into your stories.
Where Do You Call Home?
And now I'm here, living on the north shore of Vancouver, a place I've come to call home. I feel the land making its mark in me. The rain, the forest and the mountain evoke something deep. I'm learning about the stories and culture of the Coast Salish people who have lived here long before the European settlers arrived.
This land holds more than people.
Take a moment to look outside your window and think about your environment and what connects with you. If you live in a high-rise apartment where the nearest tree is several miles away, how is that for you? How might that influence your stories? Go back to the list of questions above and ask them in the voice of your character/s.
Hopefully, you'll find it helpful. Until next time.
The list of questions above is inspired by the module, A Psyche the Size of Earth, in the course Courting the World Soul by Dr Sharon Blackie.
