Creative Writing: Making Your Landscapes More Interesting

Your first step is research. That’s not just desk research – your imagination needs to be actively involved, too.

For instance, if I’m going to research the Albigensian territories of Southern France in the early Middle Ages, I’ll be looking at maps, accounts of the Albigensian crusade, history that shows me how the fields were divided, archaeological evidence about what people ate and drank, and so on. But I also need to think about how that would affect people; would dry stone walls and rocky cliffs make journeys through this territory difficult for ordinary people? How did most people spend the day? Did everyone get enough to eat? What was considered a luxury – and what would people complain about having to eat?

It’s easy to take in infomation from maps – you need to walk through the countryside, whether in reality (I actually have walked the ‘Sentier Cathare’ through this area of France) or in your imagination. Is is easy to get lost? How do you pick up directions – from signs, from river valleys, from the sight of the sun through the trees, from the wind erosion on one side of rocks, from obvious pathways or walls?

You need to explore all five senses.

Sight. This is easy to get right. What does the place look like? Be aware of the different colour and intensity of light – a misty morning in London has a completely different quality from a day in the desert. How long does the light last? Does sunset come suddenly or slowly? What are the main colours? How many colours are there – and how many shades? (Imagine the difference between the many shades of brown and yellow in a desert, and the numerous different colours of wild flowers in a meadow.)

Sound. Can you hear birds, wind, water? Listen for the small sounds – a pine cone falling from a branch, the tick of a small rock falling over a cliff, the echo you find in some canyons. In a city, is there one predominant noise, like trafffic, or many competing noises?

The ‘circles of concentration’ exercise can help here. Sit with your eyes closed and listen. Gradually, move your attention inwards, to the noises of your own body, then outward again to the room, the street, and finally the whole world. You’ll notice different sounds as you do this. Now, reproduce this exercise for your fictional world.

Let’s put taste and smell together. They’re often overlooked in fiction, but they can be potent senses. (For instance, the smell of fresh paint always reminds me of a particular day just before an important exam.) Does the air smell of damp and decay, does it smell spicy and hot, can you smell earth after rain or freshly cut hay or the resinous scent of pine trees? Taste is more specific but you need to think about the cuisine of your landscape – and in relation to it. In one London street I can smell Indian spices, fish-and-chips in the hot fat fryer, coffee grounds, Thai curry and stale beer – a mixture that conveys rather well the feel of this multicultural but rather downmarket area.

The French have a concept of ‘terroir’ – whether we’re talking about wine, cheese, a stew, a cake, everything made in a particular locality reflects the place where it was made. So imagine a dry limestone landscape in south-western France; there’s a wild, dry flavour to the honey made from heath flowers, there’s goat’s cheese with its acid rankness, there’s a tannin-rich, rather astringent wine – the hard landscape has created equally hard tastes. Normandy on the other hand is all about cider and cream and Camembert cheese, a rich countryside with green fields and gentle rivers – the taste and the landscape are intertwined.

And then there’s touch – probably the least used sense when writers describe landscape. Get out there and start touching your surroundings – or at least imagining what they are like to touch. The dry crumble of rusty iron sheet; soft insinuating dust in an old cupboard; different textures of tree bark (silky silver birch, flaking plane, rough pine). Is the air freezing cold, or damply hot?

Now you’ve done the work imagining the landscape, built it into the book. Have your characters relate to it in ways that show its qualities. For instance, one of your characters falls over, and scrapes his knuckles against a limestone wall – he bleeds, he feels the grit. Another feels dirty, the hot wind making him feel sweaty, and he wastes the little water he has trying to wash.

Is your landscape inimical or friendly? In many action books, the landscape or the city is actively malignant – there are poisonous snakes, or streets full of dangerous traffic; characters get lost, can’t follow the directions they are given, or misinterpret the information they have. Here again you are manipulating your characters’ relationship to the landscape in a way that can increase the interest of your novel.

Does your landscape have a theme? If you’ve got here, you’re moving on from just needing to have a setting for ‘local colour’, and moving onto another level. For instance, your Arctic setting might relate to themes such as a hero suppressing his emotions by trying to be ‘cool’ – using the landscape as a core symbol. On the other hand, you might treat an Arctic setting as a sign of the effects of global warming – looking at the ice gradually melting, and the effect on the environment.

Above all, individualise your setting. Make it Morocco – not ’somewhere with deserts and mosques’. (Actually, most of the Sahara is in Algeria and Libya – Morocco has more mountains.) Make it 1980s London – not ‘a twentieth-century city’. And if you’re inventing it, invent somewhere that readers can clearly recognise as a quite different place – not just another fantasy medieval world.