Writing outdoors

 

 

I explained in a previous post why I liked to write in a café. But a café is not the only place that inspires me to write: I also like to write outdoors. And when I say “write outdoors” I mean write sitting on the grass, in a garden or in a meadow, surrounded by wildflowers, with the sun shining on a summer afternoon… An idyllic setting.

When I’m writing outdoors, my surroundings tend to work their way into my descriptions: I love describing the countryside, the seasons, the way they change, and what better way to describe them than having them before my eyes as I write? It’s a bit like the difference between painting a landscape in situ and in a studio; and to make a description is to paint with words.

I’ll see a bird, a gnarled tree shaped by the wind, darkening clouds, I’ll hear animals scuttling in the undergrowth, I’ll smell crushed leaves of wild mint and feel the fresh coarse grass, and all those elements will start a trail of thought, or give me new ideas. Ripples on the surface of a pond. A deer barking. Shadows lengthening at dusk. Raindrops on a cobweb. Golden sunlight after a storm.
 

If I’m stuck in front of a blank page, I only have to raise my eyes and gaze at the landscape, and soon I am writing again. I’m not very productive in terms of word count when I write outdoors: there is always something catching my attention, and distracting me, and I daydream, and I contemplate the landscape instead of writing. But those surroundings usually help me make my prose richer and more interesting.

I sometimes look at my surroundings and ask myself: how would [one of my characters] describe this? What would it evoke to them? What would their feelings be? And I can come up with interesting answers which even help me to define the personality of those characters better. Or I “discover” something about them I had not thought of before.

I like trying to see a landscape through the eyes of my characters, for the differences in their perception of it reveals a lot about them. Where one sees bleak, barren, inhospitable moorland, for instance, another sees the play of light and shadow, contrasting colours, beauty. And another, having spent all their life there, will not see anything at all, that landscape being so familiar, so much part of them, in a way, that they stop taking any notice of it. I find those contrasting perceptions interesting to work with in terms of character development. It is also a good stylistic exercise.
 

Is the moor barren or beautiful?

So I try to write outside as much as I can: usually in the summer, when I am in the country. I take my manuscript and my pen and sit down in the grass to write – until it starts to rain that is and I have to run back inside! Or until the wind scatters my precious draft and I have to run after the pages. The hazards of writing outdoors…