In 1991, I went to Canada for a three-week trip with a friend. He ran low on money a couple of weeks in, so went for the cheaper option of travelling to Boston, while I got the train across to Vancouver for a few days. On one of those days I hired a car and drove across Vancouver Island to Long Beach in the Pacific Rim National Park. I'd picked up the recommendation from the Michelin Green Guide, but also I just wanted to get as far west as possible, and Long Beach was about as far west as you could get because the next land was the Far East.
I reached it with about two hours of daylight left. It turned out to be a vast expanse of wet sand sloping to a sea of gentle breakers, backed by a temperate rainforest, and at the high tide mark was masses of driftwood, whole trees sculpted by sea and weather into fantastical tentacled shapes. Everything was overlaid with a haze illuminated by the mellow, lowering sun. And it was deserted. I wandered around for an hour or so, absorbing it and taking photos, and in all that time the only people I saw were a couple walking their dog, who when they passed me turned out to have Yorkshire accents. It was amazingly tranquil, despite the noise of the distant breakers, but the scale of the place, the distance I'd travelled to get there, and its situation on the globe, all inspired a sense of awe too, and the combination with the tranquility was very affecting.
In the thirty years since, I've several times mentioned that place to people and tried to get across how it felt to be there, but it never seemed to really work. Then a few weeks ago I was at a neighbour's garden party and met one of her friends, a guy in his eighties who'd lived his early life in Vancouver. And it turned out he knew Long Beach, and when I recounted my experience and mentioned the haze, he said, with a brightness in his eyes, "Yes, that's it exactly". And I got quite emotional, because at last after thirty years here was someone who got one of my most intense and formative experiences, because he'd shared it, albeit maybe decades earlier.
I thought about that garden-party encounter the other day, when I reread the first few chapters of a story I started back about 2014. It features a young man isolated by the fact that he magically screws up any digital device he comes near, and who lives alone in a caravan at the edge of a coastal nature reserve in Scotland. What surprised me was that the natural description in that story seemed to me to have more power than in either of my series, even in the specifically nature-themed YA books I'm writing now. It occurred to me that it isn't any better as prose, but that my nature writing always feels more intense and effective, to me at least, in scenes where the protagonist is in solitude and feeling alone, as if the absence of human company turns their attention more intently on their surroundings.
And then I wondered if it was also true of me that I relate to the natural surroundings (or maybe any surroundings) more intently when alone. Or maybe that just happened to be the case in my youth and that's what I'm relating those written passages back to.
I've never really been sure what I wanted to achieve by writing. There were several possibilities I could get on board with, such as telling an entertaining story, giving life to invented characters and worlds, or communicating my love of nature, but nothing very specific. When I started out at about 25, it was because I couldn't find anything to read as an adult that did the same for me as Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising (the book rather than sequence) did for me at the age of eleven. A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that this was a hopeless ambition anyway, simply because the state of being a child, and the way one absorbs new things, is so different to adulthood. But now I think I didn't realised what TDIR *had* done for me, which was to communicate the numinous quality of solitude in nature, exemplified by when Will finds the rest of his family asleep and has to go out alone into a snow-covered world that is new to him. And not nature, but the depth of history sunk into the land itself.
I now think that I've always subconsciously wanted to do similar with my writing: share intense experiences I have in relation to the world (mostly the natural world, but also the past) and which I can't share in any other way. I can't share them at the time with other people, because the intensity of those experiences depends on solitude (unless you're with someone you're in love with, I think). And just trying to share them by speech doesn't work as well, because the other person won't experience it *as* me, they'll experience themselves hearing me talk about it. But by giving similar experiences to fictional characters whom the reader "becomes" (I very much like Grant Morrison's term "fiction suit"), I can get the reader to experience something like it themselves. Or at least that's the idea.
The question that bothers me is whether moving away from isolated protagonists, to ones more concerned with complex plot and interpersonal relationships, means the natural description will inevitably feel less intense to a reader, or whether it only does so for me because it lacks that connection to the solitude in which I experienced what I'm trying to convey. I've been told that even in the "non-loner" books, the natural description is still one of the strongest elements. But something I found when recently doing an editing pass on the first YA nature-themed book makes me wonder. There were two scenes in that book that linked with those "spirituality of nature" ideas, one from each of the main characters. One I've always loved, and came out perfect first time; the other I liked the idea of, but have never managed to get quite right. The first is from the POV of a character who, despite not being a natural loner, has just gone through an experience of intense solitude, but the second was from a POV whose character and thoughts at that moment are quite sociable. Having made all the connections I've just written about, I realised that section didn't work, and got rid of it.
I wonder if any of this strikes a chord with anyone?
I reached it with about two hours of daylight left. It turned out to be a vast expanse of wet sand sloping to a sea of gentle breakers, backed by a temperate rainforest, and at the high tide mark was masses of driftwood, whole trees sculpted by sea and weather into fantastical tentacled shapes. Everything was overlaid with a haze illuminated by the mellow, lowering sun. And it was deserted. I wandered around for an hour or so, absorbing it and taking photos, and in all that time the only people I saw were a couple walking their dog, who when they passed me turned out to have Yorkshire accents. It was amazingly tranquil, despite the noise of the distant breakers, but the scale of the place, the distance I'd travelled to get there, and its situation on the globe, all inspired a sense of awe too, and the combination with the tranquility was very affecting.
In the thirty years since, I've several times mentioned that place to people and tried to get across how it felt to be there, but it never seemed to really work. Then a few weeks ago I was at a neighbour's garden party and met one of her friends, a guy in his eighties who'd lived his early life in Vancouver. And it turned out he knew Long Beach, and when I recounted my experience and mentioned the haze, he said, with a brightness in his eyes, "Yes, that's it exactly". And I got quite emotional, because at last after thirty years here was someone who got one of my most intense and formative experiences, because he'd shared it, albeit maybe decades earlier.
I thought about that garden-party encounter the other day, when I reread the first few chapters of a story I started back about 2014. It features a young man isolated by the fact that he magically screws up any digital device he comes near, and who lives alone in a caravan at the edge of a coastal nature reserve in Scotland. What surprised me was that the natural description in that story seemed to me to have more power than in either of my series, even in the specifically nature-themed YA books I'm writing now. It occurred to me that it isn't any better as prose, but that my nature writing always feels more intense and effective, to me at least, in scenes where the protagonist is in solitude and feeling alone, as if the absence of human company turns their attention more intently on their surroundings.
And then I wondered if it was also true of me that I relate to the natural surroundings (or maybe any surroundings) more intently when alone. Or maybe that just happened to be the case in my youth and that's what I'm relating those written passages back to.
I've never really been sure what I wanted to achieve by writing. There were several possibilities I could get on board with, such as telling an entertaining story, giving life to invented characters and worlds, or communicating my love of nature, but nothing very specific. When I started out at about 25, it was because I couldn't find anything to read as an adult that did the same for me as Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising (the book rather than sequence) did for me at the age of eleven. A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that this was a hopeless ambition anyway, simply because the state of being a child, and the way one absorbs new things, is so different to adulthood. But now I think I didn't realised what TDIR *had* done for me, which was to communicate the numinous quality of solitude in nature, exemplified by when Will finds the rest of his family asleep and has to go out alone into a snow-covered world that is new to him. And not nature, but the depth of history sunk into the land itself.
I now think that I've always subconsciously wanted to do similar with my writing: share intense experiences I have in relation to the world (mostly the natural world, but also the past) and which I can't share in any other way. I can't share them at the time with other people, because the intensity of those experiences depends on solitude (unless you're with someone you're in love with, I think). And just trying to share them by speech doesn't work as well, because the other person won't experience it *as* me, they'll experience themselves hearing me talk about it. But by giving similar experiences to fictional characters whom the reader "becomes" (I very much like Grant Morrison's term "fiction suit"), I can get the reader to experience something like it themselves. Or at least that's the idea.
The question that bothers me is whether moving away from isolated protagonists, to ones more concerned with complex plot and interpersonal relationships, means the natural description will inevitably feel less intense to a reader, or whether it only does so for me because it lacks that connection to the solitude in which I experienced what I'm trying to convey. I've been told that even in the "non-loner" books, the natural description is still one of the strongest elements. But something I found when recently doing an editing pass on the first YA nature-themed book makes me wonder. There were two scenes in that book that linked with those "spirituality of nature" ideas, one from each of the main characters. One I've always loved, and came out perfect first time; the other I liked the idea of, but have never managed to get quite right. The first is from the POV of a character who, despite not being a natural loner, has just gone through an experience of intense solitude, but the second was from a POV whose character and thoughts at that moment are quite sociable. Having made all the connections I've just written about, I realised that section didn't work, and got rid of it.
I wonder if any of this strikes a chord with anyone?
