With posts like Fantasy’s Four Eras, and in various reviews, I’ve noted some of the differences between books based on when they were published, and I don’t mean the difference between books written two thousand years ago and books written this year (as if I read books that recent). Even from one generation of authors to the next, and one concomitant generation of readers to the next, there are different expectations, norms, and implementations of language, sentence structure, emphasis, plot archetypes, and descriptions. An aspect of this standing out to me in some of my recent reading is the difference in descriptions of nature.
We could name specific examples, but this is easily captured more generally: in a more recent book, you are more likely to find a stand of trees, or maybe a stand of pine trees, while in an older book, you are more likely to be shown a stand of blue spruces. In a word, older books are more specific (and often more accurate in terms of locality, seasonality, and so forth). This is partially a matter of expectations – modern audiences seem to have less patience for the kind of luxuriating in the details of geography, botany, et cetera that is commonplace in older works – but it is also a matter of reference frame.
I’ve resisted referencing Tolkien heretofore, because it’s become commonplace for fantasy authors to complain about being held to the standard of a determined polymath who taught himself to speak ancient Norse, but I will do so here in the context of the Inklings, Tolkien’s writing group. Tolkien’s writing, along with that of his contemporaries, is replete with vivid and specific descriptions of nature, and I suspect there is a good reason for that, and for why there is less of that in modern writing: that generation of authors was more immersed in nature than the current generation. Tolkien and his writing group took extensive, weeks-long walks through the countryside annually, and identifying the flora and fauna with which they interacted was simply normal.
These days, even if you spend a lot of time in nature, you may not spend a lot of time identifying the difference between, for example, the various types of oak. This is something I wish I had learned more from during my Scouting days (although I learned plenty about other subjects): plant and bird identification. When I walk through the woods, I know my red oaks from white oaks, my ponderosas from my sequoias, my ravens from my magpies, but I can’t tell you which variety of finch I see hopping around in a scrub oak, and I would have to look up when lavender blooms versus blue bonnets. This seems to be a cultural change, where we place less emphasis on such learning.
Now, this lack of detail is not necessarily a bad thing – it really is question of style – but it is something that I would like to correct in my own writing. The writing that I enjoy reading the most, and therefore the kind of writing that I would like to do, is rich with such details and specifics, luxuriating in the world so that the reader can smell the sap rising in the firs and hear the honeybees buzzing around the honeysuckles. To that end, I’ve made a deliberate effort at research for Impressions to identify species that might be native to the equivalent locale, but to gain a more complete and immersive understanding, so that I don’t need to do such individual research, I turn to books like Landscape and Memory, which, while not what I expected, does expand one’s nature-evoking horizons.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if I sometimes mistakenly call something a hummock when I should be calling it a knoll. That’s less the point, although that kind of accuracy does matter to me. No, I’m more concerned with being able to invoke hummock and knolls, instead of relying just upon hills. That’s where the difference lies for me, and why I think studying nature writing is valuable to improve my own writing. It’s the kind of writing that I want to read, so it’s the kind of writing I need to train myself to write. I’d like to think there’s a readership out there that would appreciate it.
IGC Publishing 