No Need to Find the Perfect Picture Postcard Landscape
Write About a Place You Know Well
You don’t need to venture far in order to generate Place Writing. You don’t need to spend money on expensive destinations. It’s the everyday noticing of things that provides rich source material.
Serious creative work can happen in ordinary moments, in accessible places that you engage with on a daily basis. You don’t need to wait until you’ve organised a holiday abroad, or walked a coastal path. You don’t need to wait for a sunny day, or the perfect picture postcard landscape. Place writing is richer and more genuine when things aren’t perfect, when you aren’t perfect.
You can start writing now, today, about familiar landscapes close to home.
Place writing—the kind that matters—is about how you interact with what you see, feel, hear, touch. It’s about being-in-place; your presence-in-place. How you feel in your chosen location. How you connect with it.
Today I’m in the polytunnel which we erected here in the Scottish Borders last November. What makes this a good subject for my writing is that I’m able to visit Polly regularly—we call her Polly—she’s only a few steps from my house.
Place Writing has huge potential as a field of study and brings together many aspects of importance and concern in contemporary society; it ranges from the minutiae of living organisms to the effects of climate change, and from natural landscapes to urban-living and our understanding of home.
Choosing a specific space or location is a good way to get into Place Writing and repeated visits will provide you with new material.
How does the place appear to you on different occasions?
How does the weather affect your appreciation of place?
How does the light affect what you see?
What are your sensory perceptions?
What animals inhabit this place?
How do humans interact with it?
Explore these details. Zoom in with your descriptions, go deep, to the microscopic level if you can. Then zoom out and describe how this place relates to the wider picture, go as far out as you dare.
What place do you keep walking past, possibly a landscape you think you know too well to write about? What if you looked at it today as if you were seeing it for the first time—or the last?
We often overlook the obvious.
I’d love to know about a place you visit repeatedly. Could it be written about in a way that only you can write it?
As always, I look forward to chatting in the comments!
Notes, Credits and Links
Image above, my own.
If you want to develop your sensory writing, this post might be of interest:
And you might consider what time of day you choose to conduct your research:
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What first drew me to your Substack was the title Place Writing. Oddly bc I was already doing it! I'd started writing fiction about 5 yrs ago and set the location in the Yucatán, and it was easy to embellish on the geography, foliage, weather, culture. I've received good comments and one review that said the environment was almost like another character. So yes, you are right! One doesn't need to find a photo and delve into it, if they already know their landscape. Imho.
Thanks for this, Yasmin. Reading your piece I was reminded of what Hilary Mantel said in a Guardian piece re advice for writers. I think that there’s a fine line, isn’t there? The craft of writing, isn’t it a wonderful thing.
“When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.” Hilary Mantel