Landscape and setting – are they the same? Elizabeth George, in her book on writing, proposes that landscape is the broad vista in which the writer places the actual settings of the book. Let’s talk about this for a moment in light of your work. Which is the landscape and what are the settings? Are they all external or can we also have landscapes of the mind?
If you make the landscape or the seascape, the broad vistas of the book, how do you differentiate it from the settings? Does it matter? If you make the mind of the writer one of the landscapes of the book is that a good thing?
Its important to consider landscape while you’re writing your book, because if you’re able to make the landscape of a place real, it gives you a head start on making the entire work real for the reader. Making the landscape live for the reader is promoting an emotional connection to it, and no-one keeps on reading without feeling some kind of emotional connection either to the topic, the exterior landscape of the work or the inerior landscape of the writer or characters. If you have all these then you’re home and hosed.
Sometimes there can be conflict in a landscape. What are some of the ways that conflict happens in a landscape? Between a landscape and a setting and vice versa. Think about this. Weather? People? Change? Between exterior and interior landscapes?
When I go to a garden centre I go with a list. I know exactly what I’m doing. Garden centres sell plants and shrubs and I go there to buy some of one or the other, but, I know, very clearly, that selling plants, shrubs and trees, and a few garden pots and ornaments, is not a garden centre’s main purpose. A garden centre’s main purpose is to sell dreams. They sell dreams. I know that and however much I might say I go to buy plants or seedlings, what I really go for is to get a top-up of the dream. To get another fix. To keep the dream alive. It’s probably why I like books that have a strong landscape element, especially if that landscape has a garden in it as one of its settings. I also like books where the landscape is a city, Donna Leon’s Venice say, or Lily Brett’s New York. And I love books where the landscape of the mind of the writer is there for me as well.
I’m not alone – other people buy other things when they’re really buying dreams – clothes, shoes, books, yachts, cars, kitsets, the latest phone or computer or tv but one of the main things they buy to top up a dream is a book.
So writers, to a large extent, also sell dreams. We sell dreams of life as it has been and might be, as it should be perhaps, of a life that has met various hurdles and troubles that have been overcome, we write about exterior landscapes and we write about interior ones.
We write about the landscapes of the mind, the heart, the emotions, the spirit. All of these allow a reader to dream – they might dream of difference, of a better life, they might marvel at obstacles overcome and dream that they will too surmount hard times – but the best dream is triggered by reading about landscapes, whether its country, city, desert or mountain, exterior or interior. They know them and like to read about them, or maybe they don’t know them and dream that one day they will see them. In the meantime they have this book which tells them of a particular place and they sit quietly, the book on their lap, but they’re not reading they’re dreaming, because the writer has given them back the landscape they either know and love, or the landscape they’ve always wanted to visit, or the landscape of a mind or a spirit triumphant after adversity, and they dream of going there.
