Robert Macfarlane's Advice on Writing: The Most Beautiful Conversation About Language

Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His books include The Old Ways, Underland, Landmarks, The Lost Words, and Is a River Alive. He has been writing about nature for 22 years.

He grew up in mountains. "They are intense spaces and places. The light feels brighter. The snow on the face feels sharper. The air you breathe, you feel it like a wire in your nose, it runs down into your lungs." His prose does not describe nature. It performs it. You feel the cold, the speed, the claustrophobia.

Never Try to Capture Nature

Language will always be late for its subject. When the subject is light, language stands no chance. "Nothing moves faster. Nothing is more alotropic. Nothing shifts its textures, its granulations, its forms more than light."

"Once you reach the point where you stop the futile questing after correspondence, you're no longer irritably falling short. Instead, lean into artifice."

Metaphor is fundamentally a distortion. Aristotle defines it as "like unlikeness." That distortion is one of the most beautiful ways of evoking nature without caging it.

"We shouldn't dream of capturing nature because then it becomes our captive and then it prowls restlessly backwards and forwards in its cage and it's not itself."

Not the thing, but how it felt to encounter the thing. Not the river, but what the river did to you. Ocean Vuong arrives at a similar conclusion: each word carries its own music, its own weight, its own failure to fully capture what you mean.

The Power of Prepositions

"I love to speak for prepositions because they don't get listened to enough."

"If I were to say I write about rivers, that's different. That's me speaking about the river." But writing with rivers means the river and the writer are co-thinking. "And then there's a step beyond that, which is being written by river."

Three prepositions. About, with, by. The shift from one to the next covers enormous metaphysical distance. By the end of his four years writing about rivers, Macfarlane felt he had briefly experienced what it meant to be written by a river.

Small words control meaning. The difference between writing about a topic and writing with a topic is the difference between observation and immersion.

Writing Speed and Stillness

From paddling wild rapids on a Canadian river: "I am staring straight down into the hole at the waves foot and then I'm airborne and slammed into the hole head first and upside down. I am exploded out of the boat on impact as if hurled from an ejector seat down into the white hole and river is punching fingers up my nostrils and river is ramming fists into my mouth."

"And is your friend. It just tumbles and tumbles and tumbles. It doesn't slow or stop or ask you to establish hierarchy between clauses. It just runs you on." The clauses between the "ands" get shorter. Articles drop away. Not "the river" but "river." River as verb, not noun.

"When you read it, you yourself become breathless. You don't know when to breathe. And that's what it's like being buried in a rapid."

But "Rivers move deep and slow. They pull. They pause." Lake water needs different rhythms than rapids. Short sentences for urgency. Long sentences for flow. Fragments for impact. The reader's body responds to rhythm before their mind processes the words.

First Lines and the Mind's Ear

Macfarlane spends longer on first lines than on entire chapters.

"The wind was rising, so I went to the wood." Alliteration: wind, wood, went. And a puzzle. "The wind's rising. But why would you go to a wood when the wind is rising? Isn't that the last place you want to be?"

"12,000 years ago, a river is born." A river is born, not was born. Present tense for something ancient. That tension pulls you forward.

"At the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk. Rises and flows. Rises and flows." The sounds echo each other. The reader's inner ear activates.

"They're not telling you what to think. They're not a set of facts. They're working on what Heaney once called the backwards and the abysm of the mind."

Notebooks and the Alchemy of Memory

Macfarlane's books take four to eight years. They begin as fragments in tiny A6 notebooks during fieldwork.

"Into those I'm just always pouring what I sometimes call qualia. The bits, the bobs, the fluff, the pebbles, the feathers that stick in my mind. A fragment of conversation. Most often, an image."

"Highly encrypted. The original encryption is bad handwriting." He sometimes picks up actual feathers and bits of earth and sticks them in the back of the notebook as memory triggers.

Back home, each tiny note becomes "the end of a thread of memory." You pull on it and the whole scene opens up around it. Connections appear between fragments from different journeys. Images recur.

In Underland, the image of the open hand appeared throughout his notebooks. Cave art made by blowing red ochre around a hand pressed to rock. Graffiti in the Paris catacombs made with spray paint. The open hand of greeting and welcome.

Rilke: "The images of the eyes are now present, but now is the time to go and do the hard work on the images that lie inside you."

Wonder as a Survival Skill

"Wonder is jaw-dropped. It's the moment where you are stepped back by the freely given miracle of the world."

Every rainbow is bespoke. "It was your rainbow. It was no one else's rainbow in the way it appeared to you, because it's a prismatic function. If you'd stepped a yard to the right, you'd have seen a different rainbow."

"Science finesses the real into wonder. It helps us continue to be astonished by the world, just understand a little bit better how it works."

"Resist the impulse to explain astonishment." Let things remain mysterious. "When you don't try to say everything, the reader steps in and becomes your co-writer."

The Visceral Transfer

In Underland, he describes crawling through a passage in the Paris catacombs so tight that his nose touched the ceiling and the back of his head scraped the floor. A metro train passed overhead. The rock vibrated through his body.

"Being able to vicariously affect your reader's body - not their mind, but their body - make them clench, make their heartbeat raise, make them go outside so they can recover from the claustrophobia even though they were reading in a room like this. That's power."

Claustrophobia transfers more powerfully than vertigo. "I'd written a lot about vertigo. People were like, 'Oh yeah, I felt a version of that.' But with claustrophobia, people said, 'I had to stop reading.'"

"Hyperbole is your enemy. Straining too hard is your enemy." Tell it how you felt it. The representation of perception, not the thing itself.

"Ass on chair. Turn up for work. It hurts. It's not much fun. You feel like you're banging your head against a blackboard. Don't run away from it." Twenty years of daily practice, and the prose starts to feel natural. "Just takes 20 years."

For more on the power of individual word choices, see Ocean Vuong's advice on writing. And for the structural side of prose, read Ward Farnsworth's advice on writing.

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