4 Nature Writing Techniques For Telling More-Than-Human Stories
#1 Individualizing: Tell stories about individuals, not animals or people in general
There’s a quote from the nature writer Barry Lopez that I keep thinking about: “One of the things you have to do when you edit your work is make sure that when you use the first person, it’s about more than you. We need the story of us.”
This quote is from a rather obscure interview with Lopez that digs surprisingly deep into his approach to nature writing. In the interview, Lopez talks about his classic book Arctic Dreams, which writer Margaret Atwood called “a book full of resonance.” In recalling his writing process, Lopez writes,
“when I wrote Arctic Dreams, the image I had always of the reader was of somebody standing right next to me. I was pointing something out, talking about it. But what I wanted to happen was for the reader to forget about me, to step in front of me, and say, oh my God, I’m sitting here watching this polar bear . . .”
How do we get readers to ‘step in front of us’ and say “Oh my god, there’s a polar bear!”?
The point I gather from Lopez here is that nature writing should do more than just describe what I did somewhere you didn’t go. The point is not to avoid writing…
