Who am I to give advice on nature writing? No one. I couldn’t write a readable essay about nature if my life depended on it. But I have read a lot of nature writing,1 and more importantly I was recently reminded of Jonathan Franzen’s essay, The problem of nature writing. I won’t offer my own advice about nature writing, I’ll just pull a couple of suggestions from Franzen’s essay, and I won’t be at all offended if you follow the link to Franzen’s essay and never return. He is, after all, an accomplished writer.
The phrase under the title captures Franzen’s key insight:
To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature.
To succeed, nature writing has to capture not only those of us who are already captivated by it, but also those who think they don’t care about it, maybe even those who find nature scary (or at least messy). And how do we do that? By telling stories. Stories capture an audience.2 So nature writing needs to be story telling, but not just any story.
Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, and then deploys universally shared emotions—hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment—to engage a reader in the journey.
Effective nature writing involves a story about people, usually the author. Whether it’s Thoreau at Walden Pond, Abbey at Arches, or Dillard at Tinker Creek, effective nature writing tells a story about the author and their intense personal relationship with nature.
We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell strong stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.
If you’ve read this far, you owe it to yourself to read Franzen’s essay. It’s not long, and you’ll learn much more from it.
- Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edwin Way Teale, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others ↩
- If you don’t believe me, read through a few of the articles on Randy Olson’s Substack, ABT Agenda ↩