Magic in the landscape - by Lu Hersey

Sometimes, places loom like beacons on the horizon, compelling you to pause on your journey, overcome with the need to explore. Parts of the landscape so powerful, they make your heart sing.

Glastonbury Tor, Silbury Hill, Castlerigg stone circle -  just a few of the places that have surprised me, over the years, with their immediate impact. A feeling that's inexplicable, a bit like coming home after too long away. A nostalgic yearning, even though you haven't been there before.

Last week, I found another.

Burrow Mump is a small but dramatic mound that springs up from the Somerset Levels like magic -a bit like Glastonbury Tor, downsized, with the ruin of a church on the top.

Forcing my friend to stop the car as soon as I saw it (she didn't object too much, even though we had an appointment in Wellington), I bounded (OK, puffed) up through the scatter of trees to the top in a matter of minutes. There was no one else there. The view was stunning.

It's a place I'd love to go back to when there are no time constraints, perhaps to watch the sun rise up from the mists, or the starlings swirling overhead in weak winter sunlight.

Because Burrow Mump seemed to be just that kind of magical place. Once an island of higher ground in a flooded (now drained) landscape, you sense its strategic importance in the past. A quick google search tells you about Roman pottery finds, a motte and bailey castle, and the connection with King Alfred - which apparently is myth, and can't be proved. But as Joseph Campbell said, “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” 

Alfred was there, I feel sure of it. This area was Alfred's territory. The years he spent hiding in the marshes from the Danes, Burrow Mump would make the perfect viewing platform, where he could watch out for any approaching danger from the wetlands below. A place to sit and think. I could almost smell his burning cakes. 

Spend a few moments on the summit and you get a strong sense of this living landscape, stretching back in time. It's inspirational, a place to set stories, create art.

Or that doesn't grab you, maybe just sit awhile, and simply admire the view.

Lu Hersey

 (This post - with some modifications - is taken from my patreon site, Writing the Magic)

The power of landscape - by Lu Hersey

In some ways it's obvious. You can't write a selkie story set in the Nevada desert - not easily, anyway. You need sea. Not only that, you need sea where there are grey seals, which limits you further. And somewhere the folklore allows for the possibility of selkies - and that really narrows it down. Perhaps most importantly, it has to be a landscape you can visualise clearly. Or it does for me. 

A defined landscape can hold the shape of a story. It's why Deep Water is set in North Cornwall, specifically between Port Isaac and Boscastle - an ancient and varied terrain which encompasses dramatic cliffs, a castle, high seas, caves, a witchcraft museum - and grey seals. Half my youth was spent there, backed up by year on year of visiting the area since. 

Maybe a clear idea of the setting is essential for all writers to carry a story along, but for me the importance is on another level. The landscape is a living, breathing thing from which the magic and folklore of the region has grown. Almost a character in its own right, as important as the other characters in the story. 

I want to know how any landscape I set a story in changes through the seasons and what I'll find there - whether it's when the basking sharks arrive in Cornwall, bitterns start booming on the Avalon marshes, or barley is harvested on the Marlborough hills. Any amount of detail to add to a store of background knowledge. A lot of it never gets used, but then neither does stuff you know about your characters either - like what their favourite colour would be, what their grandfather did for a living, or where they buy their shoes. Somehow it feels useful to know about it when you're writing. But is it essential to the reader? 

No. Of course not. But it does make a difference to the writing.

As a child I read two kinds of books. The ones my mother thought were awful and should be banned (she meant Enid Blyton) and the others. Children don't discriminate in the way you'd expect. For years, Enid Blyton won. It didn't matter to me (or not that much) that the background detail was highly inaccurate, the stories incredibly sexist and filled with the worst kind of bullies imaginable, because the main thing was the kids were busy catching gangs of criminals without any adults around (apart from unnamed servants who made picnics) and everything was tasting so much nicer out of doors. (I even tried ginger beer thanks to Enid. Hated it.)

But do I remember a single storyline from an Enid Blyton book? No, except one. An ancient copy of Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book I once came across, where the children's uncle took them on nature rambles each month to point out what you might find out in the countryside through the seasons. That knowledge stuck. Her most nerdy, possibly boring book, but the only one I could tell you anything about. 

So what about the other writers, the not Enids? Once I started reading more widely, I ended up enjoying many of them far more (though I would never admit it to my mother). My world expanded hugely through these books, way beyond catching crims and eating picnics outdoors. And unlike Enid's books, I still remember them. Philippa Pearce, Susan Cooper, Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner (to name a few) presented whole new worlds, very real, rich with detail. Firmly fixed in landscapes you could really visualise, as integral as the characters were to the story. (Even fantasy landscapes like Earthsea - once read, you can never forget those islands and can only wish they were real so you could go there...)

In many ways, all writers could benefit from being more like Enid. Not caring particularly about content but sticking to a well trodden formula that spells success. Writing a rich landscape into your story doesn't often translate into financial gain. And these days, big publishing advances are usually reserved for TV celebrities (or people married into royalty) to write whatever they like. They are today's Enids.

Of course there are lots of very successful, non-celebrity writers whose books are filled with glorious landscapes ( I won't provide a list for fear of missing people out and offending writer friends) - but most of them have day jobs too. Depth and richness of story isn't as valued nearly as much as being a big name on TV.

A very kind reviewer once compared my writing to Susan Cooper's Greenwitch or Alan Garner's early novels. Landscape is integral to those books too. But would Alan Garner or Susan Cooper get published today? In times when everyone, including children, travel widely, does anyone care any more about the ground they're walking on - or the way magic and folklore is tied to that land? I really hope so. But on gloomy days I can't help wondering. 

Maybe landscape nerds are a dying breed and we face extinction. 

By Lu Hersey

PS. But in case that isn't happening just yet, if anyone's interested, a new edition of Deep Water is now available from lovely indie publisher Tangent Books (bookshops can order via Central Books too). It has an AMAZING cover, thanks to a fellow folklore enthusiast and talented artist, Rhi Wynter. And if I say so myself, the setting makes it perfect for a summer holiday read (especially somewhere by the sea). 

Alternatively you could buy another book written by one of the popular celebrity children's writers. There are lots of them, they're available everywhere - and probably not a landscape in sight.☺ 

Location research: finding what I wasn’t looking for – Lari Don

I recently went as far north as it's possible to go in Scotland without a boat, to Sutherland, because I hope to set my next novel there.

As I marvelled at the November beauty, and shivered in the November cold, I wondered: why do we bother to research our novels?

Why do we want to get the facts right, when we are writing fiction?

I searched for a fairy mound, a magic stone, and a wise woman’s cottage; but I found an outdoor art gallery, a healing loch and a new way to listen to water…

I found a snippet of ancient folklore which links to an book I’ve already finished writing. I witnessed a new piece of folklore being born.

And I filled a notebook with cramped frozen-finger scribbles, wrinkled rainspots and muddy splotches.

I went north with a list of queries I wanted to answer and facts I wanted to check. I didn’t come home with any of those answers or confirmations…

But I did come home with a much clearer idea of what my story might be about, and what my characters might want.

And with the realisation that, for me, the main value of research is not to find answers, but to prompt questions…


Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
Lari on Twitter 
Lari on Facebook 
Lari is on Instagram as LariDonWriter

Creating worlds by Lu Hersey

Like most writers, I try to include a real sense of place in whatever I write. A place that feels so real to the reader, they can almost touch it. And up until now, that’s always been a landscape I’m really familiar with.

Setting my first novel, Deep Water, in Cornwall gave me the excuse to spend huge amounts of time there. Holidays spent snorkelling over sunlight Cornish seas, traipsing across rugged clifftop paths, exploring villages, soaking up the ambience of Cornish graveyards and chapels - and many rainy days of research in the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle.

I immersed myself in Daphne du Maurier books, Helen Dunmore’s Ingo series, and tomes on Cornish myth and legend. I told myself it would be easier to write, and the book would only work, if I covered every angle of the geography and the atmosphere of the world it's set in. The upshot was it took blooming YEARS to write.

The same thing happened when writing my second book, Broken Ground (currently undergoing its zillionth edit). The setting for this one is a fictionalised version of the area around Silbury Hill and Avebury. I spent so long immersing myself in the Neolithic in this part of the country, I probably deserve a burial space in West Kennet longbarrow. And, of course, all the months of research meant Broken Ground also took an eon to write.

But my current work in progress is a complete departure. It’s a myth-based sci-fi story, much of it set in a desert world. I know little of deserts. Once, when I was about seven, my parents drove us over the Atlas mountains to the edge of the Sahara. All I remember is it was hot and dry, and smelt of camel dung. But there are no camels in my fictional world. And it’s not the Sahara.

I haven’t been to this place, because it exists only in my imagination. My research on deserts, and desert plants and animals, is done entirely online - where scale is almost impossible to judge, and you can’t smell a thing. The upshot is I’m writing much, much faster this time round. I can’t spend time faffing about in deserts because I don't have the time or the money, so the plot is cracking along at a good pace. 

To help me work out how to conjure up the ambience of an unknown environment, I’ve been reading lots of extraordinary, inspirational books set in imaginary landscapes to see how other writers do it. Most recently, I've re-explored Wrath, the dump world where Eugene Lambert’s brilliant The Sign of One sci-fi novel is set, with the publication of the gripping sequel, Into the No Zone. I've skirted around the vast expanse of SF Said's amazing universe in Phoenix, and am currently captivated by the fantastic seascapes and ice lands of Sarah Driver’s Sea. I’m awed by the way these writers conjure fantastical worlds which have such a real feel to them that the reader is totally sucked in. And hopefully, by reading, I've learnt something.

Now I'm wondering why I didn't think of creating a landscape earlier. Today my desert world needs a dog creature, so I can make one up, from the smell of its rancid fur to the noise it makes in its throat. I don’t need to spend weeks hanging out with dingos, or African painted dogs – my dog creature is conjured from years of David Attenborough documentaries and a childhood growing up with a couple of smelly corgis. 

The dunes in my desert can be as ochre red as they like, riddled with all the caves and hiding places I need for the characters to hide. Animals and plants grow according to how much danger I need, or simply because the characters need to eat.

So would I go back to real world landscape? Yes of course. The book I write after this may well be set in Cornwall again. Or Somerset. Or Wiltshire. Somewhere I know well. But it might not. The landscapes seeded in my mind have taught me a lot. I can set a story anywhere my imagination can take me.

However, if anyone has a spare ticket, I’d really appreciate a quick research trip to the Sonoran Desert…

Lu Hersey
twitter: @LuWrites
Instagram: luwrites
blog: Lu Writes

Writing Britain - Dianne Hofmeyr

What is landscape to a writer? Waterland, Wuthering Heights, Far From the Madding Crowd are novels I read a long time ago without ever visiting the terrain and yet the landscape seeped into my consciousness… strong, powerful… never to be forgotten.  If we start with books read from childhood, the list might go on forever of experiencing a landscape for the first time through the eyes of a writer. And this is what makes the new exhibition at the British Library: Writing Britain – Wasteland to Wonderland, so fascinating.

Anyone who is slightly voyeuristic (what writers aren’t?) will find the exhibition utterly intriguing.  Access to so many writers’ journals, diaries, notes, sketches, edits, proofs and musings, is the height of voyeurism. In the dimly lit quiet rooms it’s like being a ghost peering over the writer’s shoulder.

Fortify yourself. The exhibition is huge. But as writers or lovers of books, you’ll be richly rewarded. It moves from rural dreams, to the satanic mills of industry and from wild places to water lands, the city and places beyond the city to show how stories are shaped not just by the physical but the imagined physical. If you have an idea of the extent of the exhibition beforehand, you can set the pace. A break in the middle for lunch or coffee is a good option. The dim lighting, lack of bright visuals and... odd to say as a writer – the predominance of text and need to be up close to each glass case to read the words, even the stance of reading standing upright, make it tiring. But the rewards are there.

As I experienced the swirls and loops and fluid flow of ink from Wordsworth's pen, Bronté’s neat and spidery hand, Katherine Mansfield’s firm script in her Suburban Fairy tale, Angela Carter’s italic in her manuscript for Wise Children, the neat child-like hand of Lewis Carroll in his Alice’s Adventure Underground and the fat cursive letters of Virginia Woolf writing her newspaper as a child – it occurred to me that I’m becoming unused to deciphering and reading real handwriting. Will our children’s children lose this skill entirely?

But it’s not just the script and inkblots that makes this all so personal. It’s the very true feeling of knowing how the writer has anguished and altered the words – drawings by John Betjeman overlaid with words, Thomas Hardy’s handwritten insertions on the proof copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, JK Rowling corrections to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. And what must come as comforting to any writer the huge red crossings-out of James Joyce on a handwritten page of Ulysses where the amount of red far outweighs the written word.

It’s a heady mix. Interviews with writers talking about landscape, recordings of writers reading their work, poems of Sylvia Plath, Fay Godwin’s haunting photographs illustrating the moorlands Ted Hughes describes, Wordsworth writing of his sister Dorothy on their walks, ‘She gave me eyes. She gave me ears.’ The Waterlands of Swift and the Wessex of Hardy are conjured up alongside the Willesden of Zadie Smith and the bleak visions of modern urban life as seen in the stark opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s Crash:

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.

It’s an exhibition that needs revisiting and each time I’m sure a new hidden gem will emerge.

What for me was one of the most moving exhibits was Liz Matthew’s 17 metre concertina book, Thames to Dunkirk, with the names of the Little Boats that went across to Dunkirk written into the water of the Thames combined below the with the words from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in calligraphy done with a piece of Thames’ driftwood. It seemed to show not just the spirit of those men in the small boats but also the spirit of writers who dare. 

What writer's landscape has affected you most?

www.diannehofmeyr.com