Robert Macfarlane is an author and professor at Cambridge who writes non-fiction with the beauty of fiction.
Some highlights from our interview:
1. Avoid things that dilute your sense of wonder.
2. Children are wondernauts. They continually voyaging in jay-dropping astonishment because of the freely given miracle of this world.
3. Raid old dialect glossaries in regional libraries for words that are precise, lyrical, and sometimes absurd. Take rionnach maoim, a Gaelic word for "the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day."
4. Why Robert loves the em dash: It’s liquid punctuation that flows both ways, unlike the hard bookend of a full stop period. Meaning can move against the current, eddy back up the sentence, or flow down. It's your most beautiful, fluid piece of traffic control for meaning.
5. Resist over-explanation. Sometimes, it’s okay to leave gaps in your writing so your readers can become your cowriters.
6. Don’t use big words to sound impressive. Use them to be precise. Sometimes, you can say more with the right four-syllable word than you can in four sentences.
7. For those raised on rationality, ask yourself: Has this become a prison? What can’t I see because of the blinders of rationality?
8. Take lots and lots of notes. You don’t need to write much. Just enough for little fragments to become threads of memory you can pull from to summon entire scenes once you return to your computer.
9. Don’t be scared of writing nonlinearly. You can build your books out of mosaics and edit by jumping up and downstream.
10. Edit your writing by reading it out-loud: the tongue trips on what the eye glides across, and the ear hears things that escape the usual systems of vigilance.
11. Abandon the goal of trying to “capture” your experience of nature. Lean into your perception of it instead and write about how you perceived it, not what it actually was.
12. How can you do it? Metaphor. Yes, metaphors are fundamentally about distorting reality but they can evoke something far richer than what people can see on their own.
13. His advice to writers: Ass in chair. Show up for work, every day, and put the time in. Yes, it can be “brain hurty” work but don’t run away from it.
14. When you end a day's writing, always know what the next sentence will be. It's like pushing off on a bike: you can wake up tomorrow with momentum instead of trying to start all over again.
15. In songwriting you learn to let language cross-pollinate in weird ways, which creates uncanny connections. What seems like a glitch becomes precisely the feature you need.
16. Rhythm in nonfiction does what fiction has always known. It works on the mind’s ear. We expect poetry to be rhythmic, but prose can use these same sonic tools to reach deeper down forms of knowing that bypass the analytical mind.
I've shared the full conversation with Robert Macfarlane below, and the links for YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts in the reply tweets.
Links…
Apple:
Spotify:
YouTube:
My favorite quotes from the episode:
• "Language will always be late for its subject. When its subject is light, it stands no chance. Nothing moves faster, nothing is more allotropic. Nothing shifts its textures, its granulations, its forms more than light."
• "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."
• "The dash, the em dash, that long dash—not the hyphen, but the one that lives between words—is to me such a beautiful, fluid piece of punctuation. Where a full stop bangs down the hard end, the bookend to a sentence, to a thought, the dash is liquid. It flows two ways, both ways."
• "I see the universe as shadowed by mystery. Rationalism is not the great light that floods the universe and tells us the secrets of everything."
• "Mountains sensitize you. 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."
• "Francis Bacon in the 17th century said: 'Let us torment nature until she yields her secrets to us.' But nature's secrets far outstrip the tormenting tools of rationalism."
• On taking notes: "Each of those little fragments to me becomes the end of a thread of memory. So that's the only bit you can see is the tiny fragment, but as you pull, pull, pull, pull... the whole scene within which the fragment was jotted sort of opens around it."
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