Land speaks to our heart, our emotions. Soil itself crushed in hands or felt by bare feet speaks volumes to a character’s soul.
If you’re not getting traction with your novel or other project, look at your setting. It may offer you gifts.
Do you have the usual house, apartment, café, bakery, coffee shop, mountain cabin, or romantic cove?
We writers so easily construct those things but forget we exist in and on a landscape, on landforms, on soil that has history and a sense of magic with it.
Author and college instructor James W. Hall and his students analyzed bestselling books. Many centered around “land”:
- Capturing land and lost Eden.
- Fresh beginnings in virginal wilderness.
- Struggling to return to the land.
- A contaminated land.
We humans care deeply about land and soil, even specific types of soil and landforms. But do your character care? What is that relationship? Readers care.
Recall the importance of land in Gone With the Wind, and Pulitzer winner Lonesome Dove—about the last great cattle drive. More recently James and Demon Copperhead showed characters wrestling with difficult relationships with land they worked on or wanted to run from.
There are several popular mystery/suspense series that feature tracking dogs and rangers at national parks. They explore mysterious and interesting landforms. They give us facts about soil, the history of mountains, the plants and animals living there and such. Readers love learning, but this goes beyond that. We feel something special about the mountain itself, the soil itself. Wise writers bring that into the equation to please readers (including agents, editors, publishers, reviewers).
Land can have barriers—a river your character needs to cross and can’t but thought was beautiful just yesterday. Do a “setup” for that “payoff.”
Land and soil can provide a big moment in your plot paradigm/diagram. Consider the Midpoint Crisis literal landmark in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by William Goldman. Outlaws climb a mountain, struggling against loose soil and rocks, barely ahead of the posse. Robert Redford and Paul Newman arrive at a cliff—high above a river. Their choice: surrender or chance jumping several hundred feet into the river, which will probably kill them.
Characters working land are considered noble. We love a farmer trying their best. Stories of the Dust Bowl or disasters with land break our heart. If you have a character beta readers or agents aren’t liking, get that character’s hands dirty.
Land and soil matter to readers because our lives depend on healthy, fruitful land. This is elemental stuff.
Around the world readers have land and soil in common. This aspect can expand your readership perhaps.
When writing about land and soil, be specific. What kind is it? Name? Texture? Landforms came about how? Different soils have names.
Soil and terrain resonate with readers. Wine and cheese from different world regions or the next county taste differently because of “terroir” or “gout de terroir,” a French term for the taste of the soil.
In memoirs, read Marc Hamer’s bestseller How to Catch a Mole and subsequent memoirs about tending a rich woman’s garden called Spring Rain and Seed to Dust. Working in soil became a metaphor for the man’s ups and downs in life.
Sometimes a novel can be just about the suspense of a landform. Consider the volcano in the famous Robert Harris novel, Pompeii. The geologist—who knew the “personality” of the soil and landform—couldn’t convince others of what was unfolding.
Popular nonfiction journalism books tackle “land” a lot, such as Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Classic, older regional books have loyal readership, too, and will give you ideas, such as The Land Remembers by Ben Logan.
Soil reacts to how we treat it; experts consider soil “alive.” Soil is truly a “character.”
Did you know every U.S. state and territory has an “official soil”? Lists and info about soil anywhere in the world are online.
So, instead of your cop meeting somebody at the clichéd coffee shop, what if they meet in the city park where the cop volunteers to weed flowers with children, get their hand dirty? What do they name their soil? Find in the soil?
What do YOU love about land and soil? Use that to enhance plot, characters, setting, and your unique voice.
Christine DeSmet: Author 