by Fiona M Jones

Here’s a little story, “How to Write Nature Poems,” that first appeared in Hey Mrs. Winkler as part of a series of meta-fiction micros.

Hannah wrote stuff about nature. Not poetry, exactly—just stuff.

She’d walk through the rain and ask what the rain was doing. She would climb hills and wonder why the heather chose that place to live. She’d smell the chemical distress of wind-ripped leaves or sense the joy of insects riding air.

“Well, you can always improve,” said her family. “Look, here’s a nice workshop, How to Write Nature Poems.”

The workshop began simply enough—look out of a window, focus on a flower or a tree, describe the object, and analyze your feelings.

Hannah tried the window thing, but she felt nothing.

You get the picture? Hannah is probably an amazing nature writer because she immerses herself in the outdoors and views flora, fauna, landscape, and weather in an active, organic way. To her, a plant doesn’t just stand there; it actively strategizes, responding to its surroundings, transforming itself and its whole environment. To Hannah, the rain is never just falling. It always does something and does it with attitude, whether sweeping dead leaves and silt or feeding the greenness of the season.

And the writers’ workshop had it wrong, of course. You don’t become a fantastic nature writer by looking through a window at a garden. You must walk through the landscape and understand its processes, interactions, limitations, forces, and food chains.

As with any writing, utilizing verbs more than nouns works best.

For instance, tree is a noun, but what are its verbs? A tree spreads or waits; it grasps soil and gathers water; it roughens with age and opens niches to other life. And so on. Until it dies, giving itself over to moss and woodlice, turning green again underfoot.

So far, you have these verbs: spread, wait, grasp, gather, roughen, open, die, give, turn.

You could almost guess it’s a tree without anyone telling you. For me, descriptive writing isn’t about adjectives. It’s not about is/ was/ were statements. Successful descriptive writing owes more to its verbs.

Here’s a helpful exercise—no, I didn’t say it was easy. I said helpful. Write a short descriptive piece without using any form of the phrase “to be.” This includes the exclusion of any forms of is/am/are/was/were/be/been.

You’ve decided to write about the sky? You’re not allowed to say it was blue or there were clouds. Avoid making it sound stilted. “The blueness of the sky deepened as the day went on” is better than “the sky appeared blue in color.”

Well, I did say you wouldn’t find it easy.

In my view, we all habitually overuse “to be” verbs and phrases, which dilutes our language and leaves descriptive passages feeling bland and static.

Nature is not static. Even landscape does not exist in stasis. A mountain never just stands there. It changes—ever so slightly—even as you walk upon it. With every rainstorm and slip of scree, it weathers and erodes, reshaping from its first sharp outline of tectonic drama down towards gentler, softer slopes that all but disguise its origin. Ice, perhaps, has scoured the surface in ages past. Water cuts gullies and deepens valleys. Vegetation slowly crumbles rock and grips with its roots, holding soil in place to slow the rain runoff. This mountain disturbs the flow of prevailing wind, creating turbulence to break air into white-water waves of cloud.

See how I pulled out my verbs and put them to work? I didn’t say the mountain was anything. I said it changes, weathers, erodes, and reshapes, and I described the elements and plant life and how they further disguise, scour, cut, deepen, crumble, grip, hold, etc.

Long story short: be like Hannah. I mean Hannah prior to receiving her family’s well intentioned but misdirected advice.

Go out there and experience life—then, when you write, use your verbs.