How to Write a Nature Book: Turning Wonder into Stories

Aspiring writers sometimes ask me how to write a nature book.

The answer takes me back many years to a redwood forest in Northern California.

I had gone there simply to hike.

Late that afternoon, I encountered the largest tree I had ever seen. Its trunk was so immense that when I tried to follow its height upward, I nearly lost my balance looking into the canopy far above me. Around it stood other redwoods, colossal in their own right, yet somehow diminished by comparison.

The whole grove felt ancient beyond measure.

The air carried the scent of damp earth and old bark. Even at midday, very little sunlight reached the forest floor. The trees rose upwards like pillars disappearing into the sky, so tall and still that time itself seemed to slow among them.

As evening deepened, I found myself sitting beside that great tree, watching the shadows gather between the trunks. I had no sleeping bag, no food, and no plan for the night.

What I did have was a growing sense that I wasn’t quite ready to leave.

So when darkness finally settled over the grove, I crawled into the hollow base of my towering new friend and spent the night there.

To be clear, I was not supposed to do that.

I’m not certain whether I slept at all during my night in the forest with the real Ancient One. What has stayed in my mind, however, is the memory of feeling an extraordinary sense of peace… and a question:

What stories could this tree tell?

What had it seen in its thousands of years here on this earth? And what could it use its great wisdom to teach us about living on this planet?

By morning, I left the forest with more questions than answers.

And that was a gift.

Those questions eventually became the seed of The Ancient One.

I didn’t set out that day intending to begin a book. There wasn’t an outline waiting at home. No carefully constructed plan. There was only a moment of wonder, followed by a question I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Looking back, I realize that is how many stories begin: with noticing.

Nature Is Not a Subject. It’s a Teacher

Nature has always been my greatest teacher, healer, and inspiration.

For most of my life, when I have faced a difficult decision, a disappointment, or simply the ordinary confusion that comes with being human, I have gone outside.

The natural world teaches lessons no classroom can provide.

For example, a forest teaches patience, while a river teaches persistence. Mountains? They teach perspective.

Even the changing seasons remind us that growth often happens invisibly long before we see results.

As writers, we are often eager to put words down on the page. Yet nature asks something different of us first: it asks us to pay attention.

Before you try to write about nature, spend some time in it.

Look longer. Listen longer. Notice what it is about this place that makes it different.

Your writing will be stronger for it.

Open Every Sense

One of the most common mistakes in nature writing is relying too heavily on sight.

We describe what something looks like and forget everything else.

But nature is experienced through all our senses.

Whenever I go outside, I like to pause and ask myself a simple question: What am I experiencing here?

I notice the light and shadows. The way a breeze moves through the branches of a tree. A butterfly drifting across a meadow. A leaf spins toward the ground, following a different path than the leaf that fell before it.

Then I pay attention to what I can hear. Perhaps it’s a Red-winged blackbird calling from a nearby branch, or the first cricket I’ve heard all spring.

I notice the ground beneath my feet. Am I walking through grass? Loose stones? Damp soil? I pay attention to the feeling of the wind on my face, the warmth of the sun, the scent of pine or sage carried through the air.

When I do this, something shifts. I stop rushing through a place and begin inhabiting it.

As writers, that’s important because readers don’t simply want to know about where a story happens. They want to feel as if they are there.

Think about the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, or the smell of rain arriving just before the first drop falls, or the cool air beneath a forest canopy. These are often the details readers remember long after they’ve forgotten the broader description — the details that bring a place to life.

When I write fiction, I try to engage all five senses as early as possible. The same principle applies to nature writing. The more fully you experience a place, the more fully your reader will experience it, too.

Treat Place Like a Character

I get many questions about how I build worlds like Fincayra or Avalon, and my answer usually surprises people.

I learned how to create imaginary places by paying close attention to real ones.

When I’m developing a character, I spend a great deal of time getting to know them. I want to understand their fears, hopes, strengths, flaws, and secrets. Eventually, if I’m lucky, that character begins to feel real enough to surprise me.

I approach places much the same way.

Nature plays such an important role in my books that I rarely think of it as mere scenery or backdrop. Instead, I think of the natural world as a character in its own right.

Every landscape has its own personality. A windswept coastline feels different from a quiet grove of aspens. A desert tells a different story than a mountain valley. Places are alive, just like you or me. They have moods, histories, and qualities that can be bizarre, humorous, tragic, mysterious, or inspiring. Some feel welcoming. Others feel wild, ancient, or unpredictable.

Part of my job as a writer is to make those places so real, so sensuous, so fully alive, that readers want to voyage there again and again.

The giant redwood that inspired The Ancient One was more than a setting. Sitting beneath its branches, I found myself wondering what stories it might tell if it could speak. What had it witnessed during its centuries of life? What wisdom might it share?

Those questions eventually became a novel.

When you begin writing about nature, don’t treat a place as scenery. Get to know it the way you would get to know a character.

What challenges does this place present? What makes it different from every other place you’ve visited? What stories seem hidden beneath its surface?

The more time you spend listening, observing, and asking questions, the more that place begins to reveal itself.

And once it does, it becomes far more than a setting.

It becomes part of the story itself.

The Secret is Specificity

One of the great joys of spending time outdoors is discovering that nature rarely deals in generalities.

As children, we learn words like tree, bird, or flower. Those words are useful beginnings, but the longer we spend in nature, the more we realize how much more detail is behind those words.

A ‘tree’ becomes a ponderosa pine with rust-colored bark that smells faintly of vanilla when warmed by the sun, and a ‘bird’ becomes a sandhill crane with a throaty, trumpeting cry that echoes far across the prairie.

This isn’t just linguistic precision. It’s a shift in scale. The more specific your attention becomes, the larger the world feels.

And writing follows the same rule, whether we notice it or not.

Years ago, while working on a novel that needed the sea to feel completely real, I spent time on the Baja coast. I had read everything I could find. I knew the names, the charts, and the descriptions. None of that prepared me for what it actually felt like to sit in a small kayak at dawn, waiting in water that seemed too dark to reflect anything back.

All I could hear was the whooshah, whooshah of whales breathing somewhere out there. I could not see them. I could only hope that they could somehow see me — since my kayak sat only eight feet long, and an adult gray whale could reach forty-five feet long.

I paddled quietly toward the open ocean. Slowly, the sun began to rise, turning the sky and the water creamy crimson. I caught sight of one whale lifting its tail above the waves, close enough that I could see streams of water cascading off the flukes. Then the water began to swirl just off the bow of my kayak.

Like an island emerging, a hulking gray form rose out of the water. In a moment so vivid that I have relived it many times, the whale and I drifted together. I reached out my hand and touched its barnacled back. Best of all, for a brief instant, I looked straight into its dark, round eye. It seemed as deep as a galaxy.

At that moment, I knew that my story could be true. The sea, the whirlpool, and the whales could feel as convincing to others as they now felt to me. Right down to that great round eye.

Specific details are often where emotion lives.

When readers remember a scene, they rarely remember the broad description. They remember the one image, sound, or sensation that made the moment feel real.

Nature gives us those details constantly.

The challenge is slowing down enough to notice them.

When I visit a new place, I often try to stay longer than is convenient. The first thing we notice about a landscape is usually the most obvious thing. It is only after spending time there that smaller details begin to reveal themselves.

The stories are often hidden in those smaller details.

So before writing, spend time observing.

Look longer.
Listen longer.
Notice what makes this place different from every other place you have ever been.

Those observations will give your writing something no amount of research can provide: authenticity.

Let Wonder Lead

As a child, I was always asking questions.

Why does that bird sing at dawn? How does a seed know when to grow?

The older I get, the more I value those questions.

That giant redwood I slept inside many years ago inspired a novel because it left me with a question I couldn’t answer.

What stories could this tree tell?

The question followed me home.

I thought about it all the time: while driving, while walking, while trying to work on entirely different projects. That tree had planted something in my imagination, and it refused to let go.

I have learned to pay attention when that happens.

Many writers begin with a plot; I often begin with wonder.

Sometimes wonder arrives through beauty. Sometimes through mystery. Sometimes through a paradox.

How can a forest make us feel both very small and somehow larger than ourselves at the same time?

Nature is full of such questions.

In fact, I think one reason nature has inspired storytellers for thousands of years is that it constantly reminds us how much remains unknown.

Even when science explains a process, the wonder remains.

Knowing how a monarch butterfly migrates does not make the migration less astonishing.

Knowing how a seed germinates does not diminish the miracle of a forest.

If anything, understanding often deepens our sense of awe.

For writers, wonder serves an important purpose. It keeps us curious. And curiosity is far more valuable than certainty.

The books I’ve loved most — as a reader and as a writer — were born from questions their authors couldn’t stop turning over. Not answers. Just a persistent, nagging sense that something out there was worth understanding better.

So when something in nature fills you with amazement, confusion, fascination, or delight, don’t rush past it. Stay with it for a while.

Ask questions.

Let those questions take root.

Given enough time, they often blossom into stories.

At least they have for me.