Words in the Landscape: A Craft Essay by Mark Wagstaff

Like the narrator’s map reading in ‘At Batemans Mill’, some navigation might be helpful.

Rudyard Kipling lived in a house called Bateman’s in rural Sussex, England. (The house name

has an apostrophe, which I dropped because punctuation in story titles tends to get lost anyway.

I’m not generally so slack.) A famous, bestselling writer, Kipling could afford his secluded place

in the country, in a time before the attitudes that drove his fame collapsed beneath their own

irrationality. The National Trust is a British institution, with stewardship of country acres and

historic houses. That writers’ houses are thought worthy of preservation defies logic, but there

we are.

From suburban south London, the discreet couple that set off on their day out is

presented mostly through their interactions with the house and its grounds. Though we learn the

narrator and Shirley are visually and emotionally quite different, their reactions to Kipling’s

house are complementary, which perhaps explains something of what holds them together. While

Shirley might realistically see herself drinking wine on the lawn. The narrator might, perhaps,

be happy to see Shirley do that. It’s a sunlight daydream, a fresh-air fancy, miles removed from

those sweaty comedy clubs where the narrator does stand up. We might guess the tone of her act

is acid observational humor.

The setting of the house is crucial to how the story proceeds. When I first visited

Bateman’s, I was struck by the size of the lake that sits behind the water mill. It i’s no mere

pond. At ground level it seemed notably circular. And though, from the air, it’s clearly not, its

placid regularity against the open country emphasized, to me, the artificiality— – the

extraordinary unlikeliness— – of milling and baking bread. Baking bread is a complex process

with a long evolution. I felt a sting of mischief, thinking:; what if someone gave that process a

hand? Obliquely, it’s a callback to those 1970s crackpot theories about the Nazca geoglyphs

being carved by spacemen and so on. Those theories that treated the older peoples of color as

childlike, a view not so far removed from the beliefs of Kipling’s audience.

The young girl skimming stones could be anyone. The narrator projects her own

experience onto the child. She sees the girl as lonely, an oddball, not conventionally pretty. The

narrator considers the girl has invented a purpose for herself, to justify wasting time skimming

stones. The narrator assumes that throwing rocks at water could never be as meaningful as

standing up night after night, trying to make people laugh. To be sufficiently memorable so that

they come back for more. To the narrator, the girl is material she can’t use. Shirley indulges in the

light fantasy of baking bread, which is somehow more real because she saw the flour fall

from the stone. But life gets in the way of baking bread. The narrator seems to have a fantasy to

be regarded, to have something to say in the challenging, vital art of comedy. But the small clubs

have a full roster of people with day jobs who peg away, year after year. Set against the two

adults, the girl’s fantasy may be the most likely.

The story is suggested by place. A day out in a distant world where a writer, grown rich

off a bellicose public mood, would naturally deserve a country mansion. The lawns and woods of

an England already vanishing from sight. Twelve years after Kipling bought the house, World

War One would blast the old certainties away.

‘At Batemans Mill’ is, perhaps, a small example of a wider point. All stories exist in a

landscape. All stories relate their setting. Whether we’re writing an observational piece, centered

on our own neighborhood, or constructing a science fiction world with processes and anxieties, if

we’re writing about material beings, we need to acknowledge their relation to material

surroundings. Which is a ten-dollar way of saying every story has to be somewhere and has to

follow whatever rules that somewhere supplies. Those rules might be geographic (a story set in

mountains could involve changes in altitude which may be arduous for its characters), or climatic

(a story set at a certain latitude will assume a baseline of heat or cold, which affects what people

wear and the time of day when they do things), or social (a story set in a certain community

might need to reflect prohibitions that some objects or events cannot exist in proximity). A story

about someone laying in bed for weeks has to address day and night, the texture of sheets, the

unseen causes of sound. All these are matters of landscape.

Even if I had never been to Bateman’s, I’ve seen enough weekends in the countryside of

southern England to sketch that background of traffic, fleeting warmth and skies that are never

quite empty. But that’s not to say a writer can only write the landscape they know. A story is

about where its characters live, not where the writer lives. With research and reflection, with the

application of imagination, a writer can put their characters anyplace. The key thing is knowing

how landscapes work.

If your characters wind up in a hot desert, or a small town by a frozen sea, or a city

surrounded by tropical forest, what are the rules to how those landscapes work? What’s the

elevation and climate? What are the economic constraints? What behaviors do people call

‘normal’? Knowing how those factors function can help locate your characters in a place you’ve

never been. That is not about claiming the experience of others as your own, a move which,

rightly, will always be found out. It’s about locating a story where it needs to be, in the place

where it happens, to enable characters to respond to the demands and opportunities of landscape.

Whether that response is about fighting a war, or dancing beneath unfamiliar stars, or skipping

stones across a pond.