Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge professor and nature writer whose work explores mountains, rivers, forests, and the deep relationship between language and landscape. Over 22 years of writing, he has developed a distinctive approach to prose that treats rhythm, sound, and metaphor as tools for evoking the living world rather than merely describing it. This conversation traces how his childhood in mountains shaped his sensibility, how he turns messy field notes into books, and why he believes wonder, mystery, and linguistic precision are essential to great writing.
Growing Up in Mountains
Macfarlane grew up in mountains, which he says sensitized him to the intensity of natural experience: sharper snow, brighter light, air that feels like a wire in the nose.
Mountains are dangerous places, which forces alertness and openness to the world at an atomic level.
He describes his heart as “made of mountains” and says they wore away the usual boundaries of the self, a process that continues in his writing life.
The Obsession with Light and the Limits of Language
He recounts watching a blood-orange sunset from a plane and grieving that he would never find words to describe it.
Language will always be late for its subject, especially light, which shifts faster than anything.
He argues writers should abandon the dream of correspondence, the idea that language can reproduce or capture nature.
Instead, he leans into artifice and metaphor, which Aristotle defined as matching one thing to another across unlikeness, a way of evoking rather than capturing.
He compares this to impressionist painting: representing perception, not the thing itself, where perception is multiply filtered, dynamic, and psychologically textured.
How to Write Like Water Flows
Macfarlane is obsessed with prepositions because they change the relationship between writer and subject.
Writing about a river means speaking as an authority on it.
Writing with a river means co-thinking and co-writing.
Being written by a river means becoming a conduit, where the river creates language through you.
After four years writing Is a River Alive, he came to know what it meant to be written by rivers.
He is also obsessed with punctuation, especially the em dash, which he sees as a fluid piece of punctuation that lets meaning flow both ways, unlike the full stop, which bangs down a hard end.
Rhythm and Sound in Non-Fiction
Rhythm is something readers actively listen for in poetry and fiction, but non-fiction is defined only by what it isn’t, which has led to a neglect of sound and rhythm in the form.
Macfarlane works on rhythm and sound pattern from the very beginning because they work on the reader’s “mind’s ear” in ways propositional language cannot, reaching deeper forms of knowing.
He rewrites first lines hundreds of times, testing them for alliteration, rhythm, and puzzle.
“The wind was rising, so I went to the wood” sets up alliteration (wind, wood, went), rhythm, and a puzzle: why go to a wood when the wind is rising?
“12,000 years ago a river is born” is less rhythmic but more mysterious and ominous, pulling the reader way back in time.
He tracks sound patterning across lines, like internal rhyme between “eyes” and “rises and flows,” activating the reader’s mind’s ear whether they know it or not.
Writing Speed and Panic
To write fast water, he uses long sentences connected by “and,” which tumbles clauses together without establishing hierarchy or asking the reader to pause.
Verbs become more active, articles drop away (“river rams fists” not “the river”), and clauses between “and”s get shorter and quicker.
The result is a syntax of panic that makes the reader breathless, mirroring the experience of being buried in a rapid.
How Messy Notebooks Become Real Books
His big books take four to eight years and involve extensive fieldwork with rivers, mountains, and people.
He carries small A6 notebooks and fills them with fragments he calls qualia: images, shards of conversation, bits of landscape, anything that sticks in perception.
The notebooks are highly encrypted, messy, and illegible to anyone but him, sometimes containing stuck-in feathers and earth as mnemonics.
At the end of each day, even exhausted at altitude or deep in a river journey, he lies in his tent with a head torch and jots while memories are fresh.
He also uses tiny index cards during the day, forcing himself to fill them, which reveals how many thoughts arise when given space and stillness.
The page becomes a condensation surface for vaporous thought that has been working invisibly.
The Heartwork of Pattern Recognition
When he returns from field trips, he works through notebooks page by page at a keyboard, and each fragment becomes the end of a thread of memory that, when pulled, opens the whole scene around it.
This is when pattern recognition begins, revealing a mycelium of connections across journeys.
He draws on Rilke’s distinction between “images of the eyes” (immediate empirical noticing) and “images that lie inside you” (the harder heartwork of understanding how fragments resonate and relate).
In Underland, he noticed the image of the open hand recurring across many journeys, from 36,000-year-old cave art (where hands were used as stencils, leaving the mark of absence) to modern graffiti in the Paris catacombs, and this became a central pattern lighting up the book.
Wonder as a Survival Skill
Wonder is jaw-dropped astonishment at the freely given miracle of the world, like seeing a rainbow.
Every rainbow is bespoke: its precise form depends on where you stand, so stepping a yard to the right would produce a different rainbow.
Science doesn’t unweave wonder; it can deepen astonishment by explaining how things work.
Children are “wonder-nauts,” continually voyaging in wonder, and Macfarlane tries to let wonder take charge when writing for them.
He wrote The Lost Words, a book of nature spells for children, including an otter spell full of internal rhyme and liquidity, meant to be spoken aloud on riverbanks.
Awe, Scale, and the Blinders of Rationalism
He references William Blake’s “To see a world in a grain of sand” as an example of activating perception to find vastness in the small.
Human scale is just one scale; micro and macro scales exist above and below, revealed by technologies like microscopes and telescopes in the 17th century.
He is interested in nesting different scales next to or within one another in his writing.
Rationalism acts as blinders: for those raised on it, imagining a river as alive in a way exceeding the sum of lives it contains requires unlearning, which is harder than learning.
He sees the universe as shadowed by mystery, and rationalism as a small moving light that only ever illuminates a tiny portion of the cave wall.
The River Being Encountered at the End of a Journey
After four years of river travel and a grueling final journey on a river running nearly double its normal flow rate, he experienced what he can only describe as a river being, a godlike presence.
Each day the river tumbled, bashed, and wore the travelers away, and each night they had to catch fish for dinner.
The river was unlearning him physically and metaphysically, showing him its agency, will, and presence.
At the end, his aura and the river’s aura overlapped, setting up an interference field, and he became viscerally aware of a being that had moved through that landscape for 10,000 to 12,000 years.
He felt small, one among many kinds of being, in an experience he describes as temporarily visceral, mystic, and divine.
Language cannot carry such an experience; it can only register an analog to what happened.
Questions as Portals
His books begin with deceptively simple questions that serve as narrow portals into vast complexity: “Why climb mountains?” “Can a forest think?” “Does a mountain remember?” “Is a river alive?”
Mountains of the Mind took 300 pages to explore “why climb mountains?” and Is a River Alive took 300 pages to explore its title question, neither reaching a final answer.
He compares these questions to Narnia’s wardrobe: modest entrance points that open into immense spaces of mystery, complexity, and many voices.
He also writes a letter to his future self at the start of each book, describing what he hopes the book will be, knowing it will mutate over the years of writing.
Writing a Book as Walking Upstream in a River
Writing a book feels like walking upstream: you stabilize, but the moment you lift a foot to make progress, the force of the flow knocks you off balance.
The river of ideas, people, encounters, and rivers themselves torrents him in fascinating but not always easy ways.
He doesn’t plan linearly; he writes set pieces, mosaic tiles, out of order, jumping to whatever section he can see clearly at a given moment.
People as Co-Writers and Characters
He loves writing about people and seeks out companions who are themselves fascinated by something, almost always obsessive specialists.
He traveled with Juliana Fertie, a Chilean-Italian field mycologist who can hear fungi before she can see them, sensing them around bends in a cloud forest path, despite being a hardcore field scientist who wrote the fungal guides to Chile.
He finds that such people become co-writers, bringing into the book things he could never get on their own.
He values conversation as co-creation, building a fire together, referencing John O’Donohue’s idea that real conversations are “food and drink for the soul.”
What Songwriting and Libretti Taught Him
Writing lyrics and libretti over the past decade taught him to let images lapse into looseness with one another, allowing cross-pollination in weird ways.
As a prose writer, he is a control freak about meaning, but songwriting showed him the power of friction between language and beat.
In “Uncanny Valley” with Johnny Flynn, the lyrics and guitar sit slightly offbeat from each other, creating an uncanny, off-kilter feeling that mirrors the song’s subject.
He carries this “glitch” sensibility into his prose, especially when writing about experiences that exceed rationalism’s limits.
Poetry taught him compression and speed, as in a poem about a wren so fast it seems to glitch out of sight.
Place Words and the Onomasticon
Every book he writes includes a glossary of precise, lyrical, often strange words for terrain, water, weather, and light collected from dialects and regional languages.
He spent two and a half years raiding old dialect glossaries in regional libraries and interviewing “language keepers,” elders of communities where languages are threatened.
Examples from the glossary of Is a River Alive:
Sump: a pit or pool into which waste liquids are drained; a cesspit.
Supervoid: in astronomy, a very large part of the universe containing very little or no known condensed matter.
Rùn: the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day (from Scots Gaelic, Western Isles dialect).
He met Finley MacLeod, a first-language Gaelic speaker and language keeper, who gave him a document of 150 words for aspects of moorland and peat on the Isle of Lewis alone.
Language Death as Biocultural Collapse
Language death occurs when the last living speaker dies, and the language survives only in recordings and paper.
When a language dies, knowledge goes with it because language is a knowledge storage system, and some aspects of that knowledge cannot be translated; they are inalienable from the language itself.
Language death is a form of biocultural collapse, deleting knowledge often carried over many generations.
The Revision Process: Messy Mosaic Tiles
He is a messy, nonlinear writer who compares the process to pottery: reaching into a bucket of wet clay, slapping it on the wheel, then slowly shaping and ornamenting.
He does not write linearly; he builds books out of set pieces, mosaic tiles, writing whatever section he can see clearly at a given moment.
Two pieces of advice for writers who are stuck:
When you end a day’s writing, make sure you know what the next sentence will be, so you can push off the next morning.
If really stuck, jump downstream in the book and write a different section.
He contrasts himself with writers like Alan Hollinghurst, who writes perfect linear handwritten sentences, a page a day, which he considers rare and anointed.
Why He Will Never Use AI
He does not use AI in his writing and cannot imagine doing so, except for spell check, which he tries to switch off because his writing often violates grammatical norms.
He gives an example of a passage made of verbless sentences describing a river from the sky: “A world snake in the green. Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. House-sized boulders on the banks.” Grammarly disapproves, which he takes as a badge of success.
He argues that tools like Grammarly make average writing better but hurt distinctiveness and individuality.
He also raises the issue of piracy: large language models have been trained on writers’ books without recompense, licensing, or permission.
Making Readers Feel Visceral: Sympathetic Kinesthesia
He aims to make readers feel things in their guts, not just their minds, drawing on William Golding’s concept of sympathetic kinesthesia: twitching limbs, rising heart rates, faster breathing experienced vicariously.
In Underland, he describes crawling through a Paris catacombs passage so tight that his nose touched the ceiling and the back of his head touched the floor, dragging his rucksack by his ankle, worming forward, when vibrations from a passing metro train shuddered through the rock and his body.
He received hundreds of messages from readers who had to stop reading at that point, some jumping ahead, others going outside under a clear blue sky to recover.
He realized claustrophobia is much more vicariously powerful than vertigo, which is itself quite powerful.
What Old English, Gaelic, and Irish Teach Writers
Old English kennings are hyphenated metaphors: “bone cage” means the body, “whale road” means the sea. This metaphoric generosity fuses language in ways that are hard to stop playing with.
Middle English alliterative tradition, as in Gawain and the Green Knight, taught him the power of stress, alliteration, and rhythm.
Gaelic offers compressive precision, as in rùn, and what he calls the “Gaelic positioning system” (GPS): place names that describe the shape of the landscape before you see it.
Ben tends to be a rounded hill, Stob a sharper peak, Sgùll literally means “scary tooth” and typically describes a very sharp peak.
Bulla Mòr means “the big shepherd of the glen of Etive” and stands as a guard peak at the head of the glen.
Irish and English share a relish for what Seamus Heaney called “the palp and heft of language,” the texture and weight of words in the hand and mouth.
Heaney’s line “Keep your mind clear as the bleb of an icicle” uses bleb to mean the single droplet of water hanging at the tip of an icicle, a word of extraordinary precision and beauty.
Against the Advice to Cut Needless Words
He pushes back on the Hemingway-Carver tradition of subtraction, the idea that removing words is almost always right.
He references Walter Pater’s “burn with a hard, gemlike flame” as an alternative ideal: language that is faceted, lapidary, vivid.
Sometimes he writes verbless image sentences that flash on the mind’s screen like brain cinema, each one a vivid, disconnected image.
He believes each landscape and encounter asks for a different bespoke presence of language: sometimes you subtract, sometimes you add, and you judge based on where you are and what you’re trying to do.
Capturing Astonishment Without Exaggeration
Hyperbole is the enemy of writing about astonishment; straining too hard produces purple prose and falsity.
The key is to resist the impulse to explain astonishment and instead render it phenomenologically, telling how it was felt.
This is where subtraction becomes important: by not saying everything, the reader becomes a co-creator, filling in gaps.
Letting sense and cause drop out, as in lyric writing, allows the reader to step in and become a co-writer.
He gives the example of a single sentence from Is a River Alive: “In English there is no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river?” It is a finished thought and also a sendoff, a portal that complexifies in retrospect.
He argues against the overemphasis on clarity in writing advice: great writing gifts the reader a sentence that contains mystery and that they can think about for a long time, and that requires leaving space for contemplation.
