Bookish Thursday - What Happened In Beulah - Guest Post by Author Christy Scott Cashman

I was lucky enough to be able to get a guest post from the author, Christy Scott Cashman - all about nature in writing. Enjoy!

Nature is so magical to me. I love John Muir's quote, "When one tugs on a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." I find that so true, and writing about setting becomes a minefield of adding depth and fun detail to a story. Incorporating indigenous vegetation, flowers, and wildlife becomes an interesting challenge, and in the process of researching them, I learn so much. I draw so much inspiration from this process. To me, it's one of the pleasures of writing. It gives me joy to choose a world and then describe it based on where it is on the planet. For my first novel, "The Truth About Horses," the world was horses. Barns, the way they smell with horses in them. The sounds of horses munching hay in their stalls, the beam of light that shines through a dust-covered spiderweb high in the beams. They all beg for more description. Is it dusk or dawn? Is the horse in because he's ill, or is it a mare in foal? What kind of spider is it? Where does it sit in the web? In my second novel, "What Happened in Beulah," the world is the small town of Beulah set in the Smoky Mountains in the 80s. This felt so rich to me. To the point that I had to cut pages of description as I couldn’t help but get carried away. But I found that to be a good thing. Remembering what it was like to grow up there and how the fog looked as it lifted every morning, how the rainstorms that passed through made everything smell sharper,  and how if it froze at night, I'd wake up to a world of crystal where everything down to a pine needle was encased in a thin glassy shell of ice. I found that in describing nature in the setting, remembering and research combined became so important that it could affect the characters and plot as I wove it into the story, making the story feel multidimensional. I found that, just as John Muir said about nature in life, nature in writing provides an incredible world to explore.

Check out the giveaway for the book at WOW-Women on Writing!