Throughout my teaching career I believed that if you can’t express it, you can’t see it and vice versa. Getting to where you can see, and as Rae would argue, smell, touch, hear, and taste what you want to say, and clearly say what you want others to experience is helped by Betty Edwards (1999), John Simonds (1961), and John Conron (1974; 2000). Betty Edwards approach to learning how to draw is more about learning how to see. In terms of authoring a narrative landscape John Simonds’ epiphany that we design experiences and that the places, spaces and things come from those experiences extends Edwards’ guidance into how to see, touch, hear, smell, and taste what we want to draw. Simonds helps us realize a need for a choreography or orchestration of our five senses to be captured in our written narrative and then visually complemented as a storyboard. And then John Conron (1974), through his extensive review of narratives spanning almost 500 years, helps us understand the ways of seeing and interacting with a landscape and more clearly express experiences in a written narrative.
With Rae’s, Lemott’s, and Kooser’s thinking in mind, and you with a landscape, architectural, or interior design to produce, start writing. Just write. Once you have a half page, or full page, read it out loud. Surprisingly the gaps become readily evident. Refine. Tighten. Get to where you feel pretty good, then call together friends or work cohorts and have them read it for continuity of flow, place character. You’ll field questions like, “Wait a minute. Here you say this about that. In the next sentence your character realizes something new? How do they connect?” Or, “One minute you’re here, and the next you’re there? Did you beam out and beam in? What happened in between?”