Ours is an over-processed, hyper-commoditized, fabricated world. A lot of of us in the West live in artificial environments where we keep the nature locked up in parks. The trees are usually the first thing to go in the name of progress. If the first casualty of war is the truth, then the first casualty of progress is nature. We just love cutting down trees and paving things.
So, what’s that got to do with writing? Just this: When you’re working on your story, you should get in as much nature as possible. Storytelling is part of being human. And even after we’ve cut down all the tress and turned the whole place into one big dumb strip mall, we’ll still want to tell the people around us what we think happened and why. Storytelling is hard wired into our brains. So go find some grass to look at and commune with the hundreds of thousands of years of storytelling that came before you. There have been 108 billion humans on this planet. Be one of the ones that gets your story out.