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Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

Often you find the character through the things they say. How they talk about other people, how they describe themselves - which is very rare.

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.

It's obvious that if you're going to play a character you need to amass information about that person and about their environment or their era that they're in and use as little or as much as necessary.