Writer-In-Progress

I love all the seasons equally, each for their own special qualities. Spring delivers fresh air, sunshine, and soft ground for planting new flowers and reintroduces me to my favorite plants after a long, dark winter. Summer’s sunrises give me the perfect backdrop for morning walks with my dog and the full-blown beauty of nature. Winter, despite her sharp winds and dull grey days, is full of moments to slow down, snuggle in and let the body and mind lie dormant for a period.

And autumn…well, where to begin? I don’t know that autumn is my favorite season other than the fact that we’re in it now and it’s most pertinent. In terms of nature, autumn brings football which brings leaves changing which brings a certain type of sadness at the close of the summer. Summer’s final chapter, you might say.

But autumn brings something different to my writing. Just as I tromped over piles of crisp, colorful leaves this morning on my walk with the dog, I realize that autumn is signaling to my subconscious that like the tree that sheds the leaves each year, this is the time for me to shed some of the lofty projects and hopeful pieces of writing I’ve been clinging to since spring–and possibly longer–that are holding me back.

As a creative mind, I think every single idea I have is a golden gem. Thinking up new ideas, new plots, new essay topics is what gets me going. I love ideas. But the downside of that is that some ideas are obviously wrong for me, wrong for my writing–yet I cling to them with some type of hope that they’ll spring to life on their own. This energy I waste on these projects that go nowhere do nothing to further my writing, my creativity, my mental state–instead they keep me stagnant, afraid to branch out and mentally unable to spend more time on a project that’s working or on trying something new. If you’re a writer, or creative in the least, you know the feeling of a project that’s continued to call your name that you keep putting aside, or worse, you’ve started and just can’t finish despite your efforts. Not only do these projects suck away your energy, they can get you procrastinating on all types of creative work and can effectively block your creative flow. Not good.

Take a cue from autumn and set aside some time in the next couple of weeks to seriously evaluate the state of your projects. If what you’re working on does not infuse your writing time with passion of some sort, consider whether it’s time to move on to a new work or, if it’s a long piece, move ahead to a more interesting part of the story. Some of you might even find you’ve let your writing slip into oblivion over the course of the last few weeks (or months, or even years) and are pressuring yourself to write what you THINK you must write. Try this: instead of sludging through what your conscious mind tells you you should be working on, take some quiet time to reflect on what your subconscious, your soul, FEELS like writing. Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than going back to journaling or letter-writing to a friend or something equally simple. Maybe the manuscript you’ve spend a few years writing is bringing you to tears each time you face it. Maybe you find yourself dreading writing another mystery novel because you’re bursting to try a chick lit.

Whatever your case, whatever your state of writing, taking a little time to reflect on where you are and how you could make things better is an excellent practice toward becoming the writer you dream about. So as the trees drop their colorful–yet dead–leaves in anticipation of saving their energy through winter with the promise of a new, fresh spring on the way–think long and hard about saying goodbye to the parts of your writing that aren’t working for you so that you can spend your precious, limited energy on projects that fulfill you.

What do the autumn leaves tell you about your writing?

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• Filed in BethWorld, Writer's Life