Seasons Of Writing

I don’t actually write very much during the summers. Fiction especially. There’s something within my energy that just tells me to back off, slow down, which is something I think many of us get during these warm months.

It used to make me a little nervous. I wanted to be a consistent writer, to keep my word count up. I wanted to be productive.

But my own creative/energetic rhythms got in the way, and soon I just started to go with it. Because as my word count went down, I found that I was feeling pulled toward other activities. Publishing, marketing, administrative stuff. Summers tended to be the time when I really felt like working on all these activities that were writing-related, but not writing itself.

I found myself more in learning mode rather than producing mode, and was often teaching myself something. A couple summers ago, I dove into learning Adobe InDesign, and that’s been a great investment in my skills and now I’m more than proficient with it. I often play around with stuff during the summers in a way that I don’t the rest of the year. Right now, I’m playing around with designing a business card for myself and that’s been fun and interesting. And it’s nice because I don’t have any kind of deadline on it. I can sort of work on it, then let it be, then go read an article or watch a video about some element of business card design, and then work a little more on it. There’s no urgency behind it. Just play and exploration.

But as summer winds down and autumn begins, I’ll start to feel the writing urge. And I’ll be more in producing mode. I’ll be sitting down everyday to get my thousand words in, probably working on a novel, with some short stories thrown in there too. And things will stay that way  through the spring. And as June rolls around again, I’ll feel myself slowing down.

There’s god-only-knows how many articles out there that talk about writing schedules and all the things that go along with that–motivation, hitting targets, all that good stuff. And the thing is that for as many different writers out there there’s also that many ways to design a writing schedule. You experiment and you find what works for you.

I always like to go with my energetic rhythms, not against them, but it can be hard to trust! Over time, I’ve learned that it really is okay to follow them and everything works out in life’s way–a little messy, a little sloppy, but mostly moving forward.

Amanda Linehan is the author of North, about a young woman on the run from her past, the law and an old adversary out to get her. Her newest release is Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller, about a 300-year-old vampire trying to restore the balance between life and death. She has published five novels.