Ink + Alchemy

Monthly missives to help you access your creative magic and build a writing practice you love.

In this issue:

• The answer to 2 Truths and a Lie from last week
• Our main topic: Treating your writing practice as a seasonal experiment
• A poll
• An oracle card pull
• An invitation to the September Ceremony
• Book recs and writing resources!

Before we dive in: Last week, I sent out a quick game of 2 Truths and Lie for a bit of silly late-summer fun. I enjoyed reading everyone’s guesses! If you replied and guessed right, you should have received an email from me with your prize! Here’s the lie: “I believe writers should write every single day without exception.”

What I actually believe is that the only writing practice that works is the writing practice that works for you. Daily writing can be great, but that isn’t the only path to a successful, magical practice!

And now, let’s get into our main topic for today: Treating your writing like a seasonal experiment.

September rolled in on a wave of heat and humidity, at least here in Ohio, but the signs of autumn are creeping in nonetheless.

Back to School mode is in full swing, of course, signaling the end of summer break for kiddos and a whole new set of scheduling challenges for parents (especially parents who write!). I am craving new notebooks and some sort of syllabus so I can dip back into student mode.

More and more mushrooms are popping up in the woods around the house, feeding on the rich leaf litter and the intense rain we’ve had. Acorns and hickory nuts have begun dropping onto a neighbor’s metal-roofed shed with a shocking clang.

My own energy shifts as the seasons do, and over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to become more alert to those signals—and to get way less judgmental about them. My creative seasons are as cyclical as the natural ones around me, and learning to work with that fluctuating energy instead of fighting it has made a huge difference in my life and in my creative practices.

So, today, I want to talk about treating your writing practice as a seasonal experiment (the topic that got the most votes in last month’s poll and something I absolutely love exploring with writers in coaching sessions).

First: Conventional Approaches to Writing

A lot of writing advice gets tied up with productivity culture in ways that I don’t find particularly helpful. “Number go up” expectations strip out all the magic and, too often, ask us to ignore our non-linear lives and creative cycles, to say nothing of our shifting schedules.

A “number go up” mindset might look like expecting yourself to have an unbroken streak of daily writing sessions or to hit a particular word count in a certain amount of time. It’s linear and easy to measure. While tracking your progress can certainly be helpful, this metrics-oriented writing mindset ignores huge parts of the writing experience.

Expecting ourselves to show up the same way with the same energy, day in and day out, regardless of what’s going on around us… it’s a little silly, when you think about it. It’s an impossible expectation for most of us to meet.

The problem is, we don’t have good alternative models for how to think about our writing practices, so we end up trying the same things repeatedly and then wondering why they don’t work. Something must be wrong with us, right?

Nope!

But first, a quick word from our sponsor.

Enter: Seasonal Experiments

The seasons offer us many beautiful ways to rethink our writing practices. We’re going to look at two of them today.

The first is to step back from productivity culture and look at your writing practice holistically, using the seasons as a metaphor. The second is to adjust your writing practice based on the actual season you find yourself in.

One of the reasons I love writing experiments is that they take so much pressure off of us. We’re not trying to get something “right,” we’re posing a hypothesis and collecting data. There’s no failure state. Instead, no matter what happens, we get more information about what works for us (and what doesn’t, which is equally valuable!).

Treating your writing practice as an experiment means that even if you try something and hate it, that’s fine! You learned something about yourself and you can try a different thing the next time.

Setting up a seasonal experiment also creates a helpful, time-bounded container—you’re not stuck doing something forever and ever (that’s a “number go up” approach). Seasons offer us natural points at which we can pause and recalibrate, reflecting before we move forward.

As we think about seasons, let’s start by getting metaphorical.

Seasons of Writing

Applying a seasonal metaphor to your writing practice can help you divest from productivity/hustle culture. It can direct your attention to parts of your practice that have been neglected. It can provide structure and a path to follow when you feel like you’ve gotten lost in the weeds.

It’s also beautifully simple. Here’s what it could look like:

Spring: The “spring” part of your writing practice is when you’re coming up with a new idea.

That might look like brainstorming, writing an outline, creating character sketches, or doing research. It might be a flash of inspiration and a burst of motivation—a feeling of springtime energy that spurs you on to new growth.

Summer: The “summer” season of your writing practice is when you’re putting words on the page.

You’re working on the draft, pulling together the prep work you did in the spring, telling your story or constructing your argument. (Summer energy is where productivity-oriented advice expects us to be all the time.)

Fall: The “fall” season of your writing practice comes after you finish some or all of a draft.

You’re harvesting everything you’ve been working on. You might get some feedback from beta readers or a writing group, work on revisions, or submit a finished piece to agents, editors, or publications. Autumn is all about celebrating the fruits of your labor.

Winter: The “winter” season of your writing practice is the fallow period that follows a creative endeavor.

You need rest and resources to refill your creative cup. Winter reminds us to take a breather before diving right into the next thing—spring will arrive when it arrives. (Winter is the season productivity-oriented advice likes to pretend doesn’t exist.)

Each of these metaphorical seasons might take a different amount of time, but every writing project goes through all four of them. You might have multiple projects in different seasons at the same time—in fact, that strategy can be incredibly helpful for balancing your creative energy!

Ignoring the totality of the seasons (especially winter!) is why so many of us wind up feeling burned out and unable to come up with new ideas. Instead of letting ourselves move through the full creative cycle, we expect ourselves to be in constant productive summer and then get frustrated when the other seasons demand their turn.

Here’s your experiment. Assess your current writing practice through the lens of the seasons.

• What season do you feel like you’re in creatively? Have you been pushing yourself to pretend it’s summer when it’s really winter? Are you pausing long enough to harvest your writing and celebrate your progress?
• What projects are you working on? What season is each one in? Do things feel balanced?
• How do you know when it’s time to move from one season to another, and how can you mark those transitions and honor your creative shifts?

Reflect on your writing practice using the seasonal model as a framework. Think about how you can best support yourself through the spring, summer, fall, and winter of each project you’re working on (or dreaming about). Remind yourself that the seasons are all equally valuable parts of your practice—we need the restoration of a winter to rebuild our energy for summer.

Writing with the Seasons

Another way of thinking about your writing practice is to align it with the actual seasons around you. I’m going to focus on the seasons broadly, but you can also think about different phases of life here and how they might overlap with this approach.

The Autumn Equinox is on September 23rd, and the season lasts until the Winter Solstice on December 21. There’s a lot packed into that time period, including a bunch of major holidays. Looking at fall through this lens gets us right up to the end of the year.

Is your schedule going to look different for the next three months than it has for the previous three? I’m willing to bet that it is! So your writing practice will need to look different as well.

That’s what a seasonally based writing practice is all about. Rather than trying to show up the same way all the time, we build practices that are responsive to what’s going on in the world around us, as well as our individual preferences and needs.

Some seasonal things you might want to pay attention to for the fall include:

• Back-to-school schedule changes for you and/or your kids
• Holiday travel time and plans with friends and family
• Changing amounts of light as the days start to get shorter
• The end of daylight saving time on November 1
• Shifts in your energy and capacity for creative work

Pausing at the start of the season to take stock and look at the months ahead is a way to set yourself up for success. Rather than getting frustrated when holiday events mean your writing schedule gets disrupted, you can start thinking about those events now and be ready to adjust your practice around them.

Instead of beating yourself up for having lower energy in the fall than you might in the summer, you can adjust your expectations and treat yourself with gentleness. You’ll get a lot more writing done if you’re not bullying yourself about it, anyway!

The world has seasons, and so do we. We don’t have to be in eternal summer to be productive—and I would argue that we’ll feel a lot better about ourselves and our writing practices if we don’t pretend otherwise.

A seasonal approach to writing keeps you actively engaged with your practice at key points throughout the year and asks you to reflect on what’s been working, what you might want to tweak, and what predictable changes are coming that you can account for. (Life will still throw curveballs, but those will be easier to deal with if you’ve already done the rest of this work!)

Here’s your experiment. Assess your current writing practice and then think about the next season you’re facing—which could be the literal autumn season, or some other upcoming phase of your life.

• What’s been working well? Does it seem like it will continue to work, or will you need to make adjustments to account for changing internal and external circumstances?
• What hasn’t been working so well? What piece of your writing practice do you want to shift for the next season? How will you monitor the change and evaluate the results?
• How does your energy/mood/creativity/motivation change with the seasons? Think back to previous years. Do you notice seasonal fluctuations in your energy or output?
• What can you do to plan for writing in the season ahead of you that accounts for the reality of your schedule? Where do you have margin, and where might you need to cut yourself some slack or call in support?

Reflecting on your writing practice now gives you an opportunity to make adjustments to your writing practice proactively, rather than reacting to changing circumstances after something stops working.

Make It Magical

Creating seasonal shifts in your writing practice is a practical tool—but that doesn’t mean we can’t add a bit of magic to the process. That’s why I created the Fall Writing Magic zine!

The Fall Writing Magic zine is a tiny but powerful tool that can take you deeper into thinking about your writing practice. It contains:

• Seasonal shifts for the Elements of Writing Alchemy (aka mindset, practice, and craft)
• Creative rituals to support your intuition and introduce some magic into the seasonal shift
• Prompts for reflection, tarot/oracle card pulls, and intention-setting

We’re talking about an old-school analog zine, my friend. Handmade, handwritten, created with all the witchy, writerly love in my heart. It’s scrappy, it’s practical, it’s magical, and it’s just what you need to step into the next season of your writing.

When I gave a copy of the zine to my husband to read, he went, “How did you fit all this information in such a small space?” Magic, obviously!

The zine is a quick, easy-to-use guide packed with everything you need for a fall writing practice reset. Along with the experiments in this newsletter, the zine will get you thinking about how you can continue to cultivate your writer’s mindset, build a supportive practice, and grow your craft over the next 3 months.

The zine is available as a digital download that you can print off and keep with your writing supplies. And no worries if you’re new to zines—it comes with instructions for how to fold and cut it!

If you want to go really analog—and truly make it magical—I will mail you a copy of the zine in the physical snail mail, along with some extra goodies (think: an oracle card that I pull just for you and send with the zine, a personal note from me, and maybe a few other fun surprises!). This option is only available for the U.S. (Sorry! Shipping is just too expensive right now.)

The Fall Writing Magic zine is a tool that can help you approach the end of the year with confidence. You can return to it throughout the season for inspiration and ritual—and, if you really enjoy this one, I might have more seasonal zines up my sleeve.

You can get a digital download of the Fall Writing Magic zine here for $1.99.

You can get the snail mail option here (plus an instant digital download) for $5.99.

A Poll

Which of the seasonal experiments do you plan to try? Looking at my writing practice/projects through a seasonal metaphor Lining up my writing practice with the season I'm in Both!

New Moon Oracle Card Pull

The new moon is a time to set intentions and reflect on our creative practices. I pulled an oracle card to see what aspect of creativity might need our attention during this moon cycle.

The maitake mushroom card asks us what we need to celebrate—a perfect card to reflect on as we think about stepping into fall and the harvest season.

Here are some reflection questions you can journal on or use as the basis for an additional card pull!

• What have you been working on that is close to completion?
• How do you want to celebrate yourself and your progress?
• Who can you bring into this celebration with you?
• What else in your writing practice is deserving of some celebration?