Creative Weather

On working in creative seasons (with news of a finished book)

The Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich, 1809-10

I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries earlier this year, and what struck me was the shape of the entries over time. As Woolf conceived, wrote, edited, and released each of her books, I found myself tracing a shifting rhythm in her creative ebbs and flows. Not a calendar, exactly, but a kind of weather. Since she catalogued these shifts in her diary, you can track how her emotional state turned with each phase, not unlike how light changes with the weather.

The pattern seems general to me (and I suspect you could trace the same ebbs and flows through other writers’ journals). Four creative “seasons” or types of weather:

Nurture. The next writing idea is identified and cultivated. The writing in this period is lighter: criticism, essays, marginalia. Reading is frequent and pleasurable; a way to fish for ideas. A vacation is taken, with the idea drawn out in notebooks, with lots of false starts and returns. The mood, though, is relaxed, curious, hopeful, excited.

Writing. The idea blossoms into an active project, and everything goes into it. Long writing sessions, focused attention. The work crowds everything out (including reading). It’s an isolated, solipsistic phase. The mood is intense, absorbed, uncertain (am I pulling this off?), but also pleasurable—though usually only in retrospect.

Editing. The first draft is done, but now the revision begins. The production of draft after draft. This phase often runs as long as the writing did, or longer. Woolf often described working the parts of her book that were “too thin.” The mood is exhausted, frustrated (it’s not as good as I thought), with the occasional sense of despair (will this ever be done?).

Release. A strange interval between finishing the book and seeing its release to the world. The focus is now promotional: interviews, essays, events. The mood is tired and anxious (what will they think?) with a desire to leave the book behind and embark on the next one. The writer is continually pulled back into something that, for them, is already old, but for everyone else, is fresh and new.

These “seasons” are less actual seasons and more like weather constellations. Think meteorological seasons over astronomical ones (snowfall vs. winter). Creativity never matches to a calendar. Woolf’s cycle often took at least eighteen months, usually years (her novel The Years took at least five). A creative season can last a week or a decade.

But the length of a creative season necessarily constrains what you can make. The longer the cycle, the larger the scope of work that can come out of it. Most Substack essays are 800-1,500 words long and therefore fit comfortably into a week-long creative season (but that’s about all that will fit that shape); whereas something like The Waves, Woolf’s experimental, poetic novel built out of six interior monologues, required a cadence measured in years (with much of it, in Woolf’s case, spent editing).

While writers have always had to deal with deadlines and impatient editors and the realities of making ends meet, our contemporary, email-and-social-media-driven cultural attention engine has sped up the entire cycle. The cadence of visibility used to be slower: a book every few years; but now the algorithms that decide what gets seen reward constancy. The cycle contracts, and we experience all the weather variations across four seasons in a single week (sometimes even a single day). If you write and post a newsletter every week, you’ve collapsed the entire cycle—nurture, writing, editing, release—into seven days, which then gets repeated fifty-two times a year.

I’ve found it increasingly difficult to sustain creative focus over months, let alone years. When I settle into a bigger piece, uncertainty about whether the output is worth the time shape-shifts into anxiety. The anxiety pulls me into social media, or sends me off to work on something smaller with more legible value. Something that can be finished, posted, measured. The bigger project falters, then withers, then dies.

So in February, when I finished Woolf’s diaries, I decided to try something new. I decided to see what would happen if I resisted the pull. I’d stop publishing completely. No essays or stories here on The Driftless. No social media, either. The goal was to put all my time and energy toward a single larger project. A book, maybe.

But the tension was real, and it was painful. While the “promotional” work, like writing newsletters and participating in social media and submitting work, is often draining and pulls time and attention away from writing, going completely dark has its own costs. My previous traction stalled out. Subscriptions trickled down to nothing. My writing stopped appearing anywhere. Day after day, with nothing “happening,” I began to hear a little voice that whispered, “the silence is permanent.” Without the legible markers that your writing has been read (or even acknowledged), it’s all too easy to believe that it has slipped into the void; that silence is all there will ever be.

What I was entering, what I chose to enter, was a Writing season. In hindsight, I can now see that I had been in a long Nurture season. Since my first son was born in 2022 and I started writing short stories every week, I’ve been building up toward something coherent. That “something” finally crystallized this winter, and so I stepped into Writing deliberately, and closed the door behind me.

I chose long consistent writing sessions aimed at producing new work. I chose to write stories that shared a set of intellectual and thematic concerns, with the goal of gathering them into a collection. I let the newsletter go dormant. I stopped posting to The Driftless in February. No new essays were written. Everything went into the stories. The promotional engine went quiet. I posted to social media rarely, only when I actually wanted to (which turned out to be almost never). Reading became narrow and focused. Since I was building a book of short stories, I wanted a master of the form close at hand, though one working in a mode nothing like mine. I read through John Cheever’s collected stories.

It felt weird at first. Through most of February and March, the pull was strong: release something, anything, don’t go dark. But I resisted the urge, and by April, I found myself settling into the season, enjoying the “weather” of writing new work. I felt calm. I felt relief in holding to one large thing rather than a dozen small ones.

And I finished the book. Over the last four months, I wrote eleven new stories that, along with a few older ones, make a complete collection: stories told entirely through found documents—corporate emails, forum threads, Nextdoor posts, Venmo transactions, online reviews, etc. These stories are about loneliness, and about the way digital platforms promise connection but deliver isolation. I wrote them to mirror how we read now: on screens, skimming, sifting fragments, scrolling past. The last few focused months were necessary for finishing the first draft, but the book is really the culmination of the last four years of writing stories. Completing it feels like the close of a chapter, in a good way. In a satisfying way. I don’t think I could have assembled it without that conscious break.

If this kind of story interests you, two that are on the shortlist for the collection have been posted here on The Driftless:

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Now I shift to the next “season,” the Editing. I’m rereading what I wrote, reshaping it all, going back through years of old stories for pieces that belong, finding the spots that are, in Woolf’s words, “too thin.” As I revise, I’ve started sending the stories out: to DIAGRAM, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Ex-Puritan, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, with more to come. I know most of these will come back with a “no” (I’ve already received six rejections), but that’s part of the game. I’d like to tell you I’ve made peace with that, that I’ve learned not to read a single “no" (or even a stack of them) as a verdict on the work; but I’m learning it in real time, and the rejections still sting—they probably always will.

This is my summer, then: revising, circulating, and assembling stories. And writing here again, now that the break is over. I expect a lot of these essays will reflect this work on the collection: drafting, submitting, building a collection, found-document fiction. My reading opens up, too. I’m moving through Thomas Bernhard’s novels. I’ve re-read The Loser, I’m finishing up Woodcutters, and Concrete is next. I have some thoughts forming on why Bernhard reads so well in the internet age. That may be an essay trying to emerge.

I’m only one season in, but I already find this framework hopeful. It has allowed me to write something I’m not sure I would have written if I had let everything else proceed as usual. I won’t pretend that I’ve figured anything out here. The book is still a long way from appearing. But I’m slowly learning to trust silence; to see that silence is not disappearance, darkness not a failure—but both as natural aspects of winter. A fallow season. I presented these seasons, these forms of weather, as a clean natural progression—one leading into the next; but in reality they braid together, one season overlapping with another. The next Nurture season lives in the current Editing. Seeds are stirring in the dark all winter long. The trick is not to dig them up now and present them as content, but to let them lie, for as long as they need to lie, far from the light.

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