Part 2: Writing Seasons for the Wayfinding Writer

This flexible, mindful framework could transform your writing like it changed mine

Writing Seasons are the antidote for treating my writing as problematic when it is less than resplendent.

When I feel my writing is lacking, instead of gobbling up advice from experts and silencing my own instincts, Writing Seasons remind me of an enduring truth: that everything is always in the midst of transformation, including me, my writing and my life. They start from the fertile ground of basic goodness—the notion that you and I are intrinsically trustworthy and reliable. 

When I stumble, get stuck or dissociate (like I did many times just trying to gather this piece together), Writing Seasons nudge me away from absolute, dire thinking and remind me that I am, perhaps, just in a new place I haven’t related to before. And that just as inspiration fades, so, too, writing blocks and insecurities have the potential to alchemize into something entirely different. 

Before we dive into each season, there are a few changes in my writing posture I want to revisit. These practices are nourishing to me, even as I’m sure my ability to embody them will wax and wane. They are a practice of…

• Treating my instincts as if they are inherently reliable.

• Letting my daily energy inform when and how I invest in my writing. 

• Bringing resources into my life that help bolster the ground of basic goodness.

With these self-trusting practices in mind, I am excited to share a closer look into Writing Seasons of Musing, Tending, Craft and Rest. This is the harvest I have to offer after 15 years of trying, failing and finally meandering my way to compassionately abiding (most days) with writing as a primary mode of belonging in the world. 

Even though putting things down into a format inevitably inspires them to wiggle free, I do sense that there’s something here for you just as you are. I trust you all to create space and permission for me to experiment as I try to part the waters of my own writing practice.

Season of Musing

Aimless! Liberating! Risky! The ground beneath you is shifting.

I haven’t met a writer who didn’t keep a journal of some kind from a young age. Perhaps you didn’t, but in the hundreds of writers I’ve met in my life, every one of us had some secret place where our thoughts could be plunked down onto paper. As it goes, my first diary was white with pink hearts and a lock on it, which was clever enough to keep my little brother from fiddling with it, but could have easily been nudged open by a toothpick. (Anyone else with flimsy-lock diaries?) 

Using words to make sense of the world around and inside us gives writing a different kind of cellular identity. From this place, I start thinking about the Season of Musing. Allow me to paint a picture of my own recent Season of Musing. Up until a few weeks ago, I spent four years living  a picture-perfect, secluded mountain life in Colorado, the stuff of writer’s dreams, and I could not write. I could imagine all the ways that I ought to be a writer, but it all just swirled in on itself.

I think my Season of Musing showed up precisely because I was deeply lost inside myself. The Season of Musing wouldn’t let me pretend that I was doing great in my writing world—I couldn’t hide anymore behind cute marketing plans and business agendas. No, the Season of Musing showed up to tend to some deep, unanswered questions I had about myself. 

This season is inherently aimless, intimate, risky and liberating. And I don’t think the Season of Musing shows up just once—it returns again and again, like a sojourning friend.

If your writing feels wholly impossible to finish or bring to an ending, ask yourself if this might be a Season of Musing for you. Here’s how and when this season often shows up:

• We have pushed ourselves into structures, relationships and work that take too much from us.

• We feel an urge to liberate, to throw a tantrum, to pull attention from anyone who will offer it—or even to confess our deepest secrets.

In my experience, the Season of Musing lays the foundation for some of the most juicy, energetic writing because it has an undercurrent of desperation that can’t help but fling open new doors, unleashing writing wholly new to us.  

When we’re in a Season of Musing, we’re not producing writing that people instinctively applaud. The writing comes to the surface, but not easily or smoothly or in a way that makes much sense. No matter how much you try to bring a piece into a cohesive thought or takeaway, it wiggles away. It can feel like a character is shapeshifting on you. 

In the context of Writing Seasons, how you treat the writing is what counts. 

If you’re noticing your writing leaning more toward musing, give yourself permission to go offline with this writing or only share it with a friend. This writing is the stuff of banging-your-head-into-walls, frustration, endless question asking and, often, pessimism.

For all its messiness and vulnerability, I’ve learned that the Season of Musing is almost non-negotiable. It lays such a rich foundation for writing that does eventually have clarity, impact and originality. Musing is messy, but only in the mess can we find some gold.

Season of Tending

Connect with people who need your writing the most! Give concentrated attention to marketing, branding, or learning a new platform for publishing your online writing.

In the midst of my Season of Musing, there was a lot to uncover after I was diagnosed with autism. As a late-diagnosed person, I felt like everything that made my life especially tiring or challenging was rooted in the fact that I was trying to imitate neurotypical people. I had secondary training in marketing, branding and design, but how all of these modalities are normally applied made me deeply uncomfortable or made no sense to me. I had imitated their advice anyway and forced myself for years into uncomfortable, exhausting situations where I always had to assume a new identity to make it through. 

Once I accepted the truth of being autistic, I began looking at where pretending to be a neurotypical writer had been setting me up for failure. And now the task in front of me was to decide if I wanted my writing to become more than a thing I fiddled with during my daughter’s naps—or if I wanted to take on the gargantuan task of entering a Season of Tending.

This season could probably also be called the Season of Carrying Your Writing Into the World. It’s the time when your writing practice is in a supportive rhythm and it’s time to give your attention to connecting with people who need your writing most. This is the time when we writers have to start coming to terms with the reality that our work isn’t just about writing in romantic coffee shops or Italian villas—it is work to be a writer who creates something that others read. 

In a Season of Tending, we’re giving concentrated attention to marketing, branding, learning and relationship building. Depending on your aims, this can include a lot of learning, study and socially participating in new and different ways. This might be a season where you offer concentrated effort to choose one way to regularly share your writing online—is it a website, a newsletter like Substack or something else entirely? 

Once you have picked a single destination where all your writing is shared from, give yourself the proper amount of time to really, deeply understand that tool.

• If you are using a new website platform, it’s OK if it takes you several months to get up and running. We’ll wait for you to figure things out.

• Once you understand how to draft, format, insert images, write headlines and publish a piece, nothing can stop you.

• If you’re struggling with the basics, that’s OK. Take your time! Your writing is worth learning how to confidently use these tools.

Perhaps you need some help with heart-centered branding, the kind of design and stylization of your work that feels most reflective of you. This means:

• choosing which typefaces you want your newsletter to show up in;

• designing a header and choosing colors you want on your emails, your website or newsletter;

• deciding how you will give your work a visual tangibility alongside the wonderful prose you are sharing.

Maybe you already have the visual and branding things worked out. But how will you find and cultivate a readership? One of the most frustrating pieces about being a writer is that networking isn’t something we can get out of. I loathed this truth with every fiber of my being, and I fought it.

I didn’t want to go to random coffee houses and talk to strangers. Even if I go to a conference, I’m not instinctively drawn to be chummy with other people—I’m there to learn and tuck away what I want to dream about next. However, after a decade or more of this, I realized that how neurotypical people “network” and how I build relationships aren’t so far apart. It’s just that I do this work slowly and methodically so that I don’t burn out.

A Season of Tending prioritizes deeply nourishing relationships in diverse settings. This takes some experimenting for each writer to find the right combination of in-person versus online versus short-form dialogue versus forum commenting and so forth. There are so, so many ways to connect with other writers and readers. And it is energy-intensive work to find the places where you want to intentionally learn and share your work.

Season of Craft

Elevate and refine your writing! 

In organizing these Writing Seasons, I’ve reflected a lot on whether or not writers have a propensity to get “stuck” in a season when they ought to move on. For someone like me, whose degree is in journalism and whose career has been firmly in editorial and marketing roles, I think it’s possible that I stayed closer to the Season of Craft for longer than necessary, if only because it was the season I was most familiar with. As a career writer, I definitely have to be mindful that my good intentions of “honing my craft” don’t turn into a bunch of false purity tests—where I focus so much on polishing and tweaking and obsessing over commas that I forget that readers are here for an experience, not to make red-line marks on my writing. 

A productive Season of Craft is one where we sit up straight in Writing School and get serious about the integrity of our writing. It’s not the season for prolonged arguments about the merits of the Oxford comma because the comma, ultimately, isn’t what makes or breaks a great piece of writing for readers. How you hone, edit and polish your work matters. Plopping your writing down with a banal introduction followed by incomplete thoughts is fine when you’re in a Season of Musing. But the Season of Craft is a call to lift your writing up to a higher standard. 

Sure, I’m an editor, of course I’d say this. But I’ve easily read and edited hundreds of people’s writing, and I have an ear for attention spans and the beauty of sentence structure. And I know when writers lose people in their writing. If you’re ready to get serious about your writing, here are some of the most common places that writing needs the attention of a Season of Craft:

• Improve your relationship with adjectives (use them less)

• Practice showing what happened in a story, not telling about it like you’re talking to a brick wall

• Bring in the elements of sensory awareness (tell us how things taste, smell, look, sound and feel)

• Get relentless about your first sentence having a hook and then the first paragraph working like an engine revving

• Set your writing in something relatable and then weave in your personal experiences/reflections

• Take the seemingly relatable or predictable and work to make them surprising

• Learn how to work with complex pieces of research

• Improve how you interview subject matter experts so you don’t guide them toward an answer you’re looking for

• Format your work for tired, online eyes and take into account how digital reading taxes us all

Season of Rest

Set writing aside completely and focus on nourishing what’s tucked away inside yourself. 

This season was probably the hardest one for me to wrap my arms around. 

It’s the season where the answer to writing is “no” but you may not know why. 

It’s the season where “rest” is tending to all the parts of your life and self except the ones the world likes to applaud. It is a “no accolades” kind of inner productivity. It’s the season that I thought completely disqualified me as a writer and editor. Because who would trust an editor who stops working? So I kept trying to sneak in just a little bit of productivity and achievement, a few freelance clients here and there. I couldn’t let “no” really be the answer, that is, until my body fell apart and I had a dissociative break where I couldn’t remember how to edit for a full year.

The more I reflect on the Season of Rest, I realize that it’s tried to show up multiple times in the last 15 years, only I resisted it, thinking it was luring me into laziness or, worse, invisibility. I thought it was me not wanting to do hard things. But I don’t see it that way now that I have felt the nourishment a Season of Rest can bring, however involuntarily it may show up. In my Season of Rest, I let myself really play and say “yes” to things that had no functional or productive value. 

I worked daily with my senses and understanding my nervous system’s unique ways of telling me when I was ready to play or I needed a nap. I played a lot in my kitchen. I cycled through a bunch of sensory products—my collection of bath products, lotions and face creams felt like playing in a candy store. I sat in nature and talked to trees, which felt pretty odd at first, but over time I discovered trees provided the kindest sort of “listening ears.” I worried a lot about when I would be “better,” and I felt genuinely frightened that I may never be an editor or writer again. But these days I feel confident in saying that a Season of Rest is necessary and that writing will find each of us again, perhaps in new, surprising ways.

Seasons of Rest will look different for everyone, but my sense is that this season is a little bit terrifying for all of us. The invitation from a Season of Rest is to help us develop some broader perspective for what it means to be a writer. It wants us to build confidence in the cosmic creativity all around us and—instead of working and hustling—open to ask, “What is already here for me now?”

May Writing Seasons Grant You Permission

Let Writing Seasons give you permission to be the exact writer you are today. Permission to embrace a Season of Rest even when it seems like everyone around you is soaring to greater editorial heights. Permission to be enthusiastically unproductive and even playful. When people ask what you’re up to, tell them “I’m a writer on a break” or “I currently identify as a non-practicing writer.”

Here’s the thing: the moments of doubt, the unproductivity, the wandering, it’s all working together inside you to bring something new to the surface. We unnecessarily suffer as writers when we try to force or wish ourselves into a different season. I am here to tell you: whichever season you’re in is the season you’re supposed to be in. One day you may just find yourself ready for a Season of Tending or a Season of Craft, where you roll up your sleeves and feel the energy of your writing growing all around you. Or maybe you’ll find yourself in a Season of Musing, where the writing is finally coming to the surface, but messily and without a sense of self. The ebbs and flows are part of this packaged deal. 

The complexity of being a writer used to overwhelm me. The more advice I read, the more I felt like I was unqualified to be a writer in the first place. But these days, I know that’s just not true. I have an enduring confidence that wandering is the path, resting is the path, refining craft is the path and tending is the path. They’re all working together to bring something to life inside you. And I can’t wait to read what you have to say next.

Discover Your Writing Season: Take the Writing Seasons Quiz

Hundreds of writers just like you have unlocked their creative rhythm with the Writing Seasons Quiz, gaining insights that help them flow through their work with more ease and intention. Whether you're deep in the reflective winter of your writing or blooming with ideas in a summer of creativity, this quiz will show you how to embrace where you are—and travel with those changes as the seasons shift.

By knowing your season, you can align your writing goals, creative energy, and personal growth as a writer. Take the quiz and journey with me through each season of writing with newfound clarity.

Take the Quiz Here

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