The Winter of My (Writerly) Discontent by Poppy Gee

Q: How does winter affect you and your writing? 

Reading the other authors’ essays about the merits of winter-writing has convinced me that if I ever get stuck with my writing, it’s not my fault, it’s because I live in a place that has an almost year-long summer! 

In short, winter doesn’t affect my writing habits. I write every day, regardless of the season. The only days I don’t try to write are when I’m spending time with my family on holidays or on busy weekends. But even then I might work on something briefly. It keeps me sane. This is my desk (the kitchen table) and my cat, Venus, who is a very loyal writer's cat. 

The biggest challenge I face writing in winter are my cold hands. Old Australian houses are not built for the cold. We live in what’s called a Queenslander, a pretty, timber 1880s cottage that stands on high stilt legs. The idea is that air circulates underneath, and flood water drains away. The house is not insulated – it has thin glass windowpanes and ‘single skin’ walls which means it’s built with just one layer of timber palings. There are cracks in the floorboards that let in a draft. The cottage has a lovely wraparound veranda with a bull-nose roof which keeps it shaded in the summer. In winter, the month or two when temperatures drop, it’s colder inside than out. Kookaburras nest in the top of our chimney, so we’ve never lit the fire. On cold mornings I wrap a blanket around myself while I type. Inevitably, my exposed fingers feel icy and stiff and I have to make a hot drink to warm them up. Thanks for your compassion – mine is a very sad, moving story of winter hardship!

Writing has its own winter – the bleak, lonely days of rejection, failure and despair. This winter can come when you least expect it, but thankfully, like a summer storm, it doesn’t last. All writers experience the frustration of not using allocated writing time properly, or of shelving lengthy manuscripts that didn't work. There are the moments of envy as writer-pals soar to amazing heights, the sting of a bad review, and that first gut-punch for new authors when you realise that you won’t necessarily get invited to literary festivals, book conferences and author events. 

Writers learn to stave off the cold creep of writerly discontent. We learn that to write well, we must close the curtains on the pervasive bitterness of external elements that are beyond our control. It’s a difficult lesson to learn. 

The most devastating thing that has happened to me in my writing career was in 2013 when the publisher of my debut novel passed on my second manuscript. Their polite ‘no thanks’ took me by surprise. I was so embarrassed and ashamed I didn’t tell anyone, not even my husband. For months, when people asked me when my next book was coming out, I forced a smile and told them, ‘I’m still working away on it.’ 

The rejection felt like a mortifying failure. It was hard to tell friends and family the truth. Everyone was so excited for me when I signed that first contract. My mother’s group bought me a fancy passport wallet for the inevitable book tour I’d embark on. My dad asked me for the date for my USA launch in the hope he might be able to attend. I bought a stylish pink woollen coat that would be good for a New York winter, as the book was released in January. I soon learnt that most authors (and especially unknown Australian writers) don’t do international book tours. Instead, I organised my own book launch in a local bookshop and it was wonderful. 

I was naïve about the publishing industry and didn’t realise what a rollercoaster it was. I thought it was more like a first-class train that once you’ve got your seat, you can relax and write in peace while it cruises along. Wrong! There have many ‘writerly winters’ since then and I know there will be more to come. Hopefully I’m better prepared and more resilient. 

My pink coat did eventually go to New York, but not on a book tour. We went there a few years ago on a family holiday. By then the coat was a bit tight for me (d’oh!) but my teenage daughter wore it - it looked great on her!

To finish, here are some fantastic wintery thrillers that I have enjoyed lately.

Writing in a Winter Wonderland, by Catriona

 How does winter affect you and your writing?

Could be either - but it's CA

Scottish Me: I love winter. It's my favourite season. The light is beautiful. The shrubs in flower are all scented - daphne, witchhazel, forsythia . . . There's not a lot to do in the garden, so you never feel like you're scrambling. 

California Me: I love winter. It's my favorite season. The light is beautiful. How the frilly hat can there be flowers on lavendar and rosemary and gerbera and pelargonium and snapdragons . . . ? It's January! Where am I? Oh my God, I need to cut the grass.

But the nights are still dark. I can feel cold by being outside on frosty mornings and sparkling nights (and by not putting the heating on: it's 57F in my house right now). I can light the fire and read, eat soup, wear an extra jumper, wake up with my breath clouding and the tip of my nose pink. (What a failure of an immigrant, eh?)

As far as writing goes, winter has been my easiest and best time for the last sevenish years. I started doing Nanowrimo because 50K words in November left three weeks of December to bang out another 30K and get to Christmas with a first draft of a 80K Last Ditch Motel novel. Then two weeks' holiday, which you hard-working Americans can pry out of my slightly-greasy-from-all-the-turkey-leftovers hand (but know that you made Baby Jesus cry), and I've got about the same amount of time to knock it into shape for an end of February hand-in.

Baby Neil at Christmas back in Scotland,
where our house was proper cold

I couldn't write anything else in my oeuvre like that, but the Last Ditch books are contemporary (no research to speak of), largely peopled by characters I already know (fewer names to make up) and, also, because they're fast and funny*, they suit being written at breakneck speed while I go "Wheeeeeee!" and being edited in a tsunami of post-it notes while I go "Whoaaaaaaa!" 

*Don't take my word for it. SCOTZILLA just got the series's fifth nomination for the Lefty award for best humorous mystery.

And I don't even have that late November stick in the spokes that uses up a working weekend. No, my fork in the socket doesn't come till late January.  There's a Scottish holiday on the 25th, that has heretofore taken up a lot of editing time. Burns Night is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, our national bard, and we get together to eat haggis, drink whisky and claret, read poems and make toasts. (It's a bit like a Passover Seder, with haggis as the gefilte fish and 18thC Scots poetry as the Haggadah.)

One night? you say. That doesn't seem like much time. Huh. Well, the thing is . . . for the last fifteen years I've had to make my own haggis, over the course of two days, three if you count the roundtrip to Corti Brothers in Scaramento to get suet and a big chunk of lamb's liver. I can't tell you how bonkers it is to make your own haggis. No one in Scotland makes their own haggis. It's like making your own cornflakes. But one of the traditional ingredients is illegal here. (I'm not telling you. Suet and liver are in there. Do you really want to know?)

All set for the supper last weekend

However, my mum told me on the phone yesterday that Macsween's - haggis makers to the stars - have announced a USA-compliant haggis for January 2026. Gentle Reader, I have grated my last lump of boiled lamb's liver. 

I mean, food regulations might a quaint memory by then but otherwise, next winter, I'll be picking up a haggis in a shop and throwing it casually into a pot to steam like the rest of civilised society, freeing up hours of editing time for Last Ditch Book 9. My only reservation is . . . imagine if my US pals don't like Macsween's haggis and demand a return to home-made? If that happens, I'll tell them the tale of meeting Jo Macsween out for dinner one night just up the road from a bookshop where I was doing an event. I told her about my yeartly woes and, after one of the booksellers nipped back to pickup a copy of The Macsween Haggis Bible, she wrote this in it:

 

just like Mr Kellog would have done in similar circs. Truly, no one makes their own haggis, including from next year - me.

Cx

A storm's a-coming. Can't ignore it. by Eric Beetner

How does winter affect you and your writing?

In live in Southern California about a 4 minute drive over the hill to the beach. I play beach volleyball all year round. I haven’t seen snow on my front lawn in the 33 years I’ve lived in L.A. I grew up with actual seasons, both in the midwest and New England. Brutal cold winters, blizzards, shoveling out the car to get to work or classes. I know the suffering. I also know the coziest place on earth is to be warm by a fire while the wind howls outside. And there is no place better to read a good book.

I’ve never understood the idea of a ‘beach read’. If you’re at the beach, be at the beach. Don’t read a book.

But if you’re trapped inside on a blustery winter day? Put the hot cocoa on the stove and crack that spine.

You all know about the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod, right? It’s the tradition of trading books with loved ones on Christmas, and then reading together on cold nights when the sun sets early. Having just been to Iceland last year, I can tell you they are a happy and well-adjusted culture and we could learn a lot from them.

Now then, how does this lack of a true winter affect my writing? Not at all. Sure, my office gets cold. I write in what is essentially a box built into my garage so it has no insulation and whatever temperature the garage is, that’s what I’m writing in. So yes, it gets cold. But I have a space heater for that, and nice slippers for my feet.

In summer, I wear shorts and no shoes because in the afternoon the sun hits the garage door and I end up working in a walk-in oven. I have seasons in my office, at least.

What does affect my writing, I’ve learned recently, is the larger world around me. The third book in my Carter McCoy trilogy is due this year (release is April 2026) and my logline pitch way back when I sold the series is changing.

I’d started outlining, plotting, finding obstructions for the hero, set pieces for the action, a fitting end to the whole trilogy. Then the election happened. The idea of who the bad guys are shifted for me. The story I had been planning on suddenly didn’t seem right. There were larger evil forces in the world. I started re-writing.

I’m not interested in writing a polemic. I don’t want to deviate from the world I’ve created in the first two books. But a storm hit and I had to react. If a blizzard snowed me in for weeks on end, or floodwaters began to rise outside my window, it might start to affect the book. Well, a deluge of bad news began falling every day and it shows no signs of slowing. So now the antagonists in the new book will reflect real-life horrors. I don’t want to make caricatures, or straw men, but I don’t want to ignore the real world. It also makes for a great plot driver for the book. These are some bad dudes, after all. I never try to be political in my work, but I have a point of view and I don’t want to ignore the chill outside my door.

So even if the weather doesn’t affect the words going down on the page, the world does. But typing will keep me warm, at least in my soul.  

Winter, the most misunderstood season

 

How does winter affect you and your writing?

If you’re a writer, you are familiar with the fact that the seasons are metaphors for the stages of life. Winter is the time of scarcity, a time of stasis, a time for silence, and a time for reflection. The repetition in that last sentence is both rhetoric and an echo of Ecclesiastics. With the dying of the light comes reckoning, and we are uncomfortable with it, but for reasons I think most people ignore.

 

I’d argue that we have misinterpreted the circadian rhythms of life and creativity.

 

When we were children, winter was a wonderland of snowball fights, sledding, and truancy from school when snowstorms hit. We appreciated the warmth because we had experienced the cold. There was hot cocoa, a fireplace, perhaps, and memories. We were ignorant of the menace of time.

 

I don’t dismiss that with the dying of the light, the onslaught of prolonged darkness has a psychological and physiological effect on us. I wish to point out something we have forgotten - the subtle majesty of vibrancy of life that accompanies the season. Yes, it is slower and starker, which is what makes winter so undeniable. We associate death and dying with winter, but I say that is a misunderstanding. Winter starts out white and bright with snow and then becomes dull and gray with slush. It is beauty that ages dramatically in front of us, and that is disconcerting. We see change in other seasons, but it is comforting. Winter is undeniable. Odd, is it not that white is the color of purity and innocence, while black represents evil? In Asian cultures, white is the opposite, the color of death and mourning. Black is black because it contains all the colors. White is the absence of color. Ahab’s nemesis is a white whale.

 

I suspect our difficulty with winter has to do with stillness. We don’t know what to do with ourselves when we experience solitude. We don’t want to admit that certain things we face alone. American culture values activity and results, something we associate with youth and success, however that is defined. The connotation is speed is valued. Age and wisdom are seen as slower, less relevant, and passé. The lack of frenzy denotes weakness and lack of relevance. It’s in the still point that we are most uncomfortable with the season because Nature conspires against us, and forces us to seek shelter from the literal and metaphysical elements. We are isolated and the terror is our own silent scream. Winter makes us feel alone, and we have to make sense of our experiences, in our own way and words. 

 

T.S. Eliot wrote, “At the still point, there the dance is.”

 

For me, winter is my most productive season because I explore the longer arcs of my ideas. I can see the water moving beneath the frozen ice. I try not to take offense when someone says I write genre fiction. No, I write the literature of struggle. At the surface, a mystery is a puzzle piece and the end-game is justice. The appeal is we implicitly know life is unfair, and we know damn well that the arc of justice doesn’t bend because gravity wins; it is bent through sacrifice and persistence. The battle is long, ferocious, and bitter because conformity and self-interest must be overcome. Think of it this way: corporations and governments have acted like organized crime, and they were rewarded for it until people have had enough.

 

Each and every season is a memo: Tempus fugit. Therein is the choice. We can chase all the external validations: the big house, the fat bank account, and checkmark the items we are told we should have: spouse, children, etc. In my experience, the currency here isn’t cash; it’s time. The irony is with success comes the struggle to maintain it in the Hobbesian ecosystem. There is a difference between what you need and what you think you need. As a former nurse, I can tell you there is nothing more terrifying than seeing and hearing someone dying who regrets that they spent too much time working and so little time with their loved ones. The common denominator, the true democracy, is Time.

 

Rather than see the spare landscape as a menace, seize the day. If you are a writer, pick up the pen or touch the keyboard. Write that story, decide on the right word, in the right place. Pay yourself first. Find the current under the river of ice. There is a current and a heartbeat there. It is better to find your song and sing than scream into the abyss. You are doing yourself an act of compassion.

 

Kindness and compassion to yourself and others knows no season.

 

Baby, It's Cold Outside, by Angela

 

 

How does winter affect you and your writing?

Sister Souljah wrote a book called The Coldest Winter Ever, a classic in the Black community. This is not the winter she meant, but I’m guessing plenty of folks would prefer her version at this point. It’s cold! That’s a bit of an understatement. There was a time where only we Northerners understood the brutality, joy, and yes, beauty of the frigid winter months that could start as early as October and linger well into April, sometimes even May.

 I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and there was once a surprise blizzard on Mother’s Day. We Clevelander’s never batted an eye. We just added a hoodie to our Sunday’s best and kept it moving. That’s what you do when you’re born and raised in a place that spends at least three months a year masquerading as Alaska. But now, the South has entered the chat and I dare say they are not loving this single digit air temperature mixed with freezing white stuff falling from the sky. It’s called snow, y’all. Don’t panic—it’ll be gone by the time your morning grits are finished cooking. But since we’re all here, lets talk about the upside of temperatures too cold for man or beast; more writing time!

Am I right? Sure, writing’s a great four-season (for those that have them) pastime, hobby, or job, wherever you are on your writing journey. But there’s something about sitting in my favorite writing space, looking out onto the world outside my window—shrouded in a blanket of snow, the sound of wind ripping through the naked branches of frozen trees, mixed with the occasional rumble of a snow plow—that just calls me to put more words on the page.

Maybe, it’s because, although I am a Cleveland native, I’m a bit squeamish about actually braving the elements; I prefer the picturesque view from indoors, thank you very much. And you can only watch so much reality TV. Don’t judge me. So, once I’ve watched Shay and Amara’s friendship implode one too many times, or solved yet another Dateline crime, I can lock myself in my little office, fling open the curtain, turn on Chopin radio (my current favorite station) and escape into the warmth of all those lovely words waiting to be born.

Sure, I write in the warmer months as well, but too often, it’s with half a mind on getting outside, or worrying about what I’m missing by not being outside. And as a thriller writer, you must agree the sun beaming through your window doesn’t exactly set the mood, not for writing, that is. So, summer writing tends to start later, which means ending later, which means less sleep, groggy days, and excuses. Lots and lots of excuses, that typically end with a promise to write more on the weekend. But then there’s BBQs and trips to the park, family vacations, and cold drinks with umbrellas, and guests. Fun fact: Clevelanders don’t visit each other during the winter, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and maybe New Years’. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but only a small one.

Winter, on the other hand, is a thriller writer’s dream. I find it so much easier to escape to the lonely cabin in the woods where a maniacal killer awaits when the world seems wrapped in a cocoon of silence, the night comes faster, the bitter cold biting into your skin carries its own menace.

Also, I know I’ll be undisturbed because everyone is asleep by 7:00 o’clock.

I do have my own cabin in woods. It lives in my writer’s brain. And yes, it does look a lot like the cabin in Stephen King’s Secret Window, Secret Garden. It’s always winter there. There’s an old potbelly stove, a fireplace, and it’s full of books and a cat. And the only people there are me and all the characters that wander in and out. Some sit and stay a while, while some are just passing through. But it’s here that I can hear their voices the clearest. Some are evil, some are good. Some live. A lot of them die right there at the tips of my fingers. The cabin is always there just waiting for my arrival. But I have to say, it seems a little easier to get to from October through April when the world seems to be, if not in a deep sleep, at least a light doze.

Maybe if I were a romance writer, I’d find the cool rainy spring days and hot summer nights, the perfect inspiration for a love scene. But for me the short gray days and long cold nights, egg me on to one goal. More words. 

 

Photo by Dimitri Kolpakov on Unsplash