Write while it's hot
Why summer days are the best time to collect inspiration and have your next big idea
Every time I step out of the house at the moment, I feel like I’ve just got into a hot car.
What was a sizzling but straightforward heatwave has given way, in recent weeks, to a tricky humidity, one that you wouldn’t guess at from the gloomy sky. I am forever wearing the wrong thing.
Not all summers are easy to love. They have a way of puncturing routine that can be both refreshing and inconvenient. As far as writing goes, the heat can be detrimental. Temperatures above a certain level affect our thinking, learning and even our word choices: politicians tend to use shorter, simpler words when speaking on hot days.
But because of this same disruptive quality, I think the summer is also a time that is ripe with possible sources of inspiration. We notice things diverging from the norm, see and do things later into the evening, visit new places. Hot days may not be the best for sitting at a desk, but they are some of the best for gathering raw materials.
When I look back through a lot of the fiction I’ve written, it’s set in the summer. My novel draft takes place in a London heatwave. My short story ‘Desk Flowers’ is a relic of the 2020 summer when restrictions briefly lifted and the world felt like an imitation of normal.
Other seasons can be equally inspiring, but it’s the heat that makes things uncomfortable and boundaries a little bit blurred; the free time and long days that lead inexorably to drama. The Atonement of it all.
Sometimes summer can be something of a spoiler. Like everyone else, I’m reading The Safekeep right now. From the early pages, the haze of summer surrounding the Dutch countryside house in which it is set almost gives the game away. As readers, we recognise elements of summer as little hints of what might be about to happen.
And things do happen. In fiction, lazing in the heat or boredom by the pool is a only a prelude to action, almost a prerequisite. See chapter 24 of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which Angel Clare is realising the extent of his passion for Tess.
The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon.
Everything is heavy and stultified and we, the reader, are well aware that this means something is about to happen. Where spring might be about new opportunities presenting themselves, summer is about taking them. Grabbing them before the harvest is over.
Another reason why the writer’s brain might find rich pickings in the sunshine is the way the weather reminds us of childhood summers, with all the hazy, nostalgic, near-mythical importance we ascribe to them in retrospect. Many great writers are acutely aware of the power of this instinctive memory - both as rich scene-setting and as narrative structure.
Recalling her own youth in the Florida Keys, Karen Russell writes about small moments of independence in the summer between middle and high school.
One afternoon, we ate soggy KFC biscuits in the rain on a wealthy, empty private beach just off the Rickenbacker Causeway, skipping the tollbooths and pushing our bikes through the sea grapes, our leg muscles still spasming from climbing the steep bridge that connects mainland Miami to the island of Key Biscayne. This was our longest ride; we had traveled, at most, 11 miles from our homes. I’m not sure why buying fried chicken with our parents’ money and eating it on the damp sand felt like the epitome of freedom, but it did.
It is interesting to see here how she finds ways to pull the reader into her own memory. First there’s the precision of the prose, the detail of it. But then there’s the way she invokes a specific feeling, that first taste of freedom, to which the audience can relate. The specific ephemera of her own Florida outings become, by some alchemy, the symbols of a universal experience of adolescence.
Grown-up summers don’t always feel so momentous. The commute is worse than normal and you get to use the garden, or sit outside a café. But I would like to make a case that there is still so much worth observing, and argue that you should try to gather the details of warm days as though they are kindling, to see you through what comes afterwards.
Write while the city is emerging and bursting, when you can feel a wave of cool air as you walk past the entrances to offices and shops. Write when you can smell everything with five times its usual potency: fruit, sweat, dust, beer, chlorine, milk on the turn.
Write while the grass is dry enough to sit on, the days long enough to walk back from the pub along a country road while it’s still light.
I am not advising packing yourself away into a room and focusing, or sticking to goals. That is what November is for. Live your summer of friends and after-work drinks and camping; of tetchy office conversations and mosquito bites and delayed flights. Missing out on any of this, all that full-fat life, would be a missed opportunity. Everything, as they say, is copy.
What I am advocating is snatching, when you can, a chance to write down impressions about these things. Maybe even thinking about a new idea and sketching it out when you find yourself up unexpectedly early with the light, or late with the heat.
Write a poem in the back cover of your beach read. Ask the hotel for some letter paper. Keep notes on your phone.
Whatever you do, write while it’s hot.
With apologies for my hiatus and thanks for reading today’s post, here’s a small round-up of opportunities that have caught my eye lately. This will be the new format of the newsletter, with a short essay on writing followed by the links.
Independent publisher The Emma Press is open now for submissions. This is one of the widest-ranging windows they’ve had for a while, accepting several forms short story collections, novellas and creative non-fiction. Closing on 15 August.
The theme for the next Bright Wall/Dark Room issue is ‘Teachers’. Send critical essays about films on that topic by 15 August. The pay is $50.
Great to see a new free entry contest on the landscape! The Nero New Writers Prize is for a standalone short piece of either fiction or non-fiction. Entries close 29 August.
Mslexia’s fiction competitions are now open until 22 September.
I am hosting a new writing group in London! It’s geared towards non-fiction writers, especially substackers. Check it out for more information.