Reaping What We Sow: Writing and the Cycle of Harvest
Every autumn, a new beginning, and some kind of ending...
Happy Full Moon, folks! I’m always shocked that another month has already passed, but also, this one felt quite packed for me, so here we are—the cycle of time passing, seasons changing. Another autumn is upon us.
My husband David and I have been talking about how much we like fall as a season – how as we get older, it feels like the reward of surviving the heat and often excesses of summer. As teachers, we enjoy going back to school, getting to know our students, falling into the autumnal routines of pulling out sweaters and heavy blankets, getting up in the darkening mornings (well I don’t enjoy the dark, per se), and snuggling up to feel cozy.
So I often associate the moon in September (often called the Harvest Moon) with new beginnings: a new school year, a new set of professional goals, and often, a new writing adventure.
Since I often have summers off, summer is often a big writing season for me. It’s also a season when much of the publishing world goes on vacation or goes dormant, with much action from publishers and agents drawing to a slow crawl in August, only to pick back up with a vengeance in September.
In September, the last few years, I’ve done a lot of querying, sending out manuscripts, and applying to things.
This September, as I wait for concrete news on the Taiwan book, I’ve been a bit dormant as a writer. I just finished a new draft of a novel (a fun, silly, summery novel) in August, and I’ve been dragging my feet on digging in to the second draft of it—a major revision, where a lot of final decisions about the book will be made.
So as we celebrate this Harvest Moon, a time when farmers would traditionally harvest and gather and reap the bounty of the season and take stock of their ability to survive the winter, I want to think about beginnings and endings.
Also, I remember the two Harvest Moons I spent during my 13 months living in Taiwan, over a decade ago, where we celebrated mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) with mooncakes, pomelos (the best citrus ever, like a honeyed grapefruit), bbq-ing on rooftops and in local city parks, and eating dumplings. My first Mid-Autumn Festival in Taipei was at the very beginning of my adventure there, and I met a lot of new friends with wide-eyed wonder, while my second Mid-Autumn Festival was near the end of my stay, and I celebrated it with the most delightful tight-knit crew of girlfriends I could have asked for. Beginnings. Endings. Mooncakes! BBQ!
Thinking about writing beginnings and endings, I pose this question today: how can we as writers turn a page, start a new season of our writing lives, and sow new seeds so that we’ll have something wonderful to harvest, whenever that harvest moon in our writing lives may come?
Here are some tips from the trenches!
Starting New Projects
Starting something new is always the hardest thing for me. I tend to mull things over for a long time before getting started, which is sometimes helpful, because then I have a clear pathway forward, and sometimes unhelpful, because then I worry a lot about my first rocky attempt being a sad and terrible version of the perfection that’s in my head. Be that as it may, we must get on with it if we want to write things! Here are some things I try:
Take myself on a date to a café or lovely writing space (libraries can be great non-home spaces if you need a change of pace) and set a timer: I tell myself I can have a coffee and a cookie if I just write for 45 minutes. And then I see what happens, away from the distractions of home.
I pick one character, one scene, one single interaction to write at a time. Sometimes with a new project, the entire point of a scene or a chapter is, “Who are these people??” and then something either HAPPENS, which is exciting, or it doesn’t, and they walk around each other a bit, and then I decide that I need to yank the tablecloth out from underneath one of the characters, because without uncertainty, change, or conflict, there can be no drama. And THEN something happens! Also, lately, I’ve been trying to make myself laugh as I write, which I’ve found is infinitely more entertaining than not trying to make myself laugh.
Take a memory from my own life, and figure out a way to cannibalize it or package it up so that some emotional truth of it can happen for a character, and perhaps they understand it or experience it differently than I did. This happened in two instances in the recent summery novel draft I alluded to, which I’ll summarize extremely briefly to avoid spoilers: a) a counselor from my camp created a homemade sauna with tarps and hot rocks on a camping trip when I was 14, which was super fun, and b) I got separated a friend from a group playing manhunt once and the game ended and they completely forgot about us. HA! So armed with these interesting and silly (and not totally insubstantial memories), I added them to the lives of my characters to make something interesting happen for them—a much spicier, more dramatic, and more conflict-ridden conclusion to both adventures than their real-life counterparts, but exploring these memories again and weaving them into the tapestry of fiction was actually super enjoyable for me as a writer.
Do you notice a theme here? Having recently coughed up a novel draft, I feel committed to the idea that when you are starting something new, the writer should really be having fun. And then the reader too, will have fun, when they come to a piece full of surprise and delight.
But of course, you’re not done after a first draft, unless you’re Ann Patchett (see my dear friend Jill’s Substack for a great rumination on this!). So….. let’s coach ourselves in…
Diving into a Revision
I’m currently trying to psyche myself up to dive into a revision, so I’ll let you know how this goes next month, LOL. But here are some strategies I’ve been working with:
Print the whole thing, read it, and appreciate what is working. Inevitably, with my new project, I got some ideas about what needs changing, where scenes are missing, where chapters could be trimmed way down because I was writing pages of “who the heck are these people” before the conflict emerged, and some character deepening is needed. But I also appreciated that the story had an arc, and I could lean into this macro shape and use it for emotional and moral support as I flesh out the details in Draft 2.
Take some notes about what needs to happen. I have two characters in the new novel that need to be explored a bit more. They are semi-main characters, not POV characters, but extremely central to the conflicts and relationships of the protagonist and other POV characters. So they need more rich backstory, fuller, rounder lives, and even if that thinking or writing never makes it into the book, it will make what of them is in the book that much more interesting.
Dive in to chapter 1 and see what happens! I did this last week, and it went okay, though I felt rusty. I need to do it again. Probably tomorrow. JUST DO IT. Truly. I will let you know what happens as I keep diving in and pretending that I trust myself until I start actually trusting myself with this next pass. Thanks for the support. Love you guys.
Finishing a Project
This I’ve done a couple of times, and whether it is polishing up an essay or article for publication, calling a book manuscript finished, or getting it ready to send out to agents or publishers, I can say this: for me, finishing things is ridiculously anticlimactic. I add a final comma, I write a last scene, I move something around so that the ending is punchier, and then…. I stop. And sometimes feel elated, and sometimes feel exhausted, and always feel like, “that’s it?” So when you’re not sure if you’re done, consider this:
Congratulate yourself and set it aside for 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month before doing anything else to it. Sometimes I look back at an ending 1-30 days later and know exactly how to make it pop better.
Think about a final image, phrase, sentence, or lyrical thought you want to leave your reader with. How do you want them to feel when they’re done reading? Read the ending, or hand it off to someone else. What’s the reaction?
Once you’re TOTALLY done with something, take just one more pass for commas, typos, and random long wordy sentences, or whatever your verbal tics are when you write. What is the one thing you’d like to cut before it’s published under your byline?
Sending Work Out to Editors/Agents/Deciders
This work can be thankless, rejection-filled, and tedious. So I recommend a lot of great music, snacks, dancing around one’s apartment, and rewarding oneself with a great trashy TV show or a truly spectacular sunset after an afternoon of submitting. Here are some tips for getting it done:
Get your query letter locked and loaded! Show it to a bunch of readers, especially if it’s for an agent (an editorial pitch can also benefit from other eyes, but a lit mag cover letter is just perfunctory).
My friend Leland recommends erring on the side of very short and tight query letters, with your bio UNDERNEATH your signature, so it makes the letter look even shorter. You want to have a sharp, pithy tone that is similar to the book’s tone, and leave the reader on a cliff hanger. The query letter should be the amazing movie trailer version of the book, so main conflict only – don’t get lost in the weeds.
I spend one day making lists of people to submit to (journals, magazines, editors, agents), and then actually submit to them on a different day, when my energy is fresh. That way I feel prepared AND can spend my good energy on the query, article pitch, or submitting process itself. Also, I make a spreadsheet, because it’s good to keep track of these things, and try to limit my submitting time to 1-2 hours, and then go off and do something way more fun. And get back to writing the next day, so I don’t feel like I’ve become someone’s secretary.
Try to work with all of the feelings when the inevitable rejections roll in! I have almost had snarky moments of replying in hurt tones to editors, but NEVER DO THIS. One time, a Wired editor rejected my article pitch on the same day The Guardian accepted it, saying, it’s just not relevant to interview someone “because he’s cool” and in my head, I was all like, “Well someone else wants the article, so how do you like ‘DEM APPLES?!” but never never never do that, because we all want to be good people, and also, I want to pitch that Wired editor again. Love you guys at Wired!
I wish you all cozy sweaters, writing inspiration, snuggles with family and furry friends, and soothing hot (or spicy) beverages! Let’s enjoy where we have come in our lives and creative work, and write the next chapter together.
Full Moon Fun Facts:
Since the Harvest Moon is the one closest to the autumn equinox, this full moon was typically one that farmers would use to extend evening working hours—hence the name, harvest moon. Since for a few days before and after the full moon, a bright moon would rise shortly after sunset, and since it was so close to the equinox, the moon would rise at almost the same time each night, as opposed to much later on subsequent days at different seasons of the year.
Why do full moons look bigger, brighter, and more orange when they’re close to the horizon? It’s the “moon illusion,” or a visual illusion that the moon looks closer or bigger than when it’s up in the sky, even though it has been proven by scientists that such a fact (even in photographs) is simply not the case. The moon looks yellower or more orangey at the horizon because the light travels a longer distance through the earth’s atmosphere to reach our eyes, filtering out blue wavelengths and showing the moon in longer, redder, light waves. The moon is magical, right? (More here on the moon illusion)
Once I learned that Rosh Hashanah happens on the New Moon, I started to wonder if other Jewish holidays happen on the Full Moon, and BAM! I found out (just in the last month, after almost 40 years of being alive as a not-very-observant cultural Jew) that Passover happens every year on the full moon, as does Sukkot, the holiday after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that is often overlooked as it has a bit less fanfare.
Sukkot refers to the time when Jews wandered the desert after being freed from Egypt, and as such, there is festive celebrating in small huts called sukkahs that are meant to evoke temporary shelters covered in palm fronds or other flimsy roof coverings. (the sukkah is a small hut built during Sukkot, not exactly the same word, I’m such a bad Jew for not knowing that until now!) A sukkah is somewhere between a tent, a hut, and a flimsy shed, and meals are eaten in the sukkah, along with lots of celebration – but not without a sense of insecurity and appreciating the transience of life and the vulnerability of comfort. (How Jewish, amiright?)
I remember my first Sukkot during my freshman year of college, when I was invited by friends to a Hillel celebration of “Hookah in the Sukkah” and suddenly found an extremely welcoming Jewish community of students who was ready to accept me if I wanted to learn more about my family’s cultural and religious traditions. It was very cool.
Full Moon Writing Prompt:
Harvest reminds me of endings, while Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and back to school season reminds me of beginnings, planting new seeds, digging into new projects. Let’s explore the tension between these two things.
List 3 beginnings in your life and 3 endings, as well as 3 memorable moments from Septembers of years past.
From this list, write for 5-10 minutes about one of these moments, digging into all of the details and harvesting knowledge from your memory! This can take the form of fiction, creative nonfiction or memoir, essay, poetry, or truly rambling stream-of-consciousness thought. Just go for it! See what you harvest!
Loved this one, Kim! So many good tips and ideas and ruminations here. As I'm starting to noodle around with a novel idea, I will def be looking back on this for some wisdom. <3