Writing in your season

It was not winter when I first started writing Redemption, but it was winter when I finished it. Given that the entire story takes place in the winter, writing about frigid temperatures during the summer (which, where I live, admittedly, is not as hot as most places, but can get annoyingly humid) had me in a state of writer's block. I didn't wish for winter, despite my love for the season. And perhaps it's a psychological thing, but I found it easier to write when the weather outside matched what was happening in my story -- and the more I thought about that, it went deeper than the weather.

I'm trucking through writing the first draft of my Redemption sequel, named Salvation, and the themes of this story deal with loss, with figuring out a life that you no longer recognize, coming to terms with your reality, and consistently trying to be a version of yourself that never quite seems within reach, the constant feeling of needed to do more, but never quite knowing what "more" entails.

For many reasons, I'm going through a similar "season". I won't wax poetic here, but it's got me thinking about how we, as writers, write what we know. Even if that knowledge is subconscious. We write to escape, and we write so we can escape.

The winter made it more immersive and perhaps the short days fit the darkness of the story and helped me get into that space mentally where I could write it all down a little better, to get the words out of my head and onto the page to finally be free. And just like in the narrative, where there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the spring came eventually. And maybe that's true for all of us, there's a spring that we're all waiting on in some form or another.