What to Do With Your Writing in the Off Seasons
If you read my post "Set Your Writing Life to Your Own Rhythm" a few months back, then you already know I believe your creative life has a season for everything—including seasons that aren't about producing. Seasons where the well is ready to be watered, the energy is lower, and the instinct is to retreat rather than push forward. I made the case there for honoring those seasons rather than fighting them, and I still stand by every word of it.
Summer is one of those seasons for a lot of writers. Life gets louder. Schedules loosen or, paradoxically, get more chaotic. Kids are home, travel is calling, and the heat alone is making sitting at a desk feel like a small punishment. The creative energy that was running high in the spring starts to shift—and if you're not paying attention to your rhythms, you can spend the whole season feeling guilty about not writing instead of using the season for what it's actually good for.
At the same time, many of us have projects in progress. Books we're working on. Manuscripts we're committed to. Deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise, that don't pause just because we've entered a slow season. And the question I get—the one I've asked myself more than once—is: what do I actually do with my writing life when inspiration is low and forcing output feels like dragging something heavy uphill?
The answer, I've learned, is that a low season is not a lost season. There is real, meaningful work you can do for your writing projects that doesn't require you to be at full creative capacity. Work that actually serves the project—sometimes in ways that the high-output seasons don't have room for.
Here's what I reach for when I'm in an off season and I still want to keep things moving:
slow season (AKA “low season,” “off season”) - any period—a few days, a week, a month, or longer—when your creative energy is lower than usual and output feels forced rather than flowing. It is not writer's block, laziness, or loss of calling. It is a natural and recurring part of the creative cycle, as predictable as any other season once you learn to recognize it in yourself.
1. Research and organize your secondary sourcing and citations. If your project involves research—memoir, narrative nonfiction, historical fiction, anything with a factual backbone—a low season is the perfect time to do the gathering and organizing work that high-output seasons don't have patience for. Pull your sources together, annotate them, build the scaffolding. You'll thank yourself later.
2. List out ideas for stories, anecdotes, and illustrations. Even if you can't write them yet, you can capture them. Make a running list of the stories you want to tell, the moments you want to include, the examples that might serve a point you're trying to make. This kind of low-pressure ideation often surfaces material you wouldn't have found in a high-output sprint.
3. Mind map your story arc, structure, or character development. Memoir writers, fiction writers, and even narrative nonfiction writers benefit from stepping back and looking at the whole shape of the thing. A low season is a good time to ask big-picture questions: Where is this going? What does the reader need to know and when? Who is this character becoming? You're not drafting; you're thinking. That's still work.
4. Read in your genre or adjacent to it. Not to produce anything. Just to absorb. Let other writers remind you why the work matters and what it looks like when it's done well. A low season is actually an ideal time to fill the well with the kind of reading that high-output seasons crowd out.
5. Revisit your why. Go back to the original impulse behind the project. The note you wrote to yourself about why this book needed to exist. The reader who emailed you and said they needed exactly this kind of story. The moment the idea first arrived and why it felt important. Reconnecting with the reason before the craft is not wasted time. It's fuel for when the season turns.
6. Do some light revision of existing drafts. Not heavy structural work. Just read back through what you've already written. This keeps you in relationship with the project without demanding anything new from you, and it often reignites something you didn't know was still there.
7. Interview yourself about the book. Write out answers to questions as if someone asked you about your project. What is this book really about? What do I want a reader to feel at the end? What am I most afraid to say in it? This is generative without feeling like drafting, and it has a way of surfacing clarity that the writing itself sometimes can't reach.
8. Record voice memos. Talk through an idea, a scene, or a chapter out loud without the pressure of writing it down. I was working on an essay once and I just couldn’t find my entry point into the topic. While I was out running errands one day, a spark of something flared. I grabbed my phone and began recording all of what I was sensing, and I was later able to tease out the unique angle I would use to approach my topic and outline the essay’s structure. Sometimes the voice finds things the fingers can't. And sometimes hearing yourself say something out loud is the thing that tells you whether it's actually true.
9. Build your acknowledgments or dedication. This sounds small but it is quietly powerful. Reconnecting with the people who are part of why this book exists—the community around the work—surfaces emotion and motivation that can carry you back into the writing when you're ready.
10. Organize your workspace or writing environment. Physical order can create psychological readiness. Some writers find that clearing the desk, reorganizing their notes, or even just refreshing the space where they write is the thing that signals to the creative self that something new is coming. Don't underestimate it.
The off season is not your enemy. It is part of the rhythm—and if you work with it instead of against it, you may find that you arrive at your next high-output season better prepared, better organized, and more clear about where the project is going than you would have been if you'd forced your way through.
Which of these do you reach for when your creative energy is low? I'd love to know in the comments — and if you haven't read "Set Your Writing Life to Your Own Rhythm" yet, that's a good place to start before you head into your summer: jevonbolden.com/blog/2026/3/5/set-your-writing-life-to-your-own-rhythm.