Though spring is a fine season for outdoors adventures, you don’t have to abandon your writing completely. If you want to keep writing, improve your skills and make progress, try these spring activities for writers to stay consistent and enjoy writing your stories.
Related reading: How to use seasons in your writing – Summer story ideas
What if writing is completely new to you?
The rest of this post is going to assume that you have some experience in writing, but what if you don’t? Writing is definitely my favourite creative activity because it’s so accessible and you don’t need to purchase anything to be able to do it. Yes, you could buy fancy pens and beautiful notebooks, but chances are you already have some pens, some paper and some writing software.
If you’ve never written fiction before, I don’t recommend jumping straight into writing a novel, because the whole novel writing process actually requires you to have a handle on multiple different skills. It’s also less of a fun spring activity and more of a huge project that will take months or years out of your life.
These writing exercises will teach you all kinds of important writing skills, but even if your goal isn’t to ever write a novel or even full stories, they’re still fun and useful to do. Try them out!
But if you’ve already got some experience in writing fiction and you’d like to start working on your first novel, I’d love to have you inside my free Start Your Novel course. It should only take you five days to go through, so you won’t have to wait until summer to start writing that novel.
Start from fresh
Got your laptop full of unfinished manuscripts that’ll probably never go anywhere? Are your existing story ideas feeling staler than stale? It might be time for spring cleaning.
I suffer from seasonal depression four times per year (go figure) so I can’t always sympathise with people being full of life and new ideas as soon as the sun comes out, but that’s precisely why getting rid of old baggage can be a good idea. Stop worrying about it and let it stay in the past.
Anyone who’s been writing for a while has had story ideas that initially felt exciting but that never seemed to really go anywhere. Maybe you started writing and the beginning felt great, but then it fell flat after a few dozen pages, or maybe it never even got anywhere from the idea stage because you didn’t have a plot. And what I’m saying to you here is that it’s OKAY to let them go.
Get new story ideas
If you’d like an easy way to find new story ideas, you could get this free story idea workbook or you could check out the links in this post with loads of fresh story ideas.
You might also want to try out some new writing prompts, and that’s exactly where my writing prompt collections come in.
Declutter your writing systems
It’s hard to let go of those story ideas when they’re haunting you left and right, so doing some decluttering could be a good idea.
Go through your computer’s folders and your Google Docs files, and then delete everything that feels deleteable and put everything else in a special archive folder where you can find them if needed without them cluttering up your regular workspace.
If you’re anything like me and you like writing by hand, it might also be a good time to go through those notebooks and see what you should save and what you should recycle instead.
In the future, if you want an easy way to keep your novel-writing organised, this video explains how I make it work without complex systems or software subscriptions.
The daily habit that changes your writing
You could start this habit at any time of the year, but with so many new things around you, why not start it in spring?
Here’s the deal: Your writing becomes better when you stop saying things the way that everyone else is saying. To get into the habit of saying things like you see them, you should make observations every day and write them down. Did your neighbour walk like he’s got a secret in his left shoe? Were the fingers of your daughter’s pediatrician short and chubby like he should have been too young to practice medicine? Write it all down.
When we’re writing fiction, we’re not usually surrounded by our story’s setting. We have to make it up. When you learn to make these observations and actually write them down, it’ll be easier to recall them when you actually need them. Dickens didn’t become the master of writing about London by sitting at his desk – he walked for hours every day and made observations.
Yes, you could write these notes on your phone – I mean that’s what the Notes app was made for – but personally I prefer carrying a little notebook with me. It doesn’t just make me look cool and mysterious, but it stops me from getting distracted by emails and Etsy seller notifications when I should be thinking about writing.
Do it right now. Look around you, or go to the window. Notice something small that only you could notice, in the unique way that you see the world. Don’t worry about it sounding good or interesting – quality will follow quantity, and this practice is for your own personal benefit.
Go and describe nature
Don’t let spring go to waste, go outside and experience it. Take your notebook with you.
Descriptions work the best when you know how to employ all the senses. What does it smell like when you step outside? What do the migrating birds sound like when they return home? What colour dust is staining your new sneakers? What do the new, tiny leaves feel like when you reach up to a tree branch?
I don’t know what you might taste in the nature this time of the year, but there are always seasonal treats that you could describe in your writing, even if they’re not exactly sprouting in your backyard.
You don’t need to just passively observe things when you go outside – you can create an entire scene around you! What are people doing? What is the rabbit on the field thinking? Make people do things, and then write it down. Start creating worlds where stuff happens.
Try something new
Although I personally feel like autumn is the time of new things, why not put a new step into your writing by trying something new this spring?
Here are some ideas:
- read a book you know nothing about
- read a book in a genre you don’t normally read
- write somewhere you’ve never written before, even if it’s just your friend’s house
- borrow a book from a new library
- try a new hobby and then write about it
- ask a friend or a family member to tell you something you don’t already know
- watch an episode of a TV show in a language you don’t speak
- go visit a new town, take notes and then write a scene that takes place there
If you’ve been stuck in a rut all winter, these spring activities should get you back into the creative flow. Which one will you try next? As always, I’ll be happy to add more ideas to this post if it gets any traction and people actually need these ideas 😊
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
