A Writing Season by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

I don’t know about you, but I find writing comes more naturally on a cold winter’s day than in the oppressive heat of summer. It is difficult to imagine Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf anachronistically tapping away on their respective laptops whilst sitting on a beach in shorts, sipping margueritas. Much more writerly to be wrapped up in one’s quilted smoking jacket, or staring wanly out a frosted window, communing with the muse and batting away witticisms and elegant metaphors faster than they can come at you.

Maybe it is because I’m housebound, but however much it is enhanced by circumstances, my naturally hibernatory, eremitic nature is far more comfortable writing from under the duvet in the winter. In the warmer weather, I’m reminded far too often of the outside lives other people with normal, healthy pursuits are leading.

All the same, there is something about being cosy that sits well with words. Reading, as well as writing, has something magically isolating about it. Far easier to carry yourself off to distant continents and other times hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain like the young Jane Eyre, than when in danger of being interrupted.

There’s a reason we talk about being lost in a book, and this can happen with our writing too. I finished my first novel for adults over a year ago, and it took me somewhere else for a good deal of the time. I was immersed in the lives of my characters, Kate and Evie, for the best part of two years, living every detail of their First World War lives and heartbreaks out with them, and for the most part not knowing how things would end. There was something magical about it. The power of the imagination is huge, perhaps especially when we are children, and it is something we need to harness, or rediscover, if we are to write fiction well.

For myself, there is nothing that quite compares with walking with Lucy Pevensey through the snow, and becoming utterly lost in a wintry wonderland, full of mythical creatures and talking animals. I wonder if C. S. Lewis knew what Lucy was going to find? He surely had no idea that Narnia would still be a place children (and writers) would be escaping to in the year 2020.

So winter holds a dear place in my writerly, readerly heart, and despite the lack of light, the long, colder months are when I am gestating other worlds, and trying to catch a glimpse of shimmering snowfall and maybe the glow of an unlikely lamppost out of the corner of my inner eye.

Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a disabled writer and artist with a passion for poetry, mysticism, story and colour. Her writing features regularly on spiritual blogs and in literary journals. Her full-length publications include Garden of God’s Heart and Whale Song: Choosing Life with Jonah. She has a new book, Recital of Love, coming out with Paraclete Press in June 2020. Keren lives in South East England and is mainly housebound by her illness.

(I love painting snow too – this is one of my more wintry pastels)