For us in northern states, fall brings shorter daylight, leaves to rake and cider mills to visit where we sip fresh apple cider and eat sweet doughnuts. We fill a nip in the air. In warm climates, fall begins the season of visitors with full hotels, gift shops and restaurants. Around the country Thanksgiving dinners feature the traditional turkey and stuffing and now newer vegan and vegetarian menu items, too. Fellowship and family, anticipation of winter and more holidays to come, candlelight and the warm heat of stoves and fireplaces can trigger much writing. So can a longing for times past. And so can loneliness if one feels isolated at this time of year.

Take a moment to describe a present or past fall season:

• What activities are/were traditional for you at this time of year?
• Who peoples/peopled this season?
• What dialog do you hear or remember among others and yourself?
• What buildings and homes?
• What went/goes on in the landscape of plants and trees?
• Were/are birds and animals coming or going?
• Did/do the markets have a different variety of fruits and vegetables, window dressings, and products than in summer?
• Did/do the people around you wear different clothes and carry different things, including their expressions, than at other seasons?

Now that you have conjured images to place yourself in your writing about this season, whether our answers to the questions bring joy, nostalgia or sadness, read this excerpt from Thoreau’s October journal:

By the side of J. P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible. . . . Such as these are no mean food …Their sweetness is like the sweetness of bread, and to have discovered this palatableness in this neglected nut, the whole world is to me sweeter for it … I should be at least equally pleased if I were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutritious. It increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes.

He wrote this passage following one in which he was irritated by visitors who didn’t want to walk outside or take a nap leaving him to walk alone. He said of them:

If they can’t walk, why won’t they take an honest nap and let me go in the afternoon? But, come two o’clock, they alarm me by an evident disposition to sit. In the midst of the most glorious Indian-summer afternoon, there they sit, breaking your chairs and wearing out the house, with their backs to the light, taking no note of the lapse of time.

His irritation at people with no understanding of the way he treasures the time to be outside makes me laugh – “breaking your chairs and wearing out the house, with their backs to the light.” When he does walk, his discoveries renew him.

Yes, lovely as fall can be, it can also bring with it impatience.

Where can you place yourself in your day and make a discovery about the thrill of the season for you?

Where can you place yourself in your day that leads to happiness in solitude away from those who do not share your personal, idiosyncratic love of the season?

Where can you place yourself and make a discovery if you would prefer company rather than solitude?

It may help to begin your writing with these words to get started:

It is ____ (date) and I am (an activity like walking, sitting, spying, sailing, chopping wood, cleaning gutters, calling the dogs in). It is (insert an adjective that describes a feeling like lonely, crowded, pleasing, chilly, scary, comfortable). I am going to tell you why it is this way …

From here on out you can describe a scene of the times and share your fall thoughts. Hopefully, you will make a discovery, sweet as Thoreau’s acorn, during your roaming through this season’s day, and the discovery that something or some persons in your day are crucial to who you are.

More Writing Ideas for Using Fall Memories and Imagery as a Trigger

Think of those people in Thoreau’s entry breaking the chairs and wearing out the house with their sitting. Who in your life seems to slow you down this season or be unaware of all the excitement and beauty you find in the world around and inside you? Imagine that person in a chair facing away from a window and ignoring the light or the early dark. What would you write to them?

Write about a fall day as if your writing were going into a time capsule to be unearthed in an epoch when the earth has changed geologically and the land and neighborhood where you are now will be gone. You will preserve your fall in this writing.

Write to a storekeeper or a crossing guard or a bird on a wire or a tree about to lose its leaves or some other image you associate with fall. Tell the person or thing how their presence and actions have mattered to you.

How would the persona Fall eulogize Summer? Have Fall write a speech for Summer’s memorial service. What does Fall praise in Summer? For what in Summer does Fall show affection? What has Fall inherited from Summer? What does Fall wish it could do as well as Summer?

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Should you write a combination of passages and whole pages for each of these, you may have a lyric essay completed. Or, you may have several shorter essays. Perhaps you may even find a way to knit all of the writing into one longer, non-segmented essay.

Try the writing ideas without worrying about how or if they will go together. See what the writing seems to want to be after, rather than before, you have drafted the parts.

I know you will have produced some good writing that will refresh your experience of fall.