Exiting a Fallow Period

One Creative's Strategy to Reset and Refresh

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash

Are you familiar with the farming term, to lie fallow? Sometimes you see a cropless field at a farm where, for whatever reason, the farmer has decided to rotate his crops or refrain from planting crops to allow the land to recover from soil depletion. Lying fallow also disrupts pest life cycles by temporarily removing their hosts.

I’m not a field or a stretch of land, but I am a novelist coming out of a season of lying fallow by conscious choice. After writing, editing, and publishing two novels, going through the stressful book launch season, and writing a third novel, this introverted soul felt burnt out and void of any strong new writing ideas. Usually, I can fill notebooks with book ideas, but the creativity felt dried up. No fictional characters spoke to me while I walked. No writing ideas filled my quiet moments. No quirky predicaments appeared. The emptiness scared me a bit. What if I had no more books or essays in me?

So intentionally, I quieted my writing life and turned to activities that would offer refreshment. I went fallow. What did this look like for me? I hosted friends and family in my home, enjoying great company and conversation around my table, read excellent books, walked, attended concerts, plays, and conferences. I worked in my yard and garden, somedays taking long stretches of time to just meander through a local nursery and admire the plants, dreaming of how they might beautify my yard. I also went through the workbook, The Artists Way, with some other writers from my guild, a book that encourages artists to go on “an artist date.” This could be a concert, a visit to a museum, a walk in a forest—whatever replenishes the artist’s soul. For me, walks in beautiful places outside offered the quiet I needed for contemplation. Most enjoyable of all, I took unhurried time to study my beautiful grandchildren’s faces.

Refraining from writing didn’t feel natural to me. I had to give myself permission to stop the work and lean into quieter days with less of a schedule. I thought I would refrain from writing for several months, but the period lasted about eight months instead.

So how successful has my fallow season been? While I remained fallow for many months longer than I intended, I have finally emerged with three novel ideas and I’ve begun to earnestly work on one of them, tentatively titled An Overstayed Welcome. It’s a contemporary novel for adults featuring a couple of quirky characters who form an unlikely friendship and decide to stay on at a family member’s farm without a formal invitation.

I also have a strong idea for a young adult novel based on a young woman I met—the daughter of our car mechanic—and a young boy I stumbled across one day on one of my walks. The sad sight of a young boy sitting alone in a wooded area not far from his high school while groups of other kids raced home together for lunch left me sad for days. He sat slumped on a picnic table, scrolling on his phone while all around him, other kids found comradery. I plan for these two characters to meet and see what happens. That’s how I write, by the way. I put a few people together and listen to what they say and watch what they do. I’m inviting you on the journey of discovery. Want to come?

Even if you are not a writer or an artist, are you feeling the need for soul refreshment? What would this look like for you? Maybe clearing your plate of extraneous activities. Taking time for pure enjoyment and pushing aside the guilt, knowing simple enjoyment often makes you more productive when you return to work life.

One last note: This is a new newsletter for me. I plan to write about the process of coming out of this fallow season and starting a new novel. I thought it might be interesting for some folks to read along as I describe how a novelist makes some of the one million decisions that go into writing a book. I hope to do this from start to finish. A word of warning, I’m not a fast writer. I take a lot of time to enjoy life and live it to the fullest. (Balance is important, don’t you think?) So we might be here a while. But we’ll talk about more than my writing. I plan to share life, books, ideas, faith, and whatever else comes to mind.

I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever felt a need to lie fallow? Tell us about your experience in the comments or by replying to this email.

Until next time.

Linda

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