Image Credits: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. AI images avoided.
I’m never sorry to welcome September back. It’s a lovely month and I’ve always loved the changing colours of the leaves. Okay the darker evenings are a downside but then again does that give more time for reading and/or writing? I would hope so. Of course, following the heatwave this year, the cooler autumn temperatures are also welcome.
But I thought I’d look at using autumn in our writing for this post and hope you find it useful. It’s always a delight, incidentally, to create pictures via Book Brush for my Chandler’s Ford Today posts but I had a wealth of wonderful images to choose from for this so hope you enjoy these too.
Autumn as a Setting
Autumn makes a wonderful backdrop for our stories. You don’t need to use much either. I’ve written flash pieces where I’ve just had a character note the golden leaves, the wind picking up, the character having an extra layer on and so on. It’s enough to show when the story must be set.
If I’d used the thought of there being no leaves on the trees, it would have to be winter. So simple things like picking the right details to put in your tale are enough to convey autumn (or any of the other seasons) as a backdrop.
Certain events only happen in the autumn – Harvest Festival services, apple bobbing, and other events such as Halloween – so just by having your story set with any of those examples going on will again confirm the season.
Getting your characters to notice certain things, such as Virginia Creeper going from green to red, again confirms the season and also is a good use of colour in your tale.
Using the Senses in Autumn
As well as using sight for the change of colours, using smell would be another good one here. Bonfires always have a distinctive aroma and again are usually autumnal activities. There’s also the sound they make which could be put into a story. Then there’s the smell associated with coming back home in wet things and so on.
Taste can come in via things that are so often made in the autumn as the weather turns colder – the taste of a homemade soup (and can also get smell in again there too). What would your characters like to eat here? What would their autumn preferences be?
Touch can come in as your character decides which coat (and general clothing for autumn usage) they want to wear. Readers can picture a character making the decision based on colour and how the coat feels. Will it be warm enough? No. Character goes for another. All easily visualised.
As for sound, what do you hear in the autumn you wouldn’t hear at other times of year? There would be sounds associated with harvesting, certain hymns of praise (where I go to church we adore We Plough the Fields and Scatter), certain bird songs will start to disappear as those species start to think about flying south for the winter etc. Other bird songs will become clearer due to that.
Then there’s the sound of deer. In recent months, I’ve been delighted to find muntjak, those tiny deer, come into my garden. (They work wonders in clearing bramble!). So hearing a deer “bark” may be something to hear which is closer to home than you might think. You can also look that up. A quick Google search showed there was a YouTube video demonstrating how roe deer bark.
Oh and the owls, let’s not forget them. I love listening out for them though my first dog, Gracie, was frightened of the sounds they made. We think she visualised a great big night bird and could never get back indoors quickly enough when they were about. But you can use the sound of an owl as part of your story. Also is your character frightened of them or not? Some folk are.
Autumn Memories and Little Details
You can use memories associated with any or all of the seasons to bring your characters to life for your readers too.
I find it is the little details which help me picture a character the most so if I have a character walk in, take off a scarf and coat and head straight to the kitchen to make, say, a hot chocolate, I know immediately I can narrow the seasons down to autumn or winter. I could then get the character to note the date as they wait for the kettle to boil and have them realise they’d forgotten an appointment or have one coming up later that evening which they need to remember to go. The date will confirm the season for sure.
Specific details help create stronger images in a reader’s mind too. It’s not unreasonable, say, to get a character to note the leaves coming down rapidly. Again it confirms the season. You don’t need anything else, unless it helps move the story along.
Time Changes Everything
One thing associated with the autumn is when the clocks go back for an hour. You could have fun writing about a character who struggles with this.
What about a character who cannot wait for the clocks to go back? Why would they prefer the darker evenings coming in earlier and staying with us for longer? How about writing around characters who struggle with the darkness, for whom the light makes a great deal of difference?
Then there could be stories based around timed events during the autumn months. What would happen if a character expected to turn up at Event A at X time never showed up? What would the consequences be?
Autumn Inspired Literature
When I think of autumn I think of Keats’ “seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and it is a fabulous way to sum up the season. What could we do with the season of mists in our stories? Some characters could get up to no good here, using the mists and darker, longer evenings for dodgy purposes.
Conclusion
Autumn is a beautiful season, though folk have so many different attitudes to it, which you could apply to your characters. My maternal grandmother hated the season, I love it. But you could have interesting story ideas from exploring why a character hated the season and what they do to get them through it each year. Can their hatred of the season be broken? Could something happen to a character to make them go from loving autumn to dreading it?
I hope you have fun writing up some stories coming from the ideas here. Reading and writing more in the darker months is a fabulous way to celebrate the season I think!
Related Posts:-
Read interviews with Chandler’s Ford writer Allison Symes: Part 1 and Part 2.
Read blog posts by Allison Symes published on Chandler’s Ford Today.
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