How to Write In the Dead Ass Midwinter

Skip this if you just love January

Photo by Tyler Domingue on Unsplash

January is a fragile month; everything feels breakable inside. It’s close to the bone - leaves, sun, spirit, flowers, the colorful costume of living is stripped away, leaving the skeleton of the day to make meaning of. Everything in January is harsh, all movements either too slow or too sudden. And brittle things bent suddenly tend to snap.

It’s not even that January feels like the end of things. Rather, it feels fully, dully liminal - not in a full of promise way, but in a baggage claim or doctor’s office waiting room way. Depressing, but not in a particularly interesting way, lit by florescent bulbs and scored with elevator music and the low buzz of anxious small talk.

I’ve always hated this this month, in part because I hate how I cannot manage to be grateful in January. The beginning of the month is not so difficult, borrowing ritual and promise from the bright glow of December, but come mid-month, it is impossible to summon any real enthusiasm for being alive. A more or less lifelong agnostic, I have spent most of my life, despite depression and anxiety, able to call up intense gratitude for small and large things throughout the year. I observe, I write, I spend as much time outdoors as possible, greedily taking in gardens. I spend much of the year just happy to be here, even when I’m not happy at all. But I am never happy to find myself in late January. I’m tired and cold and it almost never snows here in DC, so it’s just grey and dull, the days lit by nothing, plodding along until we are plunged into darkness. I read someone recently commenting on the absence of the blue hour in deep winter, and I realized she was right - there is no gentle fade into purple evening at this time of year, only the steep drop into night. It’s disquieting and has a vague horror movie vibe: who switched off the lights, and holy shit, what’s out there?

But then once dropped into darkness, we can breathe, anxiety fades, we light candles and feel at ease in our homes. It’s a relief from the weak tea of daylight, Dickinson’s “certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft / of Cathedral Tunes -” which is probably why I can never write during the daylight hours of winter, but can get on like a house on fire at night. The darkness feels warm, if you dim your lights and turn up your heat enough. And it’s then, I find, that your brain will expand, relax, and start to speak to you again.

But what can you write in a liminal month? So much shit that you probably can’t write in June! You can write in direct, blazing opposition to Stevens’ “mind of winter,” thawing the notion of a January heart and doing battle with the forces of freezing fucking cold. You can lean into the bleakness like an anchorite, write monastically, let an austere sort of inspiration infuse your work like light through incarnadine glass. Or you can allow the hard hidden sun to give your writing a brutal, honest beat, the long hallway of January a rehearsal for the endless hallway of death. It’s easier in bleak midwinter to look down that hallway with clear eyes, and get it down on paper before the earliest flowers of spring start to color your vision. You can write into cold truth for the small time your soul will allow.

But sometimes words won’t flow, even if the spirit is willing, right? I recommend then using January for nonsense and play, rather than any kind of serious work. Cut words out of magazines and stuff them into a bag; shake the bag and pull out words like the surrealists did. Speaking of the surrealists, start an Exquisite Corpse with your friends on social media or email or over a text chain. Grab five poetry books off your shelf and open each to a random page: use the first sentences on those five pages as the first five sentences of a new story. (Don’t forget to delete them when you’re done with the story!) Write a grocery list for a stranger you pass by on the street; write an obituary for an imaginary person. Write a list of questions that can’t be answered, and try to answer them anyway. Paint a shitty painting and then translate it into a poem. Design and print a seven course short story menu for reading one weekend day. Pair with cocktails or mocktails.

The long day of January can be a dentist’s office, but the night can be full of mystery and longing, the small human condition made manifest as the temperature drops and the outside becomes wild and unforgiving. Make use of that! The spring and summer nights won’t often yield the same feeling of profundity, and the fall nights are too full of anxiety to make good soil for language. These deep midwinter nights can offer up startling insights, desperate, beautiful characters, and the wild weirdness of life pressed up against the windows of civilization. Besides, when you’re writing even if you feel lonely and sad, you can at least feel artistically lonely and sad. And that’s not nothing, not in the dark depths of January.

What I’m reading: I like to read a lot of quiet, deeply introspective books during the winter - it helps to quiet my anxiety and feels appropriately somber and inward-looking. I’ve been reading Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s On Silence and Silences, which is wonderful and meditative so far. I also subscribed, in the frenzy of Substack subscriptions during the first days of the Fall of Twitter, to The Ariadne Archive, and it’s one of my new favorite things - a gorgeous rabbit-hole style newsletter, concerned with deep time and nature and history, and beautifully written as well. I can’t recommend it enough. And I just finished an astounding first novel about being a doctor, a patient, and a person: A History of Present Illness, by Anna DeForest. I mention it with a caveat - it is very sad, so if you can’t handle that right now, maybe save it until the spring.

What I’m writing: I’m working on a number of new essays and projects, but I also recently shared the news that I have not one but two new books coming out with my adored Liveright in the next couple of years! I am very excited! The first is a sort of gothic murder mystery novel about people in an apartment building, but funny, called Happy People Don’t Live Here, and the next is a short story collection, Did Parents in the Middle Ages Love Their Children. (Spoiler alert: they did!)

What I’m watching: My family is on a big silent short films kick, mostly watching Buster Keaton’s and Harold Lloyd’s short films, which are perfect for adults and also for a seven year old who’s crazy about physical comedy. I particularly recommend One Week, The Electric House and Safety Last - I’ve never seen my daughter laugh as hard as she did at those. (And if you’re interested in delving deeper into Buster Keaton’s life and silent film history in general, I highly recommend Dana Stevens’ Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and The Invention of the Twentieth Century.

What I’m listening to: I’ve got The National’s new singles on repeat and I’m just mad the full album won’t release during the saddest month of the year, but rather in April when I don’t want to feel sad anymore! Hahahaha just absolutely kidding, I always want to feel sad. It’s not a fad, it’s a lifestyle, baby.