In the movies, writers spend all their time hunched over their desks, furiously scribbling or typing.

Then, at the end of the montage, a book is born.

As a kid, when I dreamed about “being a writer,” that’s what I pictured.

But the longer I work at that dream, the clear it becomes that being a writer has less to do with how many hours you spend at the keyboard and more to do with how you live.

In a particularly difficult phase of life somewhere in the unmapped wilderness of having just graduated from academic success into a search for real-world purpose, I once told a writer friend that nothing bad can really happen to a writer.

The worst thing that could happen to a writer might very well be the exact thing I dream of – a quiet, uneventful life with my dog and a garden.

Life happens. It keeps happening. And from it are born the stories.

And just as life has different seasons that shape and change us, so, too, do the seasons of our writing lives each contribute to the final form of the stories we’re made to tell.

Writing seasons are my favorite, but they’re also the most difficult. When I’m in the swing of a project – writing before work, writing after work, waking up early on the weekends to write – I feel most alive, productive and fulfilled.

But it’s a bit like carrying the ring of power. The story is on your mind all the time, urgent and heavy.

Then comes the painful-but-relieving tearing away of the eyes. For a time, you must look at anything but the project.

You discover reading again, and you take up poetry again. This is for enjoyment – for nourishment.

Then, toil.

This is the season I’m in now with my novel. I’ve spent the last 10 months editing, revising, forming and forming the text and doing the same with query materials.

A considerable portion of my Google Drive storage is now dedicated to various drafts of query letters and synopses. (How can it be so hard to write about what one has written?)

I’m in the long dark winter known as querying. It feels endless, but I maintain faith that, like the changing of the clocks come spring, something will shift and this season, too, will pass.

Do you find that your writing life goes in seasons, too? What season are you in now?