Writing Tip — Writing in Time — August and the Eclipse

Much more than December, August feels like the end of the year to me. The summer is winding down, school starts, and sports and arts seasons begin. This is my favorite time of the year. From August on, each month holds something interesting for me.

Unless it’s been a brutally hot summer, most people where I live aren’t fed up with the season when August rolls in, like we are with winter when it’s February. I don’t feel anxious for the changes August heralds, just a quiet contentment — content to say farewell to the summer schedule and hello to the autumn one.

The evenings are bathed in gold during August, perhaps contributing to my content feelings. I love how the evening light looks in the summer. One of the best descriptions of golden evenings I have read is in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

With these impressions in mind, I think August is the perfect month to end a story if you want a warm or nostalgic or even a bittersweet finish.

Where I live, no major holidays occur in August, but this year on the 21st, North America will experience a solar eclipse, the first of its kind to cover so much of the United States since 1970. To learn more, click here.

I am always interested in how sunlight changes within the day and the season and then using those observations as settings for my writing. I wrote a post on it last year. I am very excited to watch how the eclipse affects the light. I bet it will appear otherworldly, making this unusual natural phenomenon a perfect setting for some unnatural fiction. So if you are in North America on August 21, get outside!

How do you view August as a setting for your writing?