July Prompts: How To Find Creative Prompts To Try This Summer

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July is summer without apology. It’s the month that commits fully to the whole project. The hedgerows are dense and tangled. The verges are tall and going to seed. The air on a warm afternoon has a thickness to it, a heaviness, that you don’t get in June’s lighter, brighter warmth.

I’ve always thought of July as a quieter month than June in terms of drama. The big arrivals have happened. The blossom is long gone. The dawn chorus has tailed off. There’s less of the urgent excitement of spring. Instead, there is a kind of settled abundance. Everything is simply here, growing and flowering and buzzing and seeding in a way that feels almost effortless.

But quieter doesn’t mean there’s less to notice. It just means you have to pay a different kind of attention. July rewards slowness. It rewards sitting still. It rewards the kind of observation that notices what’s been there all along.

This is the seventh post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We’ve reached the deep heart of summer. Everything from here, very slowly, begins to turn.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

July is midsummer in the fullest sense. The days are still very long, though noticeably shorter than they were at the solstice. In terms of actual warmth, July is typically hotter than June across most of the northern hemisphere, even though the days are already past their longest. This is because the land and sea take time to absorb and release heat. The warmth of June’s long days doesn’t fully arrive until July.

This lag between the solstice and the hottest temperatures is called the seasonal lag, or sometimes the lag of the seasons. It’s why the warmest part of the year comes after the longest day rather than on it. Similarly, the coldest part of winter usually falls in January and February rather than on the winter solstice in December.

In the natural world, July is the month when many plants are setting seed. The urgency of flowering is over. Grasses have seeded. Cow parsley has gone from white froth to brown skeletal seed heads. Thistles are flowering and then producing the drifting white seed heads that float across fields on warm afternoons.

Butterflies are at or near their peak this month. In the UK, July sees the peak of species such as the meadow brown, the ringlet, the marbled white, and, on chalk downlands, the adonis blue. In the US, monarch butterflies are beginning their southward migration, which picks up through August and September. The North American Butterfly Association has resources for finding and identifying butterflies wherever you are.

Bats are active and visible on warm July evenings. They typically emerge around twenty minutes after sunset and hunt insects low over water or along hedgerow lines. Watching bats from a still position on a warm July evening is one of summer’s quieter and more underrated pleasures. The Bat Conservation Trust in the UK has a guide to watching and identifying bats. In the US, Bat Conservation International does similar work.

Nature Journaling: Sitting Still

July is the month to practise sitting completely still and letting things come to you rather than going to look for them. In spring, the impulse is to walk and search. In July, the better approach is often to find one spot and simply wait.

Find somewhere with a mix of habitats if you can. A pond margin, a meadow edge, the corner of a garden where things have been left to grow a bit. Sit down. Stay still. After about 10 minutes, the wildlife starts behaving as if you’re not there.

This is when you start to see things you’d otherwise miss. The insects moving through the grass heads. The movements at the base of the hedge. The way a particular patch of flowers is being worked systematically by a bumblebee. The dragonfly returns to the same perching spot every few minutes.

Prompt: Find a spot outside and sit completely still for thirty minutes. Set a timer if it helps. Bring a notebook and write continuously about what you observe, but don’t move to look at anything. Only write about what comes within your field of vision from one fixed position. At the end of thirty minutes, count how many different species you noticed. Most people are surprised by how many there are.

For identifying insects and invertebrates you encounter, the iRecord app in the UK is excellent and contributes to national biodiversity data. The iNaturalist app works worldwide and has a strong community for identification help.

Poetry: The Pastoral Tradition

July sits squarely in the pastoral tradition of poetry. The pastoral is one of the oldest forms in Western literature, going back to the Greek poet Theocritus and the Roman Virgil. It’s the tradition of writing about rural life and landscape as a space of beauty and simplicity, often in contrast to the complexity of the city or court.

John Clare is probably the greatest pastoral poet in English. He wrote in the early nineteenth century, and his work is extraordinary for its precise, loving attention to the actual detail of the English countryside. Not a romanticised countryside but the real one, with specific plants, birds, weather, and field patterns named exactly. His poem The Shepherd’s Calendar has a July section that feels completely alive even two hundred years later. The John Clare Society has resources and a good introduction to his work.

The American pastoral tradition runs from Thoreau through Robert Frost to Wendell Berry. Berry in particular writes about farming, land, and the particular quality of summer work with a depth and honesty that is well worth reading. His collection, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, is a good entry point.

Prompt: Write a poem about something specific and small that you notice in July. Not the whole summer. Not the season in general. One specific thing. A particular thistle releasing its seeds. The sound of a combine harvester somewhere in the distance on a hot afternoon. A single butterfly on a knapweed flower. The smaller and more specific the subject, the more interesting the poem will probably be.

Photography: Heat Haze, Harvest, and Insects

July photography has a different quality from spring photography. The light in the middle of the day is harsh and flat and generally not very interesting. But the early mornings and late evenings in July are extraordinary, particularly in heatwave conditions, when the air is hazy and warm, giving everything a slightly dreamlike quality.

Harvest is beginning in July in many areas. Fields that were green with growing wheat or barley are turning gold. Combine harvesters are working in the evenings when the grain is driest. The particular quality of a harvested field in late July light, with the stubble bright gold and the straw bales casting long shadows, is one of the iconic visual images of English summer.

Insects are wonderful subjects this month. Butterflies on flowers, dragonflies over water, bees deep inside flowers with their pollen baskets full. Insect photography rewards patience and a willingness to lie flat on the ground for a surprisingly long time.

Prompt: Photograph an insect this month. Try to fill the frame with it. Get as close as your camera or phone will allow. If you’re using a phone, portrait mode can help with close focus. The goal is an image that shows the insect’s details, its texture, and its eyes, if possible. Insects become genuinely alien and extraordinary at close range. Wait for it to settle and be still. Then get closer than feels comfortable.

For insect photography technique, the Close Up Photographer of the Year runs an annual competition with a huge archive of extraordinary insect images that are both inspiring and instructive to browse.

Short Story: The Long Afternoon

Summer afternoons have their own narrative possibilities. There is something about the stillness of a very hot afternoon, the way time seems to slow and thicken, that invites a particular kind of storytelling.

The long, hot afternoon is a classic setting in literary fiction precisely because it creates a kind of pressure. Characters can’t easily leave or go anywhere. They are stuck together in the heat. Things that are usually kept under the surface have a way of rising when the temperature is high enough, and there is nowhere to go.

L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is set in a hot Edwardian summer, and the heat is absolutely central to the story. Ian McEwan’s Atonement uses a heat-wave day similarly. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has its most violent scene in a hot New York hotel room in summer. Heat as a narrative device is worth thinking about.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 800 words set during a single hot July afternoon. Two or more characters are stuck somewhere together. A garden. A car journey. A village fete. The heat is pressing. Something is said, or almost said, or nearly not said, that changes something between them. Let the physical discomfort of the heat be present throughout.

Drawing: Seed Heads and Summer Insects

July is a brilliant month to shift your drawing attention from flowers to seed heads. The architectural forms of plants as they go to seed are extraordinary and often overlooked.

Thistles in seed are spectacular. The seed head before it releases is like a small firework, tightly packed with potential. Teasels are tall and complicated and worth the time they take. Dock seeds turn deep rusty red. Hogweed seed heads are large, flat, and geometrically interesting. All of these are more architecturally dramatic than most flowers, and they stand still, which makes them easier to draw.

If you want to draw insects, the trick is to find ones that are feeding. A bee working on a lavender spike or a thistle flower will stay in roughly the same position for long enough to draw from. A resting butterfly on a warm afternoon may stay still for several minutes. Start with the overall shape and proportions before adding any detail.

Prompt: Draw a seed head from a plant that has finished flowering. Choose something relatively large and architectural if you can. A thistle or a teasel or a hogweed. Before you draw, spend five minutes looking at the geometry of it. How does the structure repeat? How does the pattern change from the centre to the edges? Try to understand the underlying geometry before you start making marks. The understanding shows in the drawing.

For drawing seed heads and the more architectural aspects of plants, the botanical illustrator Ann Swan has written extensively about drawing dried plant material, and her approach is very transferable to seed heads and summer plants going over.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Soft Fruits, Courgettes, and the Great Abundance

July is one of the great months for eating seasonally. The soft fruits are at their peak. Raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries, and blueberries are all here in some form. In the US, the blueberry season is at its height across the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest. Peaches and nectarines are arriving in warmer states.

Courgettes are producing prolifically now, which is both a delight and a slight problem if you grow your own. The famous problem of the gardener who goes away for a week and returns to find courgettes the size of submarines is a real and recurring July experience. Very large courgettes are best grated and used in baking, particularly in a courgette-and-lemon loaf that sounds unlikely but tastes wonderful.

Tomatoes are beginning to ripen in warmer areas. Herbs are lush and abundant. July is a good month to make herb-infused oils and vinegars, things that will be useful for months afterwards. Basil oil. Tarragon vinegar. Thyme-infused olive oil.

There is also the specific pleasure of eating outside in July. A meal eaten outside on a warm July evening, with the light going golden and the bats starting to appear, is worth planning for.

Recipe prompt: Make something that uses soft fruits in a simple, unfussy way. A summer pudding, which is one of the great British summer desserts, requires no baking. Or a simple raspberry-and-cream pavlova. Or, if you want something to keep, a blackcurrant jam, which is deeply, intensely flavoured in a way that shop-bought jam almost never is. Delia Smith’s blackcurrant jam recipe is a reliable classic. For US readers, Food52’s summer preserves collection has excellent seasonal recipes.

The aim, as always, is to use what is genuinely at its best right now. In July, that means soft fruits, abundant herbs, and courgettes, whether you like it or not.

One Last Thing

I said at the beginning that July rewards for slowness. I’ve been thinking about why that is.

I think it’s because July is the month where the seasonal story pauses before it turns. The urgency of spring is over. The melancholy of autumn hasn’t started. There is just this: warmth and abundance and long light and the unhurried business of the natural world getting on with things.

The instruction for July, if there is one, is simply to be in it. Find a warm spot. Sit still. Watch the butterflies. Eat the raspberries. Stay outside until it gets properly dark, which in July takes a long time.

The turn is coming. August will start to show the first signs of it. But for now, in July, there is just this settled, generous, unhurried summer.

I’ll be back in August, when the first hints of autumn begin to appear, and things slowly start to shift.

Previously: June. Next month: August and the first whisper of change.