November Prompts: How To Use Creative Prompts in November

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November gets a bad reputation. And I understand why. The leaves are largely gone. The days are short and getting shorter. The weather is frequently grey and wet and cold, without being the kind of cold that produces frost and sparkle. It is, on the face of it, the least obviously appealing month of the year.

But I’ve been paying close attention to November this year, and I want to make a case for it. Because what November offers, if you are willing to meet it on its own terms, is something genuinely valuable. It offers quiet, a kind of stark, stripped-back honesty. It offers the landscape revealed. And it offers, in its own way, a particular kind of beauty that you only get when everything else has been taken away.

November is the month the year rests. And rest, it turns out, is worth noticing.

This is the eleventh post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We have almost completed the wheel. One month later, we are back where we started. November is the penultimate chapter. The long exhale before the quiet of December.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

November is meteorological autumn in the UK and much of northern Europe, though it feels closer to winter. In the US, the northern states are entering winter proper by November. The Great Lakes region sees its first significant snowfall. New England is post-foliage, moving into the bare, cold season. The southern states are experiencing their version of autumn, cooler and more golden, later than the north.

The last leaves fall in November. The oaks, which held their green longest in September and October, finally let go in November. Their fallen leaves are tougher and more leathery than those of other species, and they break down more slowly. Oak leaf litter piles up against walls and in corners and produces a particular dry rustling sound when the wind moves through it.

The landscape becomes legible in November in a way it hasn’t been since before the leaves came in April. You can suddenly see through hedgerows. The architecture of trees, their branch structure, and the geometry of the way they grow is visible again. Field boundaries that were hidden all summer are revealed. Buildings appear through gaps in woodland that have been closed since May.

This revelation of structure is one of November’s most interesting gifts. The landscape shows you its bones.

Overwintering birds arrive this month. Fieldfare and redwing, members of the thrush family, arrive from Scandinavia in October and November to spend the winter on British fields and hedgerows. Their chattering flocks moving through hawthorn berries are a classic November sound and sight. In the US, winter finches move south in irruption years, appearing at feeders across the northern states in numbers that vary dramatically from year to year.

The British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden BirdWatch is a long-running citizen science project worth joining in November when garden birds become more visible and more dependent on supplemental feeding. In the US, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch runs from November to April and is a wonderful way to contribute to bird science from your own home.

Wading birds gather on estuaries and coastal wetlands in large numbers through November. A grey November estuary at high tide, with thousands of knot or dunlin packing together in dense flocks, is one of the great wildlife spectacles of the winter and is worth travelling to if you can. The RSPB’s reserve finder can help you find the nearest estuary reserve in the UK.

Nature Journalling: The Revealed Landscape

November is the month to go back to places you visited in the summer and see them as they actually are. The hedgerow path you walked in May, when everything was thick with cow parsley and hawthorn blossom, looks completely different now. You can see the hedge’s internal structure, see the old bird nests that were hidden all summer. You can see the shape of the land itself, the rise and fall of the ground, which the vegetation was concealing.

There is something almost archaeological about November walks. The landscape is revealing things it had kept hidden.

Old nests are particularly interesting. Once the leaves have fallen, you can often see a remarkable number of nests in hedgerows and trees that you had no idea were there. Each species builds in a distinctive way. A song thrush nest has a smooth mud lining inside. A long-tailed tit’s nest is a beautiful domed structure woven from moss and spider silk, lined with hundreds of feathers. You should not disturb active nests, but old, empty nests from the previous season are fascinating to examine. The RSPB’s nest identification guide is helpful.

Prompt: Revisit somewhere you know well from an earlier season, ideally somewhere you visited in May or June. Walk slowly and notice everything that has changed. What can you see now that was hidden before? Write for at least fifteen minutes, moving back and forth between what you are seeing now and what you remember from the same place in its summer state. The contrast between the two is interesting.

Poetry: Into the Dark

November poetry tends towards the interior. The nights are long. There is more time indoors, more time with your own thoughts. The external world is quieter and more austere. The imagination turns inward.

John Keats died in February 1821, aged twenty-five, having written most of his great poetry in the years just before. His letters, which are almost as extraordinary as his poems, are full of a quality he called negative capability: the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. November, with its grey ambiguity and its refusal of easy comfort, seems to me a good month for practising negative capability.

Sylvia Plath’s November poems are bleak and brilliant and very true to the particular quality of the month. Her poem November Graveyard deals directly with the bare, stripped landscape of late autumn. Her journals, published as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, have extraordinary passages about November light and November feeling that are worth reading.

In the American tradition, the poet Anne Sexton wrote about darkness and the interior life with a directness that feels appropriate for November. Her collection Live or Die is not easy reading, but it is honest in a way that November rewards.

Ted Hughes, particularly in his collection Remains of Elmet, about the moors of West Yorkshire, writes about the November landscape with a weight and darkness that feel completely true.

Prompt: Write a poem from inside. Not about the outdoors, or not only about it. Write about what November feels like from the inside of a house, looking out. The window is a boundary between warmth and cold, light and dark. What does the view look like from in here? And what sounds come through? What does November feel like as a physical presence in your body? Try to write honestly about the difficulty of the month as well as anything that redeems it.

Photography: Bare Trees, Frost, and the Monochrome World

November photography requires a shift in approach. The colours of October are gone. The landscape has moved into a more monochromatic register of grey, brown, and the occasional pale gold of the last oak leaves. This is not a problem. It is an invitation.

Black-and-white photography, or photographs that lean into the muted tones of November rather than fight them, can be extraordinarily powerful this month. The structure of bare trees against a pale sky. The graphic quality of a hedgerow in silhouette. The subtle tonal range of a ploughed field under flat grey light. None of these needs colour to be beautiful.

Frost, when it arrives in November, transforms everything. A frosted spider web on a November morning is one of the most intricate and beautiful things you will ever photograph. It requires getting out before the sun reaches it, which on a November morning might mean nine or ten o’clock rather than the five o’clock of a June dawn. Frost also transforms leaves on the ground, grass blades, seed heads, and anything else at ground level into something crystalline and extraordinary.

Fog is another November gift. Dense November fog reduces the landscape to shapes and silhouettes. A lone tree in fog is one of those photographic subjects that is almost impossible to make dull. A road disappearing into fog. A figure walking away into white air. The way fog reduces everything to its essential form is very photogenic.

Prompt: Go out on a November morning after a frost or in fog, ideally both if you can manage it. Photograph in black and white, either by setting your camera or phone to a monochrome mode, or converting afterwards. Look for strong shapes and strong contrasts. A dark tree against a light sky. A dark fence post against frosted white grass. Avoid anything with a lot of mid-tones and complexity. November’s beauty is graphic and spare. Let your photography reflect that.

For black-and-white landscape photography, the work of Fay Godwin, who photographed British landscapes through the 1970s and 80s, is a masterclass in finding beauty in bleak terrain. Her book Land is extraordinary.

Short Story: The Interior Season

November is the natural month for the kind of fiction that takes place mostly indoors. Long evenings, limited daylight, and the drawing in of domestic life create a setting that is quite distinct from the outdoor, expansive stories of summer.

The domestic interior in winter has its own emotional logic. People are closer together. There is less space to avoid things. The warmth of a house becomes something to be valued and also something to be trapped by. The contrast between the cold, dark outside and the warmth inside generates a particular kind of narrative tension.

The ghost story is one of literature’s great winter forms, and November is when it starts to feel appropriate. Not horror, necessarily, but the quieter, more atmospheric ghost story of the kind that MR James wrote and that has a long English tradition. James’ stories, collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, are often set in late autumn and winter and use the season to brilliant atmospheric effect. They are free to read online and are worth an evening of November reading.

In the American tradition, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in exactly this season and captures the particular atmosphere of late-autumn darkness with a vividness that has endured for two centuries.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 900 words set entirely indoors on a November evening. The outside is present but only through windows, sounds, and the cold that the characters are sheltered from. Something in the domestic space is not quite right. It might be a sound, an object, a memory triggered by the season. It might be something between two characters that the long dark evening is making harder to avoid. Let the November night outside press in on the story.

Drawing: The Architecture of Trees

November is the best month of the year to study and draw trees. Without their leaves, the full structure of each tree is visible, and that structure is as distinctive and varied as any other aspect of the natural world.

Each species has a completely characteristic silhouette. The English oak is wide-spreading with a heavy, irregular crown. The silver birch is upright and delicate, its branches hanging slightly at the tips. The beech has a smooth grey trunk and a high, even, domed canopy. The ash has distinctive black buds and a particular way of holding its branches upward and outward. Once you start drawing trees in winter, you begin to identify species by silhouette as naturally as you identify them by leaf in summer.

The branching pattern of trees follows mathematical rules related to the Fibonacci sequence and fractal geometry. The main trunk divides into large branches, which divide into smaller branches, which divide into twigs, each division following a similar ratio and pattern. Understanding this helps when drawing because you stop trying to draw every individual twig and start drawing the pattern that generates them.

Prompt: Draw the same tree three times this November. Once, as a full silhouette from far enough away to see the whole tree. Once, as a section of the mid-range branching structure, a metre or two of branches showed how they divide and subdivide. And once, as a close study of the tips of the twigs with their winter buds. Together, these three drawings at different scales tell you something about how the tree is structured that you couldn’t learn from any one of them alone.

For drawing trees in winter specifically, the illustrator Jake Spicer has excellent instructional content on structural drawing that applies beautifully to tree studies. In the US, Alphonso Dunn’s drawing tutorials online and structure are practical and widely applicable.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Roots, Stored Fruit, and the Long Cook

November eating is about warmth and depth of flavour and the kind of cooking that makes a house smell like somewhere you want to be. It is not a month for quick food. It is a month for the slow braise, the long simmer, the oven dish that goes in at noon and comes out at six.

Root vegetables are at their best: celeriac, parsnips, beetroot, turnips, and swede. Celeriac in particular is one of November’s great underrated pleasures. Its flavour is somewhere between celery and parsnip, and it makes an extraordinary soup, a beautiful remoulade when raw, and a very fine gratin when sliced thin and baked with cream and gruyère.

Stored apples and pears are still good. Pomegranates are arriving and are at their best in November and December. Chestnuts are here briefly and are worth roasting over an open fire or in the oven if you have them. The smell of roasting chestnuts is one of those completely November smells.

In the US, November means Thanksgiving and the cooking associated with it. Whether or not you celebrate Thanksgiving, November is squash, sweet potato, cranberry, and pecan season, and these are all genuinely wonderful ingredients. Cranberry sauce made from scratch with fresh cranberries, orange zest, and a little port is in a completely different category from anything that comes out of a tin.

Recipe prompt: Make a celeriac-and-apple soup. Roast cubed celeriac with olive oil and a little honey until golden. Fry an onion and a couple of garlic cloves until soft. Add a peeled and chopped apple, the roasted celeriac, and enough stock to cover. Simmer for 20 minutes, then blend until smooth. Taste and season carefully. Finish with a swirl of cream and a few toasted hazelnuts. It tastes like November in the best possible way, and it costs very little to make.

For US readers, Smitten Kitchen’s Thanksgiving and late autumn recipes are consistently excellent. For UK readers, Nigel Slater’s November writing in the Guardian is always worth reading for its atmosphere as much as its recipes.

One Last Thing

I started this series in January by saying that I thought January got unfairly dismissed. I want to say the same thing about November now that we’ve reached it.

November is not a failed October or an early December. It is its own thing. It has its own quality of light, its own sounds, its own particular emotional register. The bare trees and the grey skies and the early dark are not the absence of something. They are a presence in their own right.

There is a Japanese concept called ma, which roughly means negative space or the meaningful pause between things. In music, it is the silence between notes. In architecture, it is the empty space that gives a room its character. November, in the year’s calendar, is something like ma. It is the pause between the fullness of autumn and the ceremony of December. It is the quiet that makes what comes before and after more meaningful.

Go out in the November bare. Look at the bones of the trees. Listen to the fieldfare in the hawthorn. Stand in the cold air and notice that you are at the end of something and almost at the beginning of something else.

The last post in this series comes next month. December and the return of the light.

Previously: October. Next month: December, the winter solstice, and the end of the year.