October Prompts: How To Use Autumnal Prompts For Creativity

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October doesn’t ease you into autumn. It arrives and immediately makes its presence felt. The colours that were beginning in September are now fully, extravagantly here. The mornings are cold enough to see your breath. The evenings close in with a speed that still catches you off guard, even when you know it’s coming. The air smells completely different from any other month. Woodsmoke and wet leaves and something earthier underneath.

If September was the turn, October is the full commitment to it.

I find October one of the most visually arresting months of the year. The colours are almost too much. Copper and gold and deep red and russet all at once, all against the low amber light of the sun sitting closer to the horizon every day. Walking through a beech wood in mid-October in good light is one of those experiences that stops you in your tracks. You stand there feeling slightly ridiculous about how beautiful it is.

This is the tenth post in a year-long series about noticing the changing seasons through writing, photography, drawing, baking, and getting outside. We are deep in the second half of the year now. The arc is bending back towards winter. October is the full blaze before the long quiet.

What’s Actually Happening Out There?

October sits between the autumn equinox, which was in late September, and the cross-quarter day of Samhain on the 1st of November. It is astronomically and ecologically the heart of autumn in the northern hemisphere.

The leaf fall begins in earnest in October. After the colour comes the fall, and the timing varies enormously by species and by weather. A wet and windy October night can strip a tree almost bare. A calm, dry October can keep the leaves on well into November. The unpredictability is part of what makes it worth watching closely.

Fungi are at their peak this month. October is a great month for foraging and for noticing fungi in woodland, grassland, and even suburban parks and gardens. There are thousands of species in the UK alone, from the familiar fly agaric with its red cap and white spots to the extraordinary variety of shapes and colours you encounter if you start looking properly. The British Mycological Society has excellent resources for beginners. In the US, the North American Mycological Association does similar work and has a foraging guide with strong safety advice.

A word of caution about foraging fungi: some species are dangerously toxic and closely resemble edible ones. Go with an expert the first few times, or use a very good field guide alongside an identification app. First Nature’s fungi guide is thorough and free. The iNaturalist app is helpful, but it should never be the sole basis for eating a wild mushroom.

Hedgehogs are preparing to hibernate. If you have hedgehogs visiting your garden, October is when you might notice them less frequently as they begin to fatten up and find a hibernation site. Leaving a pile of leaves or a log pile in a quiet corner of a garden gives them somewhere safe to overwinter. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has excellent guidance. In the US, the equivalent is making wildlife-friendly garden features for native species, preparing for winter.

In the US, the hawk migration that was building in September reaches its peak in October at many sites. The monarch butterfly migration is also spectacular in October, with millions of butterflies moving through the central flyway towards Mexico. The Monarch Watch citizen science programme is a wonderful project to engage with.

Nature Journalling: The Fungi Hunt

October is the month to add fungi to your nature journaling practice. If you have never paid attention to fungi before, October in a deciduous woodland will change that quickly. The variety and strangeness of what is down there, growing from fallen wood and leaf litter and the roots of trees, is genuinely astonishing.

It helps to know that what you are seeing, the mushroom or toadstool, is only the fruiting body of the fungus. The actual organism is the mycelium, a vast network of fine threads running through the soil and wood beneath. Some mycelial networks are enormous. The largest known single fungal organism covers nearly four square miles of forest in Oregon. The fungus is mostly invisible. October just shows you the part it wants you to see.

Nature journaling fungi is a matter of close observation and careful description. Colour, shape, size, smell, texture, the pattern of the gills underneath, and the habitat it’s growing in. All of these are relevant to identification, and all of them are interesting to record for their own sake.

Prompt: Go to a deciduous woodland in October and look specifically for fungi. Don’t pick anything unless you are confident in your identification. Instead, spend time observing and recording. Choose one specimen and write a very detailed description of it. Sketch it from at least two angles, one from the side and one from underneath, showing the gills or pores. Note what it is growing on or near. Note the smell if you can get close enough safely. This kind of detailed record is both scientifically useful and genuinely interesting.

Poetry: The Dying of the Light

October has produced some of the most powerful poetry about endings, darkness, and the confrontation with mortality in the English language. The combination of extraordinary beauty and unmistakable decline makes it an almost irresistible territory for poets.

Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is not strictly an autumn poem, but its rage against the dying of the light feels completely at home in October. Written as his father was dying, it uses the movement from light to darkness as its central metaphor in a way that October makes visceral and immediate.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover and Pied Beauty celebrate the variety and strangeness of the natural world with a religious intensity that feels appropriate for a month of such visual excess. His concept of inscape, the distinctive individual quality of every created thing, is a useful idea to carry into October nature observation.

In the American tradition, Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” both hover in this autumn-into-winter territory. His poetry has a surface simplicity that opens into something more complex and darker the longer you look at it.

The Celtic festival of Samhain on the 31st of October and 1st of November was understood as a time when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. Whatever you make of the supernatural dimensions of that, it’s a useful poetic idea. October does feel like a month when things that are usually hidden become visible.

Prompt: Write a poem about light leaving. It could be the evening getting dark earlier, or it could be the last light in the leaves before they fall. It could be something much more personal, a relationship, a period of life, something that was bright and is dimming. Let the October landscape be present in the poem. Use the specific colours and the specific quality of October light. Try to write towards something true rather than something comfortable.

Photography: Woodland Colour and Low Light

October is the month when more photographers go out than any other. The colours and the light combine to make landscape photography feel almost effortless. But effortless also means obvious, and the classic autumn woodland shot, though beautiful, is everywhere.

The more interesting challenge is to find October’s less obvious photography. The detail rather than the panorama. A single perfect leaf lying on dark, wet tarmac. The reflection of autumn colour in a puddle distorted by a single raindrop. The silhouette of a bare branch against a sky that still has colour in it at the edges. The face of a person standing in autumn woodland with the light coming through the canopy behind them.

Fungi are extraordinary photographic subjects. They are low to the ground, so you can lie flat with your camera. The undersides of fungi, the gills and pores, are often as beautiful as the caps. A shaft of low October light through a beech wood, hitting a cluster of fungi on a fallen log, is the kind of photograph that requires patience and luck and then rewards both.

Mist is even more likely in October than in September. Valley mist, frost mist over water, and the particular low mist of a cold October morning are all worth getting up early for. The combination of autumn colour and mist in the same image is spectacular when it comes together.

Prompt: Spend one October morning photographing only things at ground level. Lie down to photograph them. A fallen leaf. A fungus. A puddle reflecting the canopy above. The base of a tree with roots, moss, and whatever is growing there. Spend at least an hour at this level. The world looks completely different from the ground, and you will see things you would never notice from standing height.

For woodland photography specifically, Mark Littlejohn’s landscape work in northern English and Scottish woodland handles autumn colour and mist with exceptional skill and is worth studying for compositional ideas.

Short Story: Thinning Boundaries

October’s folklore centres on Samhain and the idea of boundaries between worlds becoming thin. Across many cultures, late October is associated with the dead, with ancestors, with things that are not normally seen becoming briefly visible. Halloween is the commercial descendant of a very old and very widespread human impulse to mark this moment in the year.

You don’t need to write ghost stories to use this material. The more interesting territory, for fiction, is probably the psychological and emotional sense in which October thins boundaries. The way grief can feel closer in autumn. The way memories of people who are gone can feel more present when the light is low, and the leaves are falling, and the year is ending.

The Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos, celebrated on the 1st and 2nd of November, approaches this with a warmth and directness that is very different from the fear-based Halloween tradition. It is a celebration of the dead, an invitation for them to return briefly, a festival of memory and love rather than horror. That emotional tone is worth thinking about in October.

Prompt: Write a story of no more than 900 words set on a specific October day. A character encounters something, a place, an object, a smell, that connects them to someone or something from the past. The connection might be comforting or unsettling. Let the October landscape be actively present in the story. The falling leaves, the low light, and the smell of the air should be doing emotional work, not just providing a backdrop.

For fiction that handles grief, memory, and autumn landscape with great skill, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day has an autumnal quality throughout. Hilary Mantel’s short stories, collected in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, handle the uncanny and the ordinary with a precision that is worth studying.

Drawing: Fungi, Fallen Leaves, and the Forest Floor

The forest floor in October is one of the richest drawing subjects of the entire year. The layers of leaves at different stages of decay, the fungi emerging from fallen wood, the mosses and lichens on roots and stones, the whole complex ecology of the woodland floor is here and visible and waiting to be looked at properly.

Fungi are demanding drawing subjects because their colours and forms are so varied. The challenge is to capture both the structure and the texture. A parasol mushroom has a very different structure from an oyster mushroom or a cep. Getting the basic geometry right before adding detail is important with fungi, as it is with any botanical subject.

Fallen leaves at different stages of decay offer a different kind of drawing challenge. A fresh fallen leaf is still supple and full of colour. A leaf that has been on the ground for a week is beginning to curl and brown at the edges. A leaf from last year is a skeleton, just the veins remaining, translucent and delicate. Drawing that progression is a beautiful and meditative exercise.

Prompt: Collect a small selection of fallen leaves, a fresh one, one a few days old, and one that is partially decayed, if you can find one. Arrange them on a white surface and draw all three together as a still life. Pay attention to how the colour, texture, and form change at each stage. Then, alongside the leaves, draw one small fungi if you can find one to bring home safely, or draw from a photograph. Try to capture the difference in surface quality between a leaf and a fungus.

For drawing fungi specifically, the mycologist and illustrator Anna Aniskova produces extraordinarily detailed fungi illustrations, and her work is inspiring to look at alongside your own attempts. For the forest floor more broadly, Hannah Foley’s nature illustration beautifully captures the ecological complexity of woodland detail.

Baking and Seasonal Eating: Squash, Apples, Quince, and Wild Mushrooms

October is one of the great months for seasonal eating. The squash and pumpkin harvest is at its peak. Apples are in full season across almost all varieties. Quince, a fruit many people have never tasted, is appearing briefly at farm shops and farmers’ markets and is worth seeking out.

Quince cannot be eaten raw. It is hard, astringent, and quite unpleasant straight from the tree. But cooked, it transforms completely. The flesh turns from white to deep rose pink and develops a fragrant, complex flavour that is quite unlike anything else. Quince paste, also called membrillo, is one of the great things to make in October. It keeps for months and goes extraordinarily well with strong cheese. Felicity Cloake’s quince recipes in the Guardian are a reliable starting point.

Wild mushrooms, if you can forage or buy them, are at their best. A simple dish of wild mushrooms cooked slowly in butter with garlic and thyme on good toast is one of the best things you can eat in October. Cultivated mushrooms are a reasonable substitute, but if you can find chanterelles, ceps, or hedgehog mushrooms at a farmers’ market or specialist shop, they are worth paying for.

In the US, October brings the full apple harvest, the peak of the pumpkin season, and the beginning of the winter squash abundance. The Local Harvest website is excellent for finding farmers’ markets and seasonal produce near you across the US.

Recipe prompt: Make a roasted squash soup with warming spices, or make quince paste if you can find quinces. The squash soup is simple: roast a halved butternut or Crown Prince squash in olive oil with cumin and coriander seeds until soft and caramelised, then blend with stock and a little coconut milk. The colour is extraordinary, a deep amber-gold that looks like October itself. Serve it on a cold evening with good bread.

One Last Thing

There’s a tension in October between wanting to hold onto it and knowing you can’t. The colours are here, magnificent, and they are going. Every windy night takes more leaves. Every morning brings the trees a little closer to bare.

I’ve been thinking throughout this series about what it means to pay attention to the seasons. One thing I keep coming back to is that the seasons don’t need our attention to happen. They proceed perfectly well without us noticing. What changes when we pay attention is not the season. It’s us.

October is a month that teaches something about impermanence and acceptance and the particular beauty of things that are passing. The beech leaves are more beautiful because they are about to fall. The light is more extraordinary because there is less of it each day.

Stand in it. Look up at it. Let it be as beautiful as it is.

I’ll be back in November, when the leaves are largely gone and the year enters its quiet closing phase.

Previously: September. Next month: November and the quiet approach of winter.