That’s right! What better time to work on your Christmas novel or how-to or whatever genre you write in than at the time you can take in the sights, smells, and aura of the Christmas season. Even if you are writing fiction, you still want your story to be believable and feel real.

So, here are a few tips:

Gather 5 sheets of paper. Write a different sense on the top of each: sights, sounds, tastes, touch, and smell. Every day, try to think over your day and remember at least ONE sense in each category and write a description of it. (For example, sight: “snowflakes drifting down like paper from an oversized shredding machine in the sky” or touch: “cold fruit cake sliding down my throat like a lumpy slug”… you get the point.) If you are SUPER dedicated, you can take a pad around with you and take notes after you experience things.

Pay attention to relationships, conversations, and anything to do with people interactions. Make notes about it. “The tension in the air as Grandma handed Seth and his new boyfriend the punchbowl. Somehow everyone had forgotten to tell the old-fashioned matriarch that Seth had come out this year.”

Look for something good in everything “bad.” Great-Aunt Bethel gives you an ugly sweater for the tenth year in a row? Write out your rage about it. Maybe a character in your next story will have the same experience (and many readers will be able to sympathize). John and Dave have their political fight (like they have since the last election). Take notes. Maybe not on the words, but the tension, the awkwardness, the attempts at moving on and peacemaking, etc. Anything bad can be good fodder for future stories.

You get the picture. Even if you are not going to write a Christmas/holiday novel per se, having these descriptions, images, bits of dialog, etc. might be just what you need in a chapter of another work. Or just something to jog your memory.

And this isn’t just something I recommend doing only for the Christmas season. Make a habit of paying attention to little things. Tuning in to your senses and relationships. Write 200-word essays about things around you: the sights, smells, feel, etc. of your favorite coffee shop; the bleakness and quiet desperation at the local homeless shelter; the snootiness and cliques visibly evident at your teen’s high school; and on and on.

Even if you only use 1% of what you write out to spruce up a future story, it will have been worth it. And furthermore, you will have gained a skill that not many writers have: being able to size up a situation using all five sense with just a few moments of observation.

Happy looking, listening, feeling, smelling, tasting, and writing! May your books burst with the feel of reality and move your readers to recommend it to their friends and pick up your next book and the one after that... and so on.