When the ideas won't come ...
What a dry season taught me about recharging the writing life
It’s been dry, and it’s been dry earlier, it seems, than normal. I’m used to a stretch of weeks in midsummer when the heat is high and the rainfall is low. We might get a couple of thunderstorms that do nothing to alleviate the heat or to raise the water table, drying out gardens and making the lawn crunch under bare feet, but that’s supposed to be in July. This year, April showers never really arrived. To use one of Grammy’s phrases, it really didn’t do more than “spit rain” all month. What rain did fall wouldn’t fill a toddler’s sippy cup.
It maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise that the mountain caught fire by the end of the month. Heavy smoke lingered over the valley as acres of South Mountain burned. Firefighters - mostly volunteers - worked through the night to contain flames while nearby residents watched, working to contain their fears. By comparison, the fire on our mountain was small when you look at the devastation from California fires earlier this year. I suppose, though, that the size of the fire is immaterial if your house is in its path.
The past 18 months or so have been the longest period in my adult life since elementary school that I haven’t written consistently. Middle school book reports and research projects morphed into high school papers and essay exams. College and seminary developed longer-form writing skills that had to be all but unlearned to fit what the public needed to know into a 12 column inch story on a zoning issue before the borough council.
For decades, my writing emerged from one of two centers. One was intermittent writing for blogs and church. The other, more prolific center, was through my work at local newspapers. There, I wrote about such a variety of subjects that I was never at a loss for things to write about. Story ideas stared me in the face everyday. A “for sale” sign goes up on a local business? Let’s find out what’s going on. I notice that the presidents of the four colleges in our county are women? Let’s do a feature story. The scanner calls out for a possible shooting on a holiday weekend? Guess who’s spending the holiday standing near a police scene.
I didn’t know what I wanted to write outside of the guidelines of the daily newspaper grind. I didn't know how to write without an assignment. So, I took an intentional break from writing. I fully intended to get back to writing after dreaming it all up again. I took classes, went to retreats and conferences, and dove headfirst into reading in an attempt to recharge my creativity. I even wrote an optimistic post that declared I was about ready to write again.
Those plans went up in smoke. The ideas weren't there. The well had run dry.
When we say that a well runs dry, we don’t always mean that it’s completely dry. More often that not, the water level of the well has dropped below the level at which the pump can be effective. If that’s the case, the water levels will come back as the well is recharged and the pump will again be effective. That’s not to say there isn’t trouble in the meantime. A pump might need to be lowered, an alternative water supply found, or the well may need to be dug deeper.
But what makes a writer’s well run dry? How can my brain be overflowing with ideas in one season and completely blank the next? And, what really recharges creativity?
Find an alternative form of expression. One of the small joys I have found in this dry spell is a love of poetry. I haven’t been prolific in any way, but I would see prompts offered in different online spaces and worked at putting something to paper. That set my mind to thinking about words. Forcing the words into forms like tanka or haiku fires the vocabulary synapses even better. It made me think about the economy of phrasing and the sound of flowing words.
Lower expectations. One thing that held me back from jumping into writing again was my own expectations. If I wanted to keep doing the Substack thing, I had to have something to write about every week. I wanted to have more people reading what I wrote. What if I scale that back? Maybe I can write every other week or once a month - and take whatever readers may come along. What if I write just for myself and never share it? Does that count?
Dig deeper. I’ve found that the writing that most intrigues me comes from writers who are willing to dig more deeply than I have been willing to go. You can get away with that - and it is, in fact encouraged - if you’re writing purely with a journalism framework. Personal essays, poetry, short stories, and even novels ask more of you as a writer. Am I willing to dig deeply enough to uncover the heart of what I need to say?
Be consistent. Just as water levels in a well can’t be maintained without rain and snow, the art of writing can’t be maintained without doing the writing. I admittedly made a mistake when I took such a long break from writing. It was easier to fall out of practice than I ever dreamed it would be. I never thought it would be so hard to look at a blank screen or to even summon up the desire to write. For months after my intentional break, that desire had disappeared and I didn’t know what to do with that. As I’ve slowly been working my way back into my writing space (so to speak), I’ve been more comfortable with finding satisfaction in even one well-written sentence or a short piece of a poem to tuck away for future work.
It’s been rainy and stormy these first few days of May. It’s helped contain the mountain fires. It’s helped the grass grow, and has given my raised garden beds a good start although I’m sure meteorologists would tell us we’ve not put the danger of drought behind us.
But, it’s a start.
And, sometimes, starting is the best thing we can do.