Refilling the Writing Well

 I’m reading “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway and he talks about his writing routine, including how he would stop writing when he knew what was going to happen next so that the following day he could easily pick up where he had left off. He also said this:

“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

To get to that deep level of writing Hemingway is talking about, you need to spend sufficient time to drop down into the writing, to enter a state similar to meditation. I’ve been writing for a long time; I wrote my first story was when I was seven years old. But I have seldom had long periods in which all I did was write; I’ve almost always also been in school or working, which meant my natural writing flow and routine were interrupted and had to fit in around my life.

But there have been two periods when I was between jobs and able to focus solely on my writing. Both lasted about six-eight weeks. This was before I had children, so I was able to wake up, go to my desk, and work whenever and however I wanted. And this is what I learned about my “writing well.”

Other writers have used the well as a metaphor for where the stories and images and words come from. Because these things often feel submerged and brought forth or dug up in some way. But writing also feels like a muscle to me. During both of these concentrated writing periods, when I started out I produced less (four-five pages) than I did toward the end of those times (eight-ten pages). My endurance built up until I reached my natural, comfortable rate of production, which seemed to be in the eight-ten pages range.

Unlike Hemingway, I did not stop when I knew what was going to happen next, or not exactly. I would write an entire chapter/section during each sitting. I often knew what the next chapter/section was going to be, so in that sense I knew what was going to happen next, but I also liked the feeling of completion before I stood up from my desk. Eight-ten pages, in addition to being a comfortable amount of pages to produce, also corresponded to roughly a chapter for me.

There were a few chapters/sections that were longer than the others, 18-20 pages or thereabouts. And on those days I would push through to complete the writing, because for me it’s always better to get through a whole first draft and fix it later. If I stop part of the way through, as it seems Hemingway did, it is harder for me to reenter that dreamy/zone-like state.

Those few times when I wrote past my natural limits, it was fatiguing, the way running too long and pushing your body too far are fatiguing, only the exhaustion was in my mind and somewhere else. I guess that place was the well. I would feel empty for two-three days after a big push, and despite any will or discipline or intention on my part, I could not produce until I was filled up again. It felt a lot like muscle fatigue. And during those times I would read, work out, watch movies. Sometimes I could make notes, but I just could not write. I had nothing left in me.

So I think Hemingway is probably right that it’s smart to not empty the well, although I was always too scared to risk losing the thread of the chapter to stop partway. Maybe if I get another concentrated writing time I will experiment and see what it’s like to try his method.

One other thing I found interesting…once I was done with my day’s writing, and that usually was sometime between 12-3 p.m., depending on when I had started and how well the writing had gone, I would then go work out, shower, eat lunch, etc. And I would try to turn off my writing brain, think about other things. It was always when I was distracted (and most often when I was showering) that the perfect idea or solution to a problem I had encountered in the book would come to me. Maybe showers help refill the well too.