Filling the Well During Pandemics

 There's a term I learned at the Odyssey Writing Workshop years ago--filling the well. It means, essentially, that you fill your life with experience, ideas, moments, and anything that will go on to serve as story fodder. In the past I've used, as inspiration: things my son has said, new places I've visited (like a Yucatan cenote), current events, strong emotions that stuck with me. Now, this isn't to say you should do things for the sake of writing stories. But anything can become an idea, which can become a story.

Devil's Punchbowl on Oregon Coast

What happens during a pandemic, though? For the better part of a year and a half, I found my world vastly constricted. I worked, I went home, I hurried through my shopping. I no longer lingered in coffee shops, writing new words or overhearing interesting conversations. I no longer ventured out to new places. I no longer met up with friends. I continued to dip into the well, but I wasn't putting much back into it.

One of my goals for this year was to write twelve short stories. I've written nine, and this month I tried writing the tenth. I came at it one way, then another, moving from a humorous satire to something much darker. Neither worked. I finish much of what I write, but not everything. I coax my stories along, but sometimes it feels more like I'm beating my head against the wall, and when I reach that point, as I did with this story, I reluctantly stop. I have to admit to myself that I might not reach that desired number twelve. I have to remind myself that, while I've done some traveling and returned to the dojo this year, I have not yet returned to normal, and I'm trying to draw on a well that is still running low.

What I'm going to do instead is finish up George Saunder's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which he shares some of what he teaches his students about the greats in Russian literature. I am listening to it as an audiobook, which I'm really enjoying. Different narrators read the stories, and Saunders himself, with a wry bit of humor from time to time, reads his lessons. I find listening to the stories and to Saunders seems to let the lessons and the words themselves seep in better. Already I'm looking at my own fiction a little differently, and I'm looking at what I read a little differently.

This week I wrote in a coffeeshop for the first time in nearly two years. It was absolute bliss, even if I set aside what I wrote because it wasn't working. I'm going to do that again, toy around with some ideas, absorb the conversations I overhear, and people watch. I'm going to fill the well a little more, and then try again. It's all any of us can do.

Epiphany on the Treadmill

It's been a while since my last update on this blog (she says in the tone she uses in the confessional). I wrote what felt like a hundred guest blog posts when my novel Fractured Days came out, and I was just all blogged out. And, it's summer, which means I have the kiddo at home on my days off from the day job, which means I don't get a whole lot of writing time unless it's while he's in swimming lessons or after he's gone to sleep. And on the days I work, forget it. I usually come home with mushy brain. For a while there, I felt like my brain was on strike.

But this week I've been remembering my dreams, and my subconscious has been stirring even when I'm awake. Like this morning, on the treadmill, it dumped a huge plot solution into my head. I whooped, stopped the treadmill to note it in my phone, and then resumed my workout. The ironic thing is, I had just been thinking about how often people do funny things at the gym, then there I go, doing a funny thing at the gym.

Normally, I can write a minimum of a thousand new words a day, plus fit in other writing tasks, like editing another piece or blogging or critiquing or updating my website, and so on. But there are lulls in my ability to Achieve It All, and summer is a big one. I love spending time with my kiddo and hanging out at the pool or the botanical gardens or the library or wherever we feel like going while other people have to work (nana nana boo boo) but it means cutting back on writing stuff. Then at the summer's end, I feel like I have to spend some time priming the pump to get it all flowing again.

But this summer, I decided that instead of an all-or-none approach, I would simply cut back, do what I could, and be happy with it, and... I think it worked. I managed to nurture my writer self just enough to keep that part of me content and productive, as evidence by the eureka moment on the treadmill in front of a hundred or so strangers.

Incidentally, I have nicknames for the regulars at the gym, like Stomper (I'm waiting for his knees to blow out on the treadmill), Clanker (I'm waiting for his back to blow out on a machine), Coach, Joined-at-the-Hip (for a couple), Mr. Perfect (he does a hanging leg raise with super controlled scissor kicks and has fantastic flexibility), and many others. After today, I'm sure they all have a nickname for me if they didn't have one already--Weird Chick. But at least I'm a weird chick with an idea.