filling the well

Julia Cameron talks a lot about “re-filling the well” in The Artist’s Way (a book I am sometimes embarrassed to reference given its vague whiff of second-wave feminism, but hey ho, as they say here instead of “oh well”). I’m pretty sure Annie Dillard describes a similar process in The Writing Life, and Natalia Ginsburg probably does in Writing Down the Bones, and all those other “how to be a writer” books that I have read and re-read over the years and committed to a half-memory that I tug around behind me as I write and erase and re-write and bemoan and try again.

“Re-filling the well,” as a metaphor, seems to get at the idea that we are drawing things up from our interior in order to make art — emptying the well, as it were — and that eventually, we spend it all, and the well is dry. This much tracks for me. There are seasons that feel juicy with creativity and seasons that feel like I’m scraping the barrel.

Maybe it’s my lack of well-drilling expertise, but to extend the metaphor, how exactly does one refill a well? It seems like the kind of thing that’s at least half out of your control, something to do with subterranean machinations and water emerging from below bedrock.

It’s mystified me in my writing life, too — like something half out of my control. I can make gestures towards it, but ultimately it’s groping in the dark, hoping to bump into whatever will spark that old energetic impulse to create. (I think it’s part of why I love reading books I find in little free libraries — like maybe the randomness of it will lead me somewhere I couldn’t have mapped out myself.)

In between month-long sprints of novel revision this summer, where I’ve been draining the metaphorical well at a clip, I’ve been feeling around a lot for what might re-fill it. Here’s what I’ve bumped into so far!

• Rediscovering that particular style of fiction that lists a bunch of seemingly random facts and weaves them into something else — in particular, The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan, but it’s reminding me of “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel, which is about telling a dying person a bunch of trivia that doesn’t matter, but also is the only way to talk.

"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it."

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on.

• Finally going to the National Gallery, only because my friend Rachel wanted to go, but then being overcome by her enthusiasm and delight and actually finding myself feeling things about paintings that made me think new things about novels! Let this be a lesson to me to remember I live in a major international city with free admission to museums, ya dweeb!!! (Just kidding, after much emotional labor on my part and the part of my loved ones, my internal monologue is really nice these days, so it’s more like “What a delight, you wonderful woman! How expansive and possible is the world!”)

• Visiting the Shell Grotto in Margate with Rachel and Taylor. Which despite its tourist trap exterior is WILD. It’s an unexplained underground cavern lined with literally thousands of shells in intricate patterns that was probably made by a weirdo in the 1830s, but still … WHY?!

  

  It was so fucking weird! It reminded me a lot of my experiences growing up — I feel like a LOT of my coming-of-age years were FULL of imagery that was extremely strange, to the point that putting it into fiction might feel heavy-handed or even twee (Garden State vibes, tbh), and yet … it was my life! I lived in a town where they had to pass an emergency anti-nudity ordinance to keep naked people from flooding the streets! My father started a crematorium and our garage was full of cardboard coffins! My mother worked the night shift and every night I drove her down a dirt road to her carpool meet-up and she went running off into the dark in her scrubs, scarfing a pre-shift Fast Break bar! I attended a school that had a fake mass grave at the edge of the school grounds as some kind of possibly apocryphal commemoration to dead settlers!

  Weird shit is what made me want to write fiction, but it’s also part of what I struggle with on the page. There’s a lot of fiction out there that feels like it’s “weird for weird’s sake,” or honestly just like it’s trying too hard to cram a bunch of interesting-seeming oddities into one story, and it takes a particular nuance to do it well that I’ve had to hunt down through one story at a time.

  AND YET! The Shell Grotto reminded me that it’s worth it. That a lot of these inexplicable oddities actually are the stuff of life. They’re sitting there right next to the Best Beano Cafe and they’ve got a front room full of cheap Etsy treats and yet you go down one staircase and you’re in a fucking other world. What magic! Why would someone make this?! Why wouldn’t they?!

Do you guys know this feeling? What fills your wells? I’m curious.