How to Never Have a Writing Dry Spell

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. — Ray Bradbury

Found this quote tucked away in my commonplace book.

The phrase “dry spell” showed up in America around 1885. It started as a weather word. A stretch with no rain, long enough to hurt but not long enough to call a drought. We borrowed it later for the head.

When I hear it I see cracked ground. That gray, split, tired dirt you find at the edge of a field in August. You can’t plant in it. Seed just sits on top and waits for something that isn’t coming.

Bradbury says he never had one. Then he tells you why, and it isn’t talent.

“Mainly because I feed myself well.”

Look at what he eats

Poems. Essays. Plays. Stories. Novels. Films. Comic strips. Magazines. Music.

That is not one food group. Those are nine different ways of putting an idea into a person, and he’s taking all of them.

My kids do this without trying. A picture book in the morning, a song on repeat for six days, a movie they’ve already seen four times. They don’t check whether something is useful before they let it in.

I check. I reach for nonfiction almost every time, because that’s what I’m drawn to, and because some part of me wants the idea handed over plainly instead of buried in a story.

But what’s hiding in a children’s picture book? What’s sitting in a poem nobody has read since 1870? What would my mind do with a poem from the 1800s, a magazine from the 80s, and Hamlet all in the same week?

Nothing, if they never meet.

Quite a lot, if they do.

He explodes every morning

Notice he didn’t say his mind stays moist. He didn’t say he keeps a little damp going so he can get by.

He says he explodes. Like Old Faithful.

That’s what happens when you take in more than you can hold. Pressure builds, and pressure has to go somewhere. It isn’t a mood. It’s physics.

Feeding your mind heats it up. Keep feeding it and it stops being a question of whether something comes out. It only becomes a question of where.

Which means the real problem is almost never that you have no ideas.

It’s that you have no outlet.

Writing carves the tunnel

My first thought was that writing is the tunnel. That’s close, but it’s not quite right.

Writing carves the tunnel.

Here’s the part that stopped me. A geyser’s plumbing is built by its own water. Hot water rising through the rock dissolves silica, and that silica settles back out along the walls of the cracks, coating them, sealing them, making them nearly pressure tight.

The water lays down the pipe it travels through.

Every eruption builds the next one.

That’s what a writing practice is. Your first year leaks everywhere. Nothing holds. You take in something good and it drains sideways into nothing before you ever get to use it. Keep going anyway and the walls firm up. The channel starts holding pressure. You get to a point where you can feel an idea arriving and you already know where it’s going to come out.

You didn’t get more talented. You built plumbing.

What ideas do you think might be trapped in your mind, waiting for that tunnel of writing?

P.S. I built Ember for the feeding part, and for what comes after.

It’s a commonplace book and a journal in one place. You save what you come across, the poem and the comic strip and the line from a novel you almost didn’t finish, and Ember keeps it somewhere you’ll actually run into it again. The home screen hands you back one thing at a time instead of a pile. Related Sparks shows you what you saved last spring has to do with what you saved this morning.

That’s the meeting I was talking about up there. The poem from the 1800s and the magazine from the 80s, finally in the same room.

And when the heat builds, the journal is sitting right next to it.

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