Filling the Well

A few years back when I took a break from writing, I was very conscious of a need to stop and "fill the well". To put it bluntly, I was out of ideas.

Well, that's not exactly accurate. I had plenty of story ideas but creating the scenes to develop them seemed beyond me. I guess you could say my creative well had gone dry.

Discussions about "filling your well" were all the rage so I set off to fill mine.

A few years later, I'm thinking that what I really did was just take my tendency to procrastinate to a whole new level.

Filling my well was probably just a cool sounding excuse for not writing. Nope, can't work on those revisions right now, I'm filling my creative well. Haven't written anything new in months? Not a problem, I was filling the well.

Based on the time I took off, my well should be overflowing.

But when I sat down to write this week (mid-winter vacation) the scenes still weren't there.

I got past it, but the experience got me to wondering about all that time filling the well.

What does it really mean to fill your well?

The meaning of the expression is obvious, but as I would ask my students - What does it look like?

I used to think that filling your well had to be about relaxing, exploring new and good things, being uplifted, but lately I've been thinking it's more about filling your life with rich experiences.

But what of the experiences that sap your energy? Do they count?

There's a lot of discussion in education about authentic learning and making connections between words and life.

I think filling your well with varied experiences - good and bad - makes for far more authentic writing.

And now I'm off to fill my well watching Hugh Jackman host the Oscars.

So how do you fill your well?