How to Fill Your Creative Well as a Writer

Athena Dixon on how having a well-rounded writing practice can foster creativity

A few years ago, I found myself at a crossroads. I wanted to write. I needed to write. But I couldn’t. I’d find myself in front of my laptop staring at the screen, the cursor blinking, and nothing would form. I couldn’t even write a sentence to revise. I was completely and utterly stuck. As the months passed, nothing changed, and I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to get out of the hole. A friend, one creating in a completely different genre as a musician, told me my problem was I was pulling and pulling from my creative well and putting nothing back in. I’d finally hit the last drops and without change I would continue to run dry.

I’d never thought about writing as a well. If that was what existed inside me, it had always been an infinite source I could pull from whenever and however I wanted. Many years of my writing process worked exactly like this. I wanted to write and so I sat down with a blank screen or a blank page and the words would just come. I’d grown accustomed to overwriting and boundless curiosity that I never truly worried would end. Until one day the words didn’t come, and I found myself scrambling to figure out how I’d lost my words. Except I hadn’t really lost them. I just needed to figure out a new way to get the words from my brain onto the paper and make sure I had the tools to adjust if I found myself in the same situation again. Fixing a problem I didn’t realize I had required me to change the way I thought about my creative process. Two new approaches helped me fill up the empty creative well inside me until before I knew it the words were flowing again.

Input vs. Output: For most of my years writing I only considered my practice as output. And even though I was reading, watching movies, listening to music, and collecting art, I hadn’t considered these integral parts of how I created. I could always see the beauty in all of it, but I hadn’t given much thought to the ways the artists had created them and how our paths as artists of all ilk ran parallel. When I hit that wall, I had to rethink that.