Dry Spell

Every writer has dry spells.

It’s hard to know how to weather them. Do I turn my attention elsewhere and take the pressure off? Do I hunker down and push through?

My well has felt empty for weeks. The words come but they get stuck in my mouth. They don’t seem important, or relevant, or impressive. Why should anybody care?

I sit down at this computer first thing in the morning, and I have nothing to say. I pull up my long-stalled memoir, and I feel stuck. I inhibit myself. I can’t get out of my own way. So I am silent.

I fear I am tapped out.

In fact, my mind is jumbled with worry: the fear of never finding (or wanting to find) a real job; the encroaching anxiety over E’s beginning college hunt.

If I were a more disciplined writer, I could remove myself from these real life worries and produce work. Alas, I need a fallow mind. I need to be surrounded by little more than air and trees, sea and sound, for creative energy to emerge.

Yesterday, sitting in the warm spring sun with a cup of steaming lemon tea, I could feel some words come, like a thin trickle of water moistening the parched well bottom. I sat. I watched the birds. I stroked the dog. I didn’t force myself to put them down.

They kept coming. Faster. Rushing.

I grabbed a pen and paper. I wrote a page. Got them all down. Quenched a thirst.

This morning, they stare at me from the page.