WIHM: Replenishing The Inkwell

By Sonora Taylor

 

This post originated from an apology. When I contacted The Horror Tree about writing a post for Women in Horror Month, Stuart Conover asked me what my pitch was. I waited for inspiration to strike. I waited for a long time.

 

Three weeks later, I emailed Stuart back and apologized for letting my reply slip by the wayside, since I’d had such a busy month. My busy month included surgery to remove my gallbladder, and the ducks I was getting in a row were the ones I’d let swim while I was in recovery.

 

Stuart, of course, said no apology was needed and it was understandable I needed that time to recover. Still, my guilt over letting a reply slip was a manifestation of guilt I’d been feeling throughout 2019, thanks to my writing slowing down.

 

In writing my apology, I got an idea for what to write about: the necessity of writers to take time off from writing when they need to. The credo we hear — and one I admit to promoting in the past — is to write every day. Writers write! You aren’t a writer if you don’t write.

 

I’d been hearing that credo in my brain through a good chunk of 2019, because it was the first year since I got back into writing seriously that I felt my writing was beginning to run dry.

 

Don’t get me wrong: I wrote. I wrote flash pieces for Spreading the Writer’s Word’s monthly flash picture prompt challenge, I completed stories for my most recent short story collection, Little Paranoias; and I started and finished my third book, a novella called Seeing Things. The completion of these things, though, took longer than I thought they should. I thought for sure I’d finish Seeing Things in three months, given the length I had in mind. It took me closer to six.

 

When I sat down to write, I felt like I’d run dry. I had ideas, so many ideas. They swam in my head and I could just see them completed, see the characters doing what they needed to do to get their story told. But I, the author, couldn’t do what I needed to do to tell that story.

 

2019 was hard. My husband had his second surgery in as many years, my father-in-law died, and we became homeowners. Buying our first home was much happier stress than grieving and recovery, but it was still stress. I actually broke out in hives shortly after the closing date, the first time that’s ever happened to me. These three things were on top of the day-to-day of working full-time, visits, travel, and general drama that would pop up here and there.

 

And still, when I’d sit down to write, I’d wonder why I felt all dried up.

 

I spent a lot of 2019 frustrated that I couldn’t sit down and write for long stretches of time. Seeing Things was written in bursts. Sometimes I’d crank out over 1000 words, but many days, I’d only produce a few hundred. If you’re reading and thinking, geez Sonora, that’s still a lot, I was coming from my first two novels being written in bursts of 1000-2000 words a day. I wrote the hell out of those books. Seeing Things took a lot longer, and a lot more will on my part to sit down and write it.

 

Seeing Things is with my editor, and I normally use this time to work on a short story. I’ve started one I’ve been brewing an idea for for months, currently called Algorithms Always Remember Your Birthday. I spent one evening working on it and haven’t picked it back up yet.

 

I miss the feeling of just having to work on something, but I’ve also, finally, reached a place of being somewhat at peace with slowing down. I used the holidays and my break from Seeing Things to reflect on how I felt when I couldn’t write: dry. I felt like an inkwell in need of replenishing. And I’ve realized now that sometimes to replenish the inkwell, I need to step back and not force myself to write. Has a dry inkwell or pen ever improved by continued writing? Of course not. When we scribble a pen run dry to try and get more ink, we usually just end up with no ink and a lot of frustration. That’s how we writers can end up if we don’t take the time to replenish the well.

 

I’m in an ebb. I’ll get back into a flow again. I tell myself this so I don’t sit and worry when I should be resting. And I do find moments to write and take time here and there to tell a story. At the end of the day, the story will be told. Seeing Things may have taken longer, but it still got done. It will get done. The story will get done — and it will get done when it’s supposed to do.

 

You are a writer if you write. But that doesn’t mean you have to write at your expense. Take your time, and the time you desire; and the story will present itself.