The other day my sister, a fellow novelist, e-mailed me with news that her story had tanked, that her creativity seemed to be dry. My initial feeling was that since she had really nailed the last book, that this one seemed by comparison bland to her. She wrote a few thousand words but not something she thought anyone would want to read.

What she described was one of the many conditions that people refer to as ‘writer’s block.’ Most writer’s block seems to come from over imagining the work and having trouble connecting the threads as they multiply in the writer’s mind. When a work begins as something short and expands—as many novels and nonfiction books do—it can become difficult to stop it from snowballing into an unmanageable mass. Hence this form of ‘block’ is not a blockage at all, but a failure to manage the imagination—more like a traffic jam at an intersection than a roadblock.

While this classic form can be gotten around by writing more than one fiction work at a time, as this lady is doing as she writes novellas on the side while she does a series of full length novels as her main focus, ‘writers lag’ is an absence of something more intangible.

She has her characters sketched.

She has a compelling story.

She knows where it is going.

But her writer’s bucket is coming up dry from the well of inspiration that makes her characters rich, real, fun to read and fun to write.

Writers lag often comes from exhaustion, ill-health [see From Beyond A Dark Age Grave on the blog page], overwork, or emotionally draining distractions such as workplace stress.

How can you refill your inspirational well?

I have one answer that has worked well for me. As we are using the well metaphor—see how I set myself up for that Siss—realize that a well is filled indirectly. If not, it is something else, like a tank, a cistern, etc. Water seeps in from the surroundings. Just as a water well benefits from indirect input so does our imaginative one.

My answer to refilling my well has been fivefold:

1. Reading for craft, the works of an author you regard as much better than yourself.

2. Reading nonfiction on any subject, and then doing the mental exercise of trying to insert some aspect of that—I once read a self-help book on operating at flea markets and swap meets and got a Character out of it for a sci-fi novel.

3. Do something physically proactive to juice up your brain. This might be chemical. I hit people with sticks and stab them with dull knives. You might garden, or try to hit the bald spot on your husband’s head with the TV remote.

4. Get out around some people that will be talking and doing, people you don’t know too well. My part time poverty level job helps me here as I get to hear plenty of poorly constructed dialogue and see numerous exemplary examples of sloth.

5. Write some nonfiction! This works your writing craft, developing and honing skill. My site is very beneficial for this. I am writing this piece now because I am switching from writing the character Yusuf [over-sexed bandit and thief] to writing Abd al-Latif [celibate, drug-addicted doctor]. If you have lost interest in, or more likely contact with, your character find something you are always interested in [like your weird-ass hybrid pet chickens], and write about them. The trick is, to write them in such a way that your Neanderthal chicken-eating brother would actually be swayed to bypass the KFC on his way through the ghetto today.

Good luck with your story.