“The important thing is to have good water in the well,” Hemingway once told The Paris Review. When I write and write and write until I’m spent, it may take some serious time to recover the energy, the creativity, or the productivity that I experienced so intensely.

Better to leave off somewhere, Hemingway suggests, than “to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.”

For me, leaving water in the well is all about momentum and reducing friction for myself. When things are going smoothly, I sometimes get nervous that they’ll never be this easy again. I hang around, glue myself in place as long as I can! It rarely turns out well.

Instead, I try to trust that the next writing session might be okay, too. And I can help myself transition in and out of a writing flow.

Writing Prompt

These ideas are more strategies than prompts, but they might change how you write—and how you feel about your writing—this week.

• Leave yourself homework in drafts. In some publishing practices, the letters TKTKTK are used as a placeholder for anything “to come.” (“TK” is not a common letter combination in English, making it all the easier to locate and fix before printing.) Don’t stop or get lost researching details when it might derail your momentum.
• Don’t finish the sentence. Seriously. If I’m experiencing resistance on a bigger project, I make myself wrap up by leaving mid-thought—even midsentence. Then the next time I sit down with my draft, I reread the start of that sentence and am propelled to finish the thought… and look! I’m writing again. Gotcha, Caitie!
• Outline. Sometimes a loose plan is good enough. Do you know what the next section is supposed to be about? Great! Leave the outline right at the bottom of your document or notes. Then you’ll know your entry point to the work for next time.
• Write yourself a prompt. Sometimes I don’t know exactly where I’m headed, but I’ve got something I want to try. At the end of my work, I’ll leave myself some instructions for next time:
  • “Try to tie idea x to that story you told at the top of the piece.”
  • “Talk about that thing you read last week, and see what happens.”
  • “Say more about that very last idea you brought up. What do you want people to know about it?”