​The Dry Well​

Hello Reader,

Let's start this week with a story, shall we?

The Blackwood Hills Horror

October 15^th 1963

A rare moment of quiet had fallen over the Blackwood Hills Asylum for the Mentally Deficient. Grady Hawk took that moment to light up a Winston. He inhaled deeply, relishing the taste and the nicotine hit. Reminded him of that summer down in Arkansas, his first girlfriend, his first kiss, and his first taste of a cigarette.

There was that faint, dull ache in his chest, happened every time he thought of Dorothy and that summer. Seemed to him that such a brief slice of his life shouldn’t hold such importance in his memories, and yet…

And yet, here he was, eleven years later. Dorothy had long since disappeared from his life, and all his youthful dreams had disappeared with her. Sometimes, in the very few peaceful moments he had, he wondered where she was, who she might be married to, and did she have children?

Forever embalmed in his memories as the beautiful, sexy teenager she had once been, Dorothy probably looked very different now. Yeah, probably fat, with pale, flaccid flesh like uncooked dough, and a face covered in blotchy red spots. But Hawk doubted it. That was a description of his Rita, that was. Maybe she hadn’t been the sexpot that Dorothy was when Hawk first met her, but she had been good looking enough. At first, anyway.

His big mistake had been asking her to marry him, that’s what he reckoned. Seemed like she’d hardly taken that wedding dress off before she started piling on the pounds. Like she’d got herself a man now, so why bother making an effort any longer?

Hawk flicked ash on the floor. Leaned back in his chair and placed his feet on the desk. His starched uniform rustled with the movement.

‘Blood wolf! Blood wolf!’

‘All right, Audrey, less of that,’ Hawk said. ‘I ain’t got the time or the patience.’

Audrey shifted on her knees in her cage. She peered at Hawk from beneath her long, dark hair hanging over her face. Looked like she was wearing a black veil that had been shredded into strips.

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The Dry Well

I've spent the last few weeks living in other people's sentences.

Editing other authors' work.

Track changes. Margin notes. Reading a paragraph for the fourth time, trying to hear it the way its author intended before I decide whether it's working. When you edit for a living, you spend your days lending your ear to someone else's voice — untangling their rhythm, protecting their intention, sometimes rebuilding a scene from the inside so it still feels like theirs when you're done.

It's good work.

But it leaves a mark.

Because when I finally sit down to write something of my own, the well is dry.

Not empty, exactly — more like it's been filled with someone else's water. I can hear other authors' voices more clearly than my own right now. I can spot the structural wobble in a stranger's third act from fifty pages away, and I can't produce one honest sentence about what I actually want to say.

If you've ever felt this — the specific fatigue of creative labor without creative replenishment — you're not broken, and you're not alone. It's an occupational hazard for anyone whose craft involves other people's words: editors, coaches, teachers, ghostwriters.

I know authors who struggle to write because they have a day job that involves a great deal of writing, and by the time they get home of an evening the last thing they want to do is sit down and write more. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't. They're not just exhausted, but that specific part of their brain that is used in creative writing is exhausted.

We talk a lot about writer's block as a failure of inspiration. Prolific author Bernard Cornwell debunked this in an interview in The Spectator, saying, ‘Nurses don’t get up in the morning and think, “I won’t go to work today because I’ve got nurse’s block”. If they can go to work every day, then so can I.’

I get his point. The term 'writer's block' is often used a lazy way of justifying simply not wanting to do the work.

This is something else. It's not that the well ran out, (to return to the dry well metaphor), it's that you've been drawing from it all week for someone else's garden.

Or, to stick with the nursing angle, it's not that you don't want to go in to work, but you've been up all night caring for your elderly, sick mother.

There's a version of this essay where I tell you the trick to fixing it — five prompts to unstick yourself, a ritual to reclaim your voice by Friday. I don't have that today. Posts like that do have their place, but not today.

What I have instead is a smaller, stranger comfort: sometimes the block is the material.

This post exists because I sat down with nothing to say and decided to write about having nothing to say. That's an old trick — the writing about not-writing — but it works because it's honest, and honesty is the one ingredient that never runs dry, even when imagination does. The shadows this newsletter is named for aren't just gothic set dressing. They're the hidden, unglamorous corners of the process: the drafts that don't work, the weeks the well won't fill, the days your only real material is the fact that you're stuck.

So if you're an editor, a coach, a critique partner — anyone who spends their creative currency on other people's stories — here's what I'm telling myself this week: the exhaustion isn't evidence that you're not a real writer anymore. It's evidence that you did real work.

It's evidence that you are tired.

The well refills. It always has. Usually it starts with something small and unglamorous, like this — three hundred words about being stuck, written instead of a post about the shapes of stories or wrestling with words.

Not every entry needs to arrive polished and full. Some of them just need to arrive.

If you're in a dry spell right now, I'd love to hear about it. What does your version of the drained well look like — and what, if anything, have you found that helps you wait it out?

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Thanks for reading! I just wanted to let you know that paid members of Writing in the Shadows get a story every week. Coming soon they are going to be getting a Zine once a month too. Paid members also get free access to the archive, and to some of my ebooks.

If you've been thinking about a paid membership then now is the time to join, as prices are going up soon. But all current members are locked in forever at the price they originally paid.

Find out more here.

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Currently Reading

I am loving this biography of Victorian newspaper editor WT Stead. I may write a blog post about him soon.

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Movies Watched This Week

Watching 365 movies in 2026

178​ Incredible musical numbers and cinematography by Bob Fosse.

179​ Fun, self aware Jaws ripoff.

180​ I need to watch everything David Lynch directed again and all the other films referenced in this documentary. Maybe I will one day, somewhere over the rainbow.

181​ Very good anthology, but one or two stories letdown by weak endings.

182​ Fred Willard is very funny in this.

183​ Brilliantly structured movie and lovely cinematography.

184​ Brilliant police procedural.

185​ It's not Do the Right Thing

186​ Only Sterling Hayden could make a wink look that cold.

187​ Completely insane.

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