Well of Writing

The Well of Writing names a discipline of creative restraint: a writer should stop before the available material is exhausted, trusting that rest will replenish what the next day’s work requires. The image turns a practical routine into a model of composition, linking the continuation of writing to stored resources and their gradual renewal.

The Rule and Its Image

The narrator says he had learned never to empty the well of his writing, but to stop while something remained deep within it. The distinction is not between working and refusing to work; it is between using up every available impulse and preserving enough to continue. The well’s depth matters: what remains is not necessarily ready to be drawn at once, but it is still present beneath the day’s labor.

The image also gives the practice a rhythm of replenishment. At night, the well refills from the springs that feed it. Renewal is therefore not described as a fresh act of effort, but as something that can happen when the writer leaves the work alone. The rule makes stopping part of composition rather than a break from it.

Protecting the Pause

The practice belongs to a wider routine for keeping work from becoming an object of anxious, continuous thought. After writing, the narrator found it necessary to read: if he kept thinking about the work, he might lose the thing he needed in order to continue the next day. Exercise could tire the body, and making love with someone he loved was described as better than anything; afterward, when he felt empty, reading helped keep worry about the work at a distance until he could return to it.

Reading thus has a particular function in the cycle. It follows the work, but does not require the writer to keep working on it mentally. The narrator sometimes chose contemporary writers, including Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, from books available at Sylvia Beach’s library or found along the quais. This reading was a way to occupy attention without drawing further on the unfinished work.

Conversation and Creative Continuity

When he had not been away on reporting trips, the narrator sometimes stopped at 27 rue de Fleurus after work and tried to get Gertrude Stein to talk about books. Stein’s response to his reading could be sharply dismissive: she called Huxley a dead man and asked why he wanted to read him. That exchange places the private discipline of the well beside a social encounter in which reading becomes a subject for judgment and conversation.

The governing idea remains the narrator’s own account of how to protect the next day’s writing. Its force lies in the carefully limited promise of the metaphor: the well is not declared inexhaustible, only capable of refilling if it is not emptied. Creative continuity depends on leaving something in reserve.