Clamouring to become visible...

This article first appeared on the Write Anything website on July 12, 2009. The original text can be found here. I was beginning to suffer a little from burn out on the Write Anything site, and was finding it difficult to come up with something to write about. This was my plea to the readership to find out what they wanted to read about.

Overdraft

In The Artist's Way Julia Cameron talks about something called "filling the well". All artistic endeavours draw heavily upon our artistic well. Each brushstroke, each paragraph, each performance is like pulling another bucket of nourishing water from the well.

Then one day, you drop the bucket down and instead of a splash, you hear a clunk. You've tapped the well for all it can give you. While you've been busy drawing on the well, you've done nothing to replenish the well.

That's what it feels like at the moment for me. I have neglected to replenish my well, existing on the artistic equivalent of the deep groundwater, overtaxing it and myself.

There are a number of things that you can do to refill your artist's well, and Julia Cameron's book is effectively a twelve week course in water resource management for the artist. One method of replenishing a well not mentioned however is time - leave the well alone, stop drawing on it, let it fill back up.

But wait, you cry - if we've followed the metaphor correctly, wouldn't that mean stopping writing altogether? Perhaps. But I think writers have different wells for different occasions, and it is one specific well that I'm thinking of letting lie fallow for a while. It is the well I draw on for inspiration for these articles.

And this is where you guys can help. I find that at the moment I can write when told what to write, but I'm finding it fiendishly difficult to come up with my own ideas. I know from looking at the webstats that we get a lot of hits daily, but only a handful of people leave comments. So either the majority of people are totally satisfied with what they've read and can add nothing further (which I doubt) or we're not inspiring and challenging people enough.

I need your ideas for things to write about.

For some months now we've been trying to enhance the interactivity of the site with the readership, and the best way to do this is through the comments. So lets start writing about what you the readers want to read about. What am I not talking about, that you desperately want to read about? What areas do you think are being ignored that you want to see explored? This may be my column, but it's your time I'm taking up expecting you to read this. That's an obligation on me to provide something worthwhile to you.

So lets hear from you out there, the silent visitors. Let's make this your site too. Talk to me.