Novelist comfortable after spine drained (6)

'novelist' is the definition.
Both the answer and definition are singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see a link between them that I don't see?

'comfortable after spine drained' is the wordplay.
'comfortable' becomes 'well' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'after' is a charade indicator (letters next to each other).
'drained' says to hollow out the word (remove centre letters).
'spine' with its centre removed is 'se'.
'well' put after 'se' is 'SEWELL'.

Can you help me to learn more?