Have you ever noticed, those of you who are writers, that at that moment when you’re just about to go to sleep, or should be going to sleep, you suddenly get struck with inspiration that’s so good you can’t wait until morning, partially for fear of forgetting it, to at least start it. So you get out the computer at 1:20 in the morning and you start writing and once you start you can’t very well stop, so by 3:00am you have several pages of something, and a twitching eye from lack of sleep.
This is just one of the reasons I do a lot of writing at night. The other thing is, I have nothing else to do. That really is an awful thing to say since I do spend a good bit of my day playing stupid flash games and watching anime, but that’s far beside the point. Once it gets to that point of ‘yeah, I should probably go to bed’ I usually have run out of ways to procrastinate, and I figure, I haven’t written anything all day… I should probably write something, just to make sure I did at least something. So I start writing. I think ‘I’ll just write a paragraph… or two… or three… and soon I’ve gone off and done something productive and it’s way later than I wanted to be up.
This is the problem with being a procrastinator; you think all day ‘I have time, I can do it in a little while’ and by the time you get around to it it’s very late. But, sometimes it can’t be helped. Sometimes you need to be in that half asleep, gotta get this done, mode before anything can come out of that bizarre little brain of yours. For example: I wrote my best story ever three nights in a row. I finished it at 4:20 in the morning. That might have also been because that was before I had a lap top and night was the only time my sister wasn’t barging in demanding, “It’s my turn!”
Another theory I have is that it’s the moons pull on a writer’s brain that allows them to be more creative at night. That’s completely ridiculous, though and only a writer would come up with it. Is it like this for other artists? Do you work better late at night?
Pretty much. Although I have found that for writing, if I have the right atmosphere it helps in the day. That can be the back porch with good weather, a coffee shop, my favorite restaurant if it's busy enough the wait staff isn't visiting (we know them all, so they stop to visit when they aren't busy).
ReplyDeleteI also know that for years, I seemed to do my best work under time pressure. I had to slog my way out of that before it killed me.
Ah, yeah, I'm the same way. If I set a deadline of some sort I always seem to do better right before it's due. It's kind of helpful when I'm just doing it for myself.
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