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In Praise of Insomnia
Recently, my mother informed me that I was only a genius between the hours of midnight to six a.m. It's an unfortunate truth that I seem to write best 1) under a deadline, and 2) in the wee hours of the morning.
The deadline assistance makes logical sense. As a theatre person, everything's a deadline. The show will go on, whether you're ready for it or not! Similarly if you're writing a play, there's a certain date where you simply must have sides for auditions, and a mere 72-hours after that you'd better have a script to give to the actors!
Novels are harder, though, simply because they're enormous in scope and have a tendency to get richer as you write them (at least for me), and so I fully understand why Douglas Adams famously said: "I love deadlines. I love to wave at them as they pass me by." (A nice nod to which was in Pirates of the Caribbean 2.)
But my justifications for why insomnia is a blessing are as follows:
In the wee hours of the morning, there's simply nothing else to do but to fill up the time with words.
In the wee hours of the morning, every other sane person is aslumber - which means that there is no one awake with whom I can distract myself from the accusatory blank screen.
In the wee hours of the morning, there's a sense of impending deadlinery, insofar as the dawn will inevitably come and I'd better get some sleep before it becomes tomorrow...hence I must finish what I am writing today. ("Today" always being that time before the dawn. None of this meridian nonsense.)
Or on a slightly more silly note:
Theatre people don't know the meaning of 10 a.m. anyway.
My grandmother was an insomniac, so there's simply no hope for it.
Clearly, it's not that I'm up too late, it's that night comes too early!
So I wonder...when do other people find their genius flowing?
The deadline assistance makes logical sense. As a theatre person, everything's a deadline. The show will go on, whether you're ready for it or not! Similarly if you're writing a play, there's a certain date where you simply must have sides for auditions, and a mere 72-hours after that you'd better have a script to give to the actors!
Novels are harder, though, simply because they're enormous in scope and have a tendency to get richer as you write them (at least for me), and so I fully understand why Douglas Adams famously said: "I love deadlines. I love to wave at them as they pass me by." (A nice nod to which was in Pirates of the Caribbean 2.)
But my justifications for why insomnia is a blessing are as follows:
In the wee hours of the morning, there's simply nothing else to do but to fill up the time with words.
In the wee hours of the morning, every other sane person is aslumber - which means that there is no one awake with whom I can distract myself from the accusatory blank screen.
In the wee hours of the morning, there's a sense of impending deadlinery, insofar as the dawn will inevitably come and I'd better get some sleep before it becomes tomorrow...hence I must finish what I am writing today. ("Today" always being that time before the dawn. None of this meridian nonsense.)
Or on a slightly more silly note:
Theatre people don't know the meaning of 10 a.m. anyway.
My grandmother was an insomniac, so there's simply no hope for it.
Clearly, it's not that I'm up too late, it's that night comes too early!
So I wonder...when do other people find their genius flowing?
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