Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Midnight Writing

It’s one o’clock in the morning. The house is quiet. Well the house isn’t completely quiet. It’s never completely quiet. There’s always a hum, or a noise in the background that prevents total quietness. Don’t quite know why that is.
But anyway. Where was I? Yes. It’s one o’clock in the morning; the hour of the third-shift worker, the party person, and the insomniac. I am none of those things. I am up because I’m writing. I could write earlier and indeed I do the majority of my writing in the early evening. But every now and again, I stay up late and let my fingers tap the keyboard at will. I like to see what I come up with in the haze of sleepiness. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I’m pleasantly surprised by what I wrote.

Writing in the middle of the night is challenging and rewarding.  It’s challenging because I’m sleepy. I’m not thinking as clearly as I would at eight pm. But then it’s rewarding because I really have no inhibitions. My mind is more alert at eight pm and it guards what I write to a greater extent. There are some words, phrases, plot twists, and endings that my mind would definitely tell me to avoid if I’m writing earlier in the evening. After midnight, I write with my heart primarily and include every intimate detail of my experiences and thoughts. I usually come up with something pretty cool. Or I end up writing something really crazy, get a real good kick out of it, and file it away in a folder named DO NOT USE.

I do have a job to go to in the morning so I must lay it down. Sometime tomorrow, I’ll review what I wrote in the wee hours of the morning. Then I’ll see if it’s something great, something scary, or something that will give me a really good laugh.

1 comment:

  1. I'm a late-night writer myself. The day is just too full of distractions for me to access the source, whatever it is.

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