I've always been fond of writing at night. When I was younger, I imagined that to be the fancy of a teenager who didn't go to sleep until 2 or 3am, anyway, and liked it that way. As I've grown, I've found that my inclination towards creativity hasn't found its way to the daytime hours yet. That's not to say it never happens or isn't possible, it just seems to take more effort. If I establish a daytime routine, it tends to work well enough and has in the past - I wrote a novel in my senior year of high school by having an independent study hour overseen by my creative writing teacher. That was at 9am or thereabouts, as I recall. It worked. I popped in my headphones and went on with it.
In real life, it's harder to find or create time that structured. When you're in school, in a situation like that, you're left with no other purpose than to write. It's nice. Other stresses vanish and that one in particular is pushed to the forefront. I can wax poetic all I like about a writer's purpose being to write and so on and so forth, but a writer is a person and sometimes a person's purpose on a given day is to make meatloaf for dinner, take the car to the shop or have a drink with friends at the downtown bar. These are the adult responsibilities of real life and they have to be acknowledged and satisfied. But most adult responsibilities in life have one thing in common - they fall under the jurisdiction of the day.
Besides that, the day is the time of business. It's a time of hustle and bustle! Even in a quiet apartment complex, there are comings and goings, children playing, motorcycles going by. But once night falls, silence descends. Oh sure, there's still ambient noise to be had, most of it road noise from afar, but otherwise, the world tends to be mercifully quiet and peaceful. And for the writer, who has had adult responsibilities to deal with, they're melted away. Either they got completed or they became the next day's matter. And so, it's at night that the mind can better unfurl, unrestrained by daytime worries and daytime noises.
I like to do things during the day. Go for a walk. Cook. Talk to people. Run errands. Read. Play a video game. These are responsibilities, hobbies and joys of mine. Sometimes I write. Sometimes there's something pressing that I can't ignore that I need to write about - this morning was like that. Last night, as I was going to sleep, after following the Detroit Tigers game, I started to write my article for The Daily Sports Update. When I woke up, it was still there. Before I even showered or got my pot of coffee started, I got it down and published it to the blog. It felt good, felt nice. But it's not always that easy.
Tonight was a good night and perhaps there'll be more like them now. My woman works an early morning shift for her job and goes in even earlier now, so as to get in a morning workout. This leaves me with great freedom at night; she went to bed at 8:30pm or so tonight. Almost as soon as she did, as I sat at my computer pondering how to fill the rest of my evening, that creative spark struck and I finally - FINALLY - pushed through a part of my novel that I wasn't enjoying. I put my earphones in my ears, turned on iTunes and got to work. One hour and several pages later, I had another part done and a fresh feeling to myself as I realized that this particular part of my novel only has a couple more pages before I can get moving on with the primary plot, something I've been struggling to do for a few days.
Was that possible earlier? Sure. Probably. But there's a certain ease to it at night... all of my daytime worries are faded. Anything I didn't do today is firmly the property of tomorrow. So this time, this remarkably precious time between now and when I lay my head to my pillow... it's completely uninhibited, completely without hindrance. It's the blank page that the day can never be, because the day itself authors work upon us. The night makes no such impositions on us and for that reason, it's so often at night when I find myself tap-tap-tapping away on my keyboard.
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