I was up at 6am this morning. One of the monsters nibbled on my ear lobe and I was suddenly wide awake.
This doesn’t usually happen. I’m a sleep-til-eleven but work-til-2am kind of writer. And I have no explanation as to why I wasn’t immediately sleepy again after I woke up so early today.
I was so alert that I jumped out of bed, grabbed some breakfast and got a whole lot of work done. Then I crashed out at 10am and slept soundly for a couple of hours.
For me this has always been one of the wonderful things about being a writer. When I was a professional musician too, I was able to work round the clock, as and when it suited me. Learning to make the best of my creative body-clock has been a very useful and productive thing for me over the last few years. I know that between 10pm and midnight I can do more, and do it better, than I can in three times as long between 9am and 3pm.
The only shame about it is that when I’m in a school for an event, it obviously has to be within school hours. I have never been at my best during school hours. I have usually been asleep during most school hours, if not physically then mentally. Of course, I do my best to get myself worked up and be energetic, but I still feel like I’m operating at half my capacity during normal working hours.
I know that all these writers in this cave have very different hours. We’re all have our own schedules and know what works best for us. But isn’t it weird that some people can get everything done early in the morning while others, like me, have to sleep late and then stay up late to make the best of our minds?
And how do you learn what works best for you unless you become a writer?
13/05/2009 at 12:58 pm Permalink
I used to be exactly the same – sometimes writing through until 5 or 6 in the morning, then sleeping until early afternoon.
Then I had a baby. Well, I didn’t actually do the giving birth bit, but I became a parent. Suddenly my work/sleep pattern was out the window, and I was reduced to trying to work or sleep at the strangest of times.
Nowadays, I rarely write late into the night. A couple of years of having to get up at 7:30 every morning to take the little ‘un to school have put a stop to that. Now I try to work office hours when I can, but quite often I’ll work beyond that. Rarely now do I write beyond 10pm, though.
The human body is a marvellous thing, and it can adapt to pretty much anything. No doubt if circumstances meant you had no choice but to write from 7am to 1pm every day, you would soon adapt and be back producing your usual high standard of writing quite quickly.
That said, I encourage anyone who can get away with sleeping until 11am to do just that.