Jun 07 2008
Writing while Sleeping
I know you’ve done it before…you’ve stayed up all night finishing a paper, poring over it until your eyes crossed and the computer screen seemed to be jumping out at you. You got to the magic number of pages (even in graduate school we have that magic number), and threw yourself into bed for the two hours you had left before class started. And then, in the final seconds before you took off for class, as the paper was spewing out of the printer, you started reading it. And it was only then that you realized your paper was utter crap.
Every time that happened to me, I swore I would not do it again. I swore I would pace myself, doing the research as soon as I had my topic, writing an outline weeks ahead, writing a good rough draft several days before it was due, so that I could revise without staying up all night. Only now, when I am no longer in school, do the deadlines not loom ahead.
Yet, funny enough, I still write in the middle of the night. During my pregnancies, I broke a major rule of being pregnant: one must be tired all the time. Instead, I regularly functioned on 5 hours of sleep, in two installments. I crashed at around ten, then, strangely, woke up at 1 a.m. And I wrote. I finished my first novel while pregnant, writing mostly between 1:30 and 5:30 a.m. Writing wore me out enough to go back to sleep, giving me another hour or two before I had to get up.
Yet I am, and always have been, a morning person. If you gave me long division to do after midnight, I’d get most of the problems wrong–or they would take me twice as long as they should. My eyes go into “auto-shut mode” after ten at night. Just ask my husband.
So, why is it that I can write so late at night, even when I’m tired? Perhaps it is the relationship between right-brained activities and left-brained ones. Theatre professionals are capable of fantastic work when they get little sleep (though excessive drugs do seem to affect them, whether they know it or not), yet doctors working 24 hours straight make horrible mistakes, perform surgery clumsily, etc. Exhausted drivers veer across lanes just like drunk ones would, and their response times are just as slow. So, if generating writing is a right-brained activity (synthesizing language, creating), then it would be something possible to do while one is not so well rested.
However, revising is a left-brain activity (analyzing, judging, assessing)…and it would follow, then, that revising is not something to be doing at 4 a.m. I can write all I want at night, but I need to be prepared to revise it when I’ve had more sleep.
Otherwise I might just discover, in the morning, that it’s nothing more than utter crap.
