Night Writing

When I was a very young man, I used to be able to stay up all night writing and feel no aftereffects in the morning. In truth, I have always been fairly nocturnal. It used to drive my parents mad to hear me padding around the house late at night when I was a child. During the early seventies when I was in my "Dracula phase," as my father once called it, my dream was to spend an entire night living the vampire's life (sans the sanguine aspects, naturally) for one entire night. I was never able to stay awake that long, though, and even then I sensed that it would be lonely to be the only one awake at that hour. Also, I loved falling asleep to the sound of adults talking upstairs. It made me feel very safe to know that there would be people to protect me if I drifted off to what I was already beginning to think of as another world, oneI could get to by passing through a secret doorway in my mind. Later, in my teens, when I worked a number of restaurant jobs in the summers when I was home in Ottawa, from boarding school, the nocturnal life became my habit. I would come home from the restaurant at two or three a.m. and it would take me awhile to slow down. I would wake in the late-morning, much to the condescending amusement of my mother's friends who, for whatever reason, didn't see the connection between working all night and sleeping late.

When Brian and I were first married and I was starting my career as a writer in the mid-eighties , I realized that there was an actual distinct advantage to night writing. In our first two apartments, and later, at our house in Milton, I would work generally at night. There is a point just before exhaustion when the mind is pushed to its outermost limits. The tradition of Huichol Indian Shamanism refers to the nierka, the doorway of the mind. For many creative artists and writers—certainly for me—this doorway is most easily slipped through at night. Listening to music on my headphones, secure in the knowledge that I had four or five completely unencumbered hours at my disposal where the phone wouldn't ring, Brian was asleep nearby, and editors who wanted my work right away! wouldn't be heading to their offices for a good twelve hours. Some of my best work from my early years was written this way, and I actually remember the feeling of the words coming out, fluid, not lapidary, like an easy, lovely flow of water in the darkness beyond that doorway. Memories swam back to me, and I was able to say things I might be too reserved to express in the daytime. Words became poetry of a sort and they made a mosaic in my mind that I was then able to impress upon the page.

Now that I'm in my forties, I'm finding that writing late, like drinking and carousing (which I much prefer) isn't something I'm going to be able to do without consequence anymore. Although I still find a glorious release in an all-night flow of words (and now that I'm writing fiction, it's even more enjoyable to have those words flow without reference or responsibility to anything but the story in my mind, as opposed to the facts involved in retelling someone else's story in non-fiction and the responsibility of being accountable to facts when I’m exhausted) there is a cost the next day. One night of working till four or five means that I won't get much done the next day, much less much good writing.

I'm now exploring something that I've been told ever since I first dreamed of being a novelist, that there is portentous use in rolling over to the computer from bed in the morning. Katherine Anne Porter wrote about getting up when the house was silent, not talking to anyone, having black coffee and breakfast, and writing "till the vein ran out." A very apt metaphor, the image of blood draining.

This morning, for instance, Harper woke me at 7:30 a.m. in order to demand I get his breakfast. Who needs an alarm clock when you have a yellow lab? Rather than stumble back to bed after feeding him, I came into my office. The sun was coming though the windows like warm yellow molasses, warming my left shoulder and bathing me in mood-altering light. I switched on the computer, and opened my mind. The nierka was even easier to achieve in the morning sun, the doorway between the world of dreams and the world of consciousness wider and easier to push though. I put the new new James Blunt CD on the stereo and began to write. Before I knew it, two hours had passed, and I had written five pages. They weren't necessarily brilliant, but they were excellent first drafts, and, best of all, I have the rest of the day available to me to do the things necessary to have the life experiences I need for my writing work. Like writing late, living in a tortured poetic vacuum is something that twenty year olds wear vastly better than forty-three year olds do.

These days, in order to produce something I'm going to be happy with, I need sleep the night before, a clean office in the morning, and an excellent moisturizer all day. Like writing late, living in a tortured poetic vacuum is something that twenty year olds wear vastly better than forty-three year olds do.