For the night owls reading this, you (we) are not alone. Writer A. L. Kennedy wrote an essay about her nocturnal orientation in The Observer. Here are a couple of excerpts:
“I work at night. I don't just mean I write at night - I am writing this at 1.53am, as it happens - I mean I function at night. After sunset, I think as clearly as I ever will. I want to walk about, play the banjo and wear hats. I want to enjoy being alive in an uninterrupted and possibly creative way. Left to my own devices, I would always keep my office hours between 10pm and 4 or 5am. Sadly, the rest of the world fails to understand this and tends to telephone me most mornings. Traffic noise, hammering next door, unforgiving travel schedules, the necessity of meeting daytime people and purchasing food; they all conspire to drive me from my bed and disturb my natural order, so I spend my life jolting from one kind of jetlag to another.
…Chronic back pain has spent the past 10 or 15 years keeping me highly alert after dusk and ensured that I write lying down. It's a great relief, in every sense, to write - to spend the dark hours in impossible places with people who never were. The pain is suspended and something is made.”
Sudden thought: Maybe the reason that there’s so much vampire literature is that a lot of writers share this characteristic.
(Want tips and techniques on being more creative, regardless of the time of day or night that you write? Get my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin by request to [email protected]. You will also find lots of useful material in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey.)
