Sometimes I’ll stay up late to finish up a chapter or a couple of pages before going to sleep. But it’s hard to turn the creative engine off when I’m on a roll. I’ll keep going until I run out of steam or burn out.
It’ll be a battle to get up the next morning. Every fiber of my body resists as it begs for more sleep. But I get up anyway because I have to, and then I brood, regretting the late night work before.
I’ve recently changed my schedule to write early in the morning or the afternoon. At night, I still want to write late into the morning, but because of my new schedule, I don’t. I’m left feeling restless, even disappointed that my ideas won’t manifest themselves onto the page.
In a previous post, I had written about how each person has an optimal hour to write/create. It’s that time when they are most productive, when the gears of their mind are spinning rapidly. It can churn out brilliancies, masterpieces even.
My optimal hour has been late at night–somewhere around 10 or 11 o’clock at night. This has been the case for many years–ever since I was in college. But I couldn’t keep it up forever. Times have changed, and so has my routine.
Fallton Havenstonne 