I Love the Smell of Re-Writes in the Morning

Okay, here it is:

Writing at night is bullshit.

I know that a lot of you guys do it. Hell, once upon a time I did it. But I'm here today to repudiate the practice.

For family reasons, and reasons of just general interest, I've always been interested in research about the brain. I think that just about everything we've really learned about the brain we've learned in the last decade or so, since the advent of the MRI and CATscans became common. And what they're finding is that the night is just...different. Your brain is different at night.

This was a hard thing for me to admit. When I was in my early 20's I was a big believer in the romance of pulling an all nighter to get something done. I think I wrote every one of my University essays that way. I was also, famously, an inveterate up-to-the-wire last minute procrastinator. I was the guy who turned the essay in on Monday at 7:59 a.m. because it was due on Friday, but you'd heard from your buddy that the woman in the office hadn't stamped stuff when she left on Friday...

When I was doing sketch comedy, writing at night was like writing drunk. It was awesome fun! Everything was funny, and your creativity flowed free, man... but I was kidding myself. I was so hopped on adrenalin and being young that I mistook that early flower of being in love with writing to be the feeling that I would always get. It wasn't.

And so began the transition.

I am not a morning person. There are no morning people in my family, other than my father, who doesn't count because he takes two hour naps every afternoon. Must be nice, Dad.

My family gets dragged out of bed. When I was a kid, I made sure to ask my mother to sign permission slips or if I could do this or that first thing in the morning, because let's face it, she's a mess before about 10:30.

I have had whole conversations with my little sister that she recalls completely differently years later, and my theory is that she was slipping in and out of alpha state because it was morning when we had them.

Mornings. Feh.

Except...

There's coffee. And there's that great, grand, shining sun. And the hours stretch before you filled with portent and possibilty. The world looks different in the morning.

We live in difficult times. People seem to have trouble telling the truth -- they even seem to have trouble recognizing the truth, it seems. The night, for me, has never been about truth. The night is about regret and secrecy and passion, and longing and recrimination and rumination. But not truth. Truth is best observed and channeled in the morning's light. And truth is essential to what we do.

I can't write drunk either, anymore. No big loss, that. Though, yes, I know, Looking for Mr. Goodbar was written that way. But I'm going to go ahead and guess if you're one of those "I write at night people," you're probably 21 and drink and don't get hangovers and you've never even heard of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Now there are some people who are locked into writing at night. I know. You may have a job that requires you to work days. You may have shift work. You might have kids. I know. I'm not talking about you. You do what you have to do with your personal situation to write your way out. Writing your way out means trying to treat the craft as respectfully and professionally as you can until such time as it becomes the primary way you make your money.

Does anyone recognize how similar that last sentence is to the sentiment, "fake it til you make it?"

Same thing. You have to be a professional writer long before you become a professional writer. Paradox. Deal.

When I decided to go full-time in my writing, I had a couple of advantages. I was writing a documentary soap show that gave me one script a week that didn't take very long to do, and that was enough for me to live on, for at least part of the year. I also quit a full time job, yes, but I went to school for four months, so I had a transition between work and writing.

But when that program was over, one thought came to me above all others, and it was this:

The day I'm not up and working by nine a.m. it is all over.

And I've mostly kept to that. I can say with genuine confidence that in the five years since, I've missed that Monday-Friday nine a.m. start maybe twenty times. A couple of times it was cause of a late night. A couple of times I was sick. I usually wind up working on the weekend when I don't think I accomplish enough during the week anyway. But why? Why try to emulate that workaday schedule when you don't have to?

I've thought a lot about that over the years. I think part of it has to do with trying to establish normality. People who go to work, most of em, go from 9 to 5. If I can do that, I have limits same as other people. It makes me connected to the world at large, not out on my own as much. It also gives you a built-in time to stop. It makes it easier to make plans with friends who have real jobs.

But it also maximizes those morning hours. And here's the secret, the real reason why I don't write at night anymore: if I'm going to write in the morning, I need all the churning, flipping, funking and random disconnected thought that occupies me at night to just sit there and perk. perk. perk. I don't write at night because I need the night to do something else.

What I think about at night, what I don't think about at night, what I don't realize I'm thinking about until it works its way into my dreams, that's filling the tank. Night is for maintenance and detailing. And mornings are for writing.