Sleep has a ridiculous effect on my creativity. I love to stay up late, and I can do a lot of things when I'm up past my bedtime, but writing well isn't one of them.
That being said, I'm not sure exactly how I pulled off NaNoWriMo last year as well as I did. I mean, it's certainly not hard for me to generate 50,000 words in a month — and not only did I do that but I also knocked out 30 blog posts that month — but I was actually happy with what I wrote. (Well, not the blog posts — they were crap. But the novel I still like very much.) I know I had the help with a lot of caffeine, and of course there was all that leftover Halloween candy. For some reason, Laura bought a ludicrous amount of mini Tootsie Pops, and I pretty much lived on them during November 2007. I'm not exactly sure how Chris Baty chose November as the best month for NaNoWriMo, but having the marathon kick off with an infusion of refined sugar certainly helped me.
If I'm really gonna churn out words — words that I can be proud of, whether they are for work or for "pleasure" — I need a good amount of sleep. Naps can be very helpful — even a five-minute power-nap can make a huge difference. (In fact, I often come out of those catnaps with the solution to a problem I was having with the work, or with a whole new scene or sequence of scenes almost fully worked out in my head, waiting for transcription.) But if I'm serious about kicking some fiction ass, I need a good eight to ten hours under my belt.
This is part of what has made this year more difficult: I've been working a second freelance job that involves a lot of reading, writing and thinking. So after the girls have gone to bed and I've taken care of the most important cultural duty (watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report), I have to dig into the work on this other job. By the time that is done, I have no energy left for more creative pursuits.
My mom's favorite line recently has been: "Take care of yourself first; the writing will be there waiting for you when the right time comes." That's very sweet. Sane, even. But it's hard for me not to feel like every day not spent writing is one less day I'll have in my life to complete the stuff I'm doing. I want to keep writing!
It's a sad irony that I want to draw on my life as inspiration for good writing, but life keeps getting in the way of my writing.
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