The story so far: a freelance writer and editor for 20+ years, I jumped ship in April 2015 from bricks and mortar to live on a historic narrowboat – currently permanently moored in a busy marina in greenest Staffordshire.
2.00am. 8 degrees, calm (after the storm)
Tonight I can’t sleep because my mind is popping with ideas. I get this sometimes. Lying in bed, one idea emerges, peels away into blackness, and another two or three more surface to take its place. They form themselves fully, my mind writes them in my head. I can even remember them. One is simply a note: it reminds me not to forget that I had a daft idea for a kids’ story yesterday. Others are ideas for blog posts: lots and lots of them. If I were focusing on short stories I’d have ideas for those, but I’m focusing on blog posts, so that’s what I get.
‘Blog posts’ as a phrase sounds so prosaic and yet these posts can be anything: a flow that begins somewhere and ends up in a very different place, like a stream. I toss and turn hoping to sleep but at the same time enjoying in a pleasurable-painful way the flow of words in the darkness. I’m plucking a magical ideas flower whose petals replenish itself each time I pick one and discard it.
Eventually, I decide to get up because I’m not going to sleep right now, and I make some Horlicks. There’s a slug in the kitchen sink. (I’ve noticed by now that I’m writing in the present tense and am curious about this.) The slug tentacles waving about from the bottom of the ceramic sink could almost be my sleep waving back at me ironically. In some recess of my mind that I’ve not accessed in the daytime, I remember that slugs aren’t supposed to like salt and, without thinking, put some in the sink. But the slug starts melting like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving a sticky amber trail. Its tentacles lift as its body curls pleading for help. I feel dreadful that I’ve inadvertently murdered one of God’s creatures and worse, a few days before the anniversary of the birth of Christ.
Trying to distract myself from the slug’s plight and my guilt, I sit on the sofa, drink the Horlicks and jot down the ideas I had in bed in a notebook. I’m actually not a rigorous ideas jotter. Sometimes (anathema!) I don’t think it matters if I write them down or not because I don’t regularly look back at them. Ideas often have the most fire and heart if you can follow them through in the moment (not impossible to do with a short, short story or a poem) rather than just putting down a note or two which you come back to in a different frame of mind. It feels good to get the ideas out of my head though, like emptying a drawer that’s too full.
I now have a few options as to what to do. I could go back to bed but I’m not tired enough yet. I could read recipe books which is gentle fun and doesn’t over-stimulate the mind. I could clean the kitchen sink … Then I have the idea to write a blog post about tonight’s middle-of-the-night ideas for blog posts. There’s a image which half-blooms to describe the pattern of interlocking posts – like a fractal or crystal formation – but it dissolves before I can catch it. This post could be a way of exploring the ideas cascade that I’m sure other creatives also have. It’s also a way of capturing this process because these ideas rarely come to fruition – the next day I’m usually too knackered to get much down: so the hyper mental night-time creativity seems to serve as a way of creaming off creative anxiety, like removing scum from a boiling pan of chickpeas with a slotted spoon.
I’m also interested to see what emerges in terms of content writing-wise in the middle of the night, and how tiredness affects prose. I don’t make a habit of writing at 2.00am these days. Left to my own devices, I’d go to bed at 5.00am and rise at 12.00pm, but I’ve trained myself to lead non-vampiric hours and to write at sensible times. It’s better for all, and I don’t feel for the whole day slightly sick from going to bed so late, as though I’m about to catch an early morning plane (something to do with melatonin). In fact, I can’t remember the last time I wrote at 2.00am or 3.00am. So I’m interested to see how the sleep dep. (as I refer to it) affects the way thoughts link up and disperse, and how the night itself imprints itself on the page.
As I fire up the laptop my mind still feels day-sharp, although I know that my quick-fire attitude towards the slug has proved otherwise. Poor judgement and decision-making are key indicators of sleep dep. I’m already kidding myself that this is a good idea so predictably, as soon as I start writing, my mind begins to swirl and wander off. I can’t catch the edges of my thoughts. My head feels fuzzy and a bit ill. But the night is quiet and that in itself holds me, this miracle of quietude.
For weeks we’ve had floods and storms and it’s been hard to sleep . I’ve joked that we’ve got ahead of the times and already built an ark for when waters rise (complete with animals in the form of slugs). It’s strange experiencing the boat this still and that makes me want to stay up and imbibe the silence: stick a cocktail straw down into the stillness and drink. Tonight, head on the pillow, I heard one Canada goose squawking and, just now, sitting in the living room, I heard a creature running along the pontoon outside and flapping off into the air. Whereas, last night, the back room (aka our bedroom or nest) was bumping the sides, water slip-slapping and sloshing between pontoon and boat, as though it was laughing at me all night. I had to cover my ears with a pillow. Individual animal noises would have been lost then.
Where was I? Where am I? (I had a thought when I was writing the first paragraph of this post that I’ve been trying to circle back to – that’s the sleep dep, so let me not do it in too enforced a way.) Yes: flowers, crystals, fractals. Patterns … Yesterday, I bought a gift as a Christmas present for my nieces that I’d long had my eye on. It’s called an Insect Hotel. It does what it says on the tin: it has different spaces for different kinds of insects to live and breed and hibernate and grow inside it, only they don’t have to pay any rent. I’m looking at the insect hotel right now. It’s sat next to the television festooned with tinsel and cards. The insect hotel has a slot for butterflies and moths to crawl into and hibernate, tubes of bamboo and drilled holes for solitary bees to nest and lay eggs, pine cones where native ladybirds can shelter, a leaf litter section for lacewings.
Glancing up from time to time as I type at the insect hotel – I love that error created by a tired subconscious: “as I type at the insect hotel”, as though I’ve moved in; it should read: “as I type while looking at the insect hotel” – it seems that the insect hotel is the perfect metaphor for a home for ideas. It’s better than the flower one I had earlier. I like the idea of ideas crawling into those crevices and being snug and warm and perhaps even competing with other ideas for survival of the fittest. Looking at the hotel closer, I imagine the tubes becoming alive with idea-insects and piping in and out like a brass band playing.
My poetry tutor keeps anticipating boat poems: ‘Where are the boat poems?’ That must be so romantic to live on a boat, so poetic, people say. But because I’ve focused my ideas about pond life on a blog – even if, as I keep saying, so many of the ideas remain written only in my head or on the air – they swarm around the blog and don’t go into poems. I haven’t written any boat poems. The level of my boat poems would therefore be: splish splash splosh, whereas, the blog posts gnaw and nuzzle at one another for ascendancy.
It’s now 2.45am. Time for bed? I’m feeling worse than before for sure. I read it through and tweak and, in what seems like five minutes, the time’s turned into 3.22am. I wonder if this piece will makes much sense when I read it through in the morning, or whether I’ll feel absolved, when I get up, of working on my novel today because I’ve written this instead?
So here’s a tip if you want one. If you’re working on a Serious Writing Project (SWP) as I am – I’m at the editing stage of a novel – you can get stale and serious if you too rigidly exclude all other writing projects while doing it over the long haul. Take a break from time to time to write something daft or different like this post. Take time just to play and see how many of those ideas blighters you can catch by their tails before they wriggle away.
I’m thinking that over Christmas it will do me good to take a bit of time away from the SWP, away from the novel to write something just for fun – whatever I feel like in the moment. Maybe a kids’ story about a zombie soft toy giraffe, or a blog post about night thoughts on a boat.
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