Never Write After 00:00 – It Will be Garbage

I’m often struck with the idea that I should write something at around the point when I should be considering going to sleep. I’m not sure why it is, but it seems that the portion of my brain that would normally say, “You’re a hack and will never produce anything of consequence,” seems to fall asleep a good deal earlier than the rest of me.

I’m not complaining about that, it’s fine and dandy to have a small portion of your brain that’s good and critical of your work – it keeps you on your toes. What gets to me is that, once its asleep, I’ll happily sit down and write up a few thousand words in a night, ignorant of the passage of time and breaking only for trips to and from the kitchen – kettle, mug, tea-chest, drawer, spoon, milk.

Eventually I’ll shamble into bed, tired as much from the process of writing as from being up too late and burnt out from the constant rewrites and edits. The problem with these edits is that they’re not born of some internal critic; there’s no element of my brain that tells me, “This is not good enough, succinct enough, comprehensible enough,” there’s just the constant struggle to effectively communicate an idea that just plain won’t make sense to anyone, myself included, who happens to be awake when they read it. If it’s after midnight, I’m not changing text because it’s not good enough, I’m rewriting my rewrites through a tea-soaked haze because I think there’s a neater way to say whatever it is I was trying to say before, but which I’ve probably by then forgotten.

The worst part is that I know I’m doing it right now, as I write this, and I’ve decided that this is the only way to sidestep the whole tedious business and not write some convoluted mess that I’d either forget all about or be dimly aware of in a vaguely embarrassed sort of way. It’s not that the things I write at night are bad necessarily, it’s more that they’re like dreams; they hold themselves together only for the duration of the experience and afterwards, thinking about what I’ve written, they’re just a strange insubstantial slush.

I’ve created entirely ephemeral text and that saddens me.

Moreover, I think I’m like this in general after midnight. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around me at night when one of these moods takes me (and here I would look pointedly to Ross and Kev as much as anyone else) then I’m sorry if I go a bit strange sometimes. I’m not editing myself effectively, so you’re just getting whatever is on the surface of my brain, most often.