On Writing While Exhausted
I’m too tired to be meta.
I’m exhausted today, but I’m writing — at least, I’m writing this.
I’m writing something about writing whilst exhausted.
You may think this is a bit meta. Believe me, I’m too tired to be meta.
(I paused for a moment there to try to rub a vertical mark off my screen, but it seems the vertical mark — which looks a bit like a blade of grass — is permanent.)
The most tired I’ve ever been, whilst writing, is when Flipper was in his first year. (For more info on Flipper, see Year One of the Diary.)
Sometimes, I would be up in the night, slouching in an IKEA POÄNG chair, doing a very slow 2 to 2.45 a.m. bottle feed.
Please don’t puke. Please don’t puke all over your nice clean babygro. Please don’t fill my lap with hard won breast milk.
That would be the main thought in my head.
Not plot structures or sentence structures.
(Maybe the mark on the screen looks more like a shooting star falling straight down.)
However, I did plot a whole novel during a couple of consecutive nights of feeds.
I forgot it, of course. But I remember doing that and feeling good about it.
And then, slightly later on, when I was slightly less tired, I plotted and then replotted my novel King Death.
By plotted, I mean something a bit more like dreamed. Figured out. Hallucinated. Because I think, at points, as Flipper made gentle rubber-squeaky noises, I dozed off.
But I was stuck in the POÄNG. Couldn’t even lift my elbow more than a couple of inches. So I had a very wide and porous dreamspace in front of me, whispery and smelling of sweetness. I had unpopulated time.
So what I came up with was a looming shape of what it could be like, this novel-thing, if I ever got over the exhaustion.
There is a certain kind of writing that one can only do when going back and forth across the borderline between awake and asleep.
What I learned during the bottle-feeding months, and I’ve passed on to tired and very tired students ever since, is that you should use that precious state of could-nod-off-at-any-moment to allow phrases and images and coloured shapes to come through from your subconscious.
These ideas, to give them a more respectable name, shouldn’t be forced into any kind of form. If you want to dictate them as voice messages on your phone, great. If you would prefer keeping a shoebox full of paper scraps, and adding the occasional Tesco receipt with the words ‘family — octopus — moon — like those people from the holiday in Devon’ scribbled on it, wonderful. Or if you have an ‘Vague Notions to Half-formed Ideas’ file on your laptop (backed up of course, multiple times) that you can steal two minutes to add another short paragraph to, equally brilliant.
(I managed to forget about the screen-mark for a few minutes, but now it’s back. Like the mark on Virginia Woolf’s wall. Attracting my attention because I might make something of it. If I weren’t so bleugh. Like everyone, I’m very distractible when exhausted.)
So — and here’s my main bit of advice — when exhausted, do not attempt any form of writing that asks you to make judgements.
Do not operate heavy machinery.
You’re not in a fit state to know what’s good or interesting or finished.
But you are in the perfect state to get outside your usual self and come up with something truly surprising — to you and, hopefully, later on, to many others.
This is what I needed: “There is a certain kind of writing that one can only do when going back and forth across the borderline between awake and asleep.” 😭🙏😊
This is good advice. My whole practice is a Mystic Alchemy, drawn from visions. I had visions my whole life (as long as I remember) and first became aware I can see what others can't age six, when holes opened in the wall and snakes and lizards came out of them and fell into the room. I ran to tell mummy, who said it was all in my mind. I watched the bubbles float around her and she asked me what I was staring at. "There aren't any bubbles!" were words I'll never forget. Up till then, I half suspected others saw these strange things and it was one of the odd taboos they don't admit to.
I saw a picture of a giant spider crawl off the page of a book onto my hand and believed pictures could come to life and was haunted by spectral entities. I was diagnosed schizophrenic in my teens and hospitalised, severely dosed in my 20s.
Dreams, hallucinations, delusions, and, of course, as you describe, the strange states of insomniac exhaustion, all inform my writing. My work is about these altered states and inspired by them. I use schizophrenic delirium, 'magic potions', dreams, meditation, Active Imagination and various methods of inducing and receiving visions.
It creates unusual stories, not exactly commercial, but interesting, and a lot like the epic mythological adventures of ancient Mystery Cults, although with modern characters in every day settings. I often go without medication to make it a bit more interesting and switch the magic on, although this can lead me into difficulties at times.
Nowadays, the artist ignores his Demon, there's a lot of talk about hard work over inspiration, etc. I agree with hard work to an extent, but the idea of 99% hard work 1% inspiration don't quite weigh up for me. Not the same value, as far as I'm concerned. I once saw someone say 99% oyster 1% pearl.