“Wake the $#@! Up”
It happens with alarming regularity. I wake in the night with a prattling thought, and toss and turn for a while, trying to relax back into sleep. Between pointless rolls of my body east and west I start coming up with ideas that, like Jack’s beanstalk, climb towards the heavens at steroidal speeds.
I spent the better part of the week in an intensive workshop-like writing process with a friend. We got an amazing amount done in a short period, but we refrained from the scripting of any dialogue, sticking solely to the outline process. Naturally, you start hearing lines you’d like to include.
It would seem that the majority of them came rushing forth in the night, and, if memory serves… it was brilliant stuff. Only I didn’t write any of it down, and now I can’t remember a word of it. Which leads me back to an old nemesis: the difficulty of getting up in the night to write things down.
I’ve tried everything. Pads at the ready. Tape recorders. Digital recorders. Special flashlight pens.
My writing mentor in college told me that it wasn’t worth doing. His experience was that what he thought were strokes of genius at 3am, divinely inspired, were in fact peals of useless drivel. Better, he suggested, to go back to sleep and start fresh in the morning.
Maybe.
It occurs to me there might be an alternative. Having experienced first hand how a practice of mindfulness and meditation has changed the way I think, I believe the mind can be trained to do marvelous things. My experience aside, I know also that the cab drivers of London show greater development in the hippocampus, the area of the brain dedicated to spacial memory and navigation, because of their profession.
So, is it not possible to train the mind to retain these passing thoughts in the night, and determine later whether its worthy of a Nobel, or meant for the scrap heap? I’m going to try. My guess is there might be something worth salvaging amidst the ramblings.
Either way, any exercise of the mind should help me wake up, in some way, and that’s really the ultimate pursuit…
I have to disagree with your writing mentor about this. Maybe HE came up with useless stuff at 3:00 am, but not everyone does. I have been awaked by things which made me write them down, only to read them later in the day and find I’d had a very useful breakthrough. My last book and one of my best short stories both came from things like this.
Go ahead, jot them down. If it’s kindling, no harm done. But you never know when you’ll capture something you’ll be glad you didn’t miss.