My sleep has been troubled for around ten days. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, the world rushes in and I can’t surrender to unconsciousness. So I get up and start writing. I read a wonderful Joan Didion essay many decades ago about her relationship with her migraines - how they were often triggered by red wine, how cripplingly painful they were, how they led her to shut out the world until they passed... and how she began to accept them as part of her weather system. Being a much younger man at the time I didn’t really comprehend what it means to accepting the difficulties that life and your own body/psyche present to you as a form of existential grace (remember that Hemingway defined courage as: ‘Grace under pressure”). Nor had I yet worked out that the biggest struggle you will have in life is truly with yourself. Or that we all lose sleep over things about which we really shouldn’t lose sleep. Just as we are all afflicted with pathologies that can undermine our sense of well-being. I am a much happier man than I have ever been - and really do acknowledge so many fortunate attributes within my own life. But I am still stalked by insomnia - and am writing this now while it is still dark outside, having jolted awake at two am after only four hours of sleep (yes I tried to get to bed super-early last night). When I do sleep through the night I awake with a sense of restored equilibrium. When I find myself bolting upright in the wee small hours of the morning (as I did last night) all I can do - when sleep will not overtake me again - is open my laptop and get on with the writerly task at hand.. If you google ‘writers and insomnia’, you will discover this is an affliction prevalent amongst purveyors of my craft. You cannot begin to know how many of my novels were written in sleepless interludes - which, it seems, works well for my fiction, if not for my esprit du corps.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 15:16:56 +0000
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