Do all Writers Suffer from Insomnia?

My manuscript has an RSS feed directly to my brain. People talk to me but I can’t hear them. I drift past chores, eat toast for breakfast, lunch. Same menu at supper.

I’m revising.

In the morning, I awaken to thoughts already in progress regarding my story. It takes me a minute to catch up, but then I realize I’ve been revising all night long. My mom appeared in a dream, telling me to turn off Track Changes. In real life, she doesn’t even know how to use email.

Sentence fragments steal past me, plot developments tumble—in the fog of my sleep, I can’t grab them. I get up. I think if I write these thoughts down they’ll let me sleep. But as I said on VK, I can't push the pen around fast enough; I go downstairs and type because it's faster to type but since I’m on the keyboard anyway, I might as well open up a new draft and tweak that one chapter that's been bothering me and, yes, I see it's well past midnight, but I've made it on three hours of sleep before and I can't stop now because I’m on a roll and I’m wide awake so I might as well keep on writing. I mean, it's almost breakfast time.

I visit the sleep doctor this week. I hope he can doctor me up some sleep. Just don’t make me wear one of those Darth Vader sleeping apparatuses.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

YES. This is exactly how it is. So well put. I was nodding my head to this whole entry.

Danette Haworth said...

Hi Courtney,

Thanks for your agreement.

When you're in the middle of a work, it pulls all your thoughts. Your body is a shell in the land of the living, but your mind is actively and constantly in your story.

Madeleine said...

My manuscript has an RSS feed directly to my brain.

I love that and I don't really even understand RSS!