Some of my books refuse to be written in daylight. They are nocturnal.
It's quite bizarre. Raymond, for example, was written very quickly: 21 pages in 3 days, and most of it written between 15:00 and 03:00 (3 p.m. and 3 a.m.). It was written in Winter, and where I live, the Winter dusk starts to fall at about 16:00–17:00. So the vast majority of the story was written during the hours of darkness. If I tried to make progress during daylight, the ideas would not flow. As soon as the sun went down, the muse awoke, and the story unfolded itself in my head. I did not try to fight this phenomenon: it very quickly became apparent that this story had its own way of doing things, and I was not about to argue so long as the ideas kept flowing.
Seven years later, when I wanted to edit Raymond for publication, it refused to be edited in daylight. I spent hours staring at the manuscript on my computer monitor, but could not make any progress on editing it, no matter how I tried. And then, inexplicably, as soon as the sun went down, I could.
After the editing was complete, I needed to format the text for publication, and this the story allowed me to do during daylight. Formatting requires little creativity, so perhaps that is why I could format in daylight; although, in theory, editing doesn't require a lot of creativity either. Editing does, however, require lots of decisions to be made – lots and lots of tiny decisions – and apparently I couldn't make them while the sun was up.
The sequel, Raymond's Nemesis (due to be published in December 2018) was the same: in daylight, nothing; at night, the inspiration flowed. It was harder to write than Raymond was, and took much longer, so there were more sleepless nights and more sugar was consumed.
Incidentally, some stories require certain sorts of sugary treats – in addition to my usual hot chocolate, masala chai lattes, or mochaccinos – to be consumed whilst writing them. Raymond's Nemesis, which was also written in Winter, was – if I recall correctly – the strawberry Oreo book: I had access to a large box of those biscuits, packaged in threes, and every hour or two would leave my computer to make another hot drink in the benighted kitchen and retrieve another packet of Oreo biscuits, to be eaten at my desk while the heater blasted warm air into the room. Another nocturnal book, The Vine, required a large box of Turkish Delight, which I already had in my possession (I love Turkish Delight), and which I started eating so that I could describe the taste of it really well for the story, then kept eating because I was writing at night and wanted the sugar to keep my physical brain awake and functional while the muse fed ideas into it.
To anyone who does not believe in muses, or who is not possessed of an artistic temperament, or whose muse is less capricious, this must seem ridiculous. Surely, one can set a time for writing, then sit down and write. How hard can it be to put words on paper, or on a screen?
Certainly, that is what one tries to do. But there is a thing called 'inspiration'; one cannot wait around for it, else nothing will get finished: one must write regardless of how uninspired one feels; but at the same time, inspiration is the magic without which stories simply cannot exist. One cannot force it; one cannot wait for it; and when it does arrive, one must allow it to seize and drive one's imagination for as long as it will do so, because the result of such possession is always wonderful and beautiful and far better than anything one can produce without it.
So if inspiration descends upon me late at night when I am tired and want to sleep, I have a choice: tell it to come back another day, and risk it not doing so, or stay up and write for as long as I can, until either I or the inspiration is exhausted. This is why I call the particular type of inspiration that comes to me my 'muse': she seems almost like a person, with whims and moods, sulks and passions. Sometimes she ignores me; sometimes she pesters. Sometimes I can almost see her in my mind's eye. And the magic – the inspiration – that she causes to flow through me is worth losing sleep over.
These nocturnal, sugar-laden writing processes are neither healthy nor sustainable, occasionally frustrating, and certainly not my preference; but when that is how the story insists on being written – or how the muse insists I write the story – that is what I must do, and a series of nights of sleep-deprivation and sugar highs is worth it in the end when I have a complete, or near-complete, story before me.
