Finished.
At 3am this morning, but finished nevertheless.
A couple of striking things emerged while I was writing. First, it turns out I really am more productive in the early hours of the morning. It’s happened three nights in a row now. There’s a phase of sleepiness around eleven, but by half one something kicks in (alarm? despair?) and my brain cuts straight through all the nonsense, looks brightly at the matter in hand, and networks of ideas and observations begin to fit together in ways that are worth writing down and keeping. Hence finishing at three.
That’s one thing. The other is that my writing tends to get tight. I do it on purpose a lot of the time: I knot words together across paragraphs so that when they recur they tug at their previous contexts and their thickness builds up. It makes a lot of sense to me to write like this: you end up with a text that’s heavy with thought. Trouble is it’s heavy. It isn’t always a pleasure to read, or it’s hard to read, or it takes a couple of readings to enjoy. For most contexts, this is no good. Meanwhile some of the clearest and most engaging passages among my drafts for this article were written fairly swiftly and spontaneously, without too much thought of which words might be tugging at what. And I think this is the kind of writing I tend to do early in the morning..
So, the two things are connected are they. Perhaps in the early morning I’m so tired and so in need of getting words together that I let them loose to roam a bit. I let them go poking around the matter in hand to see what comes up, and I just note down what they report back. It’s a nicer process; more openly connected to the whatever it is I’m writing about, rather than connected in to itself.
The thing to do would be to get this kind of work happening at more reasonable times of the day, so I don’t have to sleep in til almost lunchtime.
Anyway, the thing’s done. No more writing for a while. Tomorrow I’m borrowing a projector and a couple of lamps, and I’m going to see how these videos I’m making look on the surface of the wall.
