Sleep Less | Write More

Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, reportedly advised:

If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day—which is what I did.

However, if you're like me, a night owl, I would recommend, after a twenty minute power nap, staying up a couple of hours after one's bedtime to write. 

Like Mary Oliver alluded to, it's difficult to find time to write if you work and sleep for a a combined 16 hours per day. 

 

The Secret[s] of Sleep

The October 23, 2017 issue of The New Yorker is packed with interesting articles. For example, Jerome Groopman's review, "The Secret of Sleep", of Meir Kryger's The Mystery of Sleep is particularly intriguing. 

Kryger's question “Why do all forms of life, from plants, insects, sea creatures, amphibians and birds to mammals, need rest or sleep?” is particularly interesting when viewed through the lens of orthodox Muslims who believe that God doesn't get tired, rest or sleep.  

Groopman writes: "[...] after we have been awake for about fourteen hours, and increases in intensity until the eighteen-hour mark, after which we find it hard not to fall asleep." That explains why, no matter how badly one wants to write, it becomes very difficult to write after being awake for 18 hours - especially if one sleeps five hours per night.

In addition, Groopman writes: "Reiss looks to the historian A. Roger Ekirch, who, in 2001, documented that in early-modern Europe and North America the standard pattern for nighttime sleep was “segmented.” There were two periods, sometimes termed “dead sleep” and “morning sleep,” with intervals of an hour or more when the person was awake, sometimes called “the watching,” during which people might pray or read or have sex. In some indigenous societies in Nigeria, Central America, and Brazil, segmented sleep persisted into the twentieth century. Ekirch hypothesized that segmented sleep was our natural, evolutionary heritage, and that it had been disrupted in the West by the demands of industrialization, and by electricity, which made artificial lighting ubiquitous."

Once again, this is particularly interesting to orthodox Muslims who perform Tahajjud [Arabic: تهجد‎‎].

Lastly, Reiss reminds: "Honoré de Balzac [...] was fuelling his writing with twenty to fifty cups of coffee a day, often on an empty stomach. Balzac believed that, with caffeine, “sparks shoot all the way to the brain,” and “forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink.” Balzac typically wrote between fourteen and sixteen hours a day for two decades, producing sixteen volumes of “La Comédie Humaine” within six years." 

Writing vs. Sleeping

I quoted former prestigious Stuyvesant high school principal Teitel who used to tell his incoming New York City freshmen, "Grades [i.e. any creative project.], friends, and sleep—choose two."

After reading Gardner's Creating Minds and Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, I learned that a number of overachieving artists like Picasso slept very little compared to the average person. 

Not only did the Paris Review reveal that Nabokov worked on the translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse for over 17 hours per day, I recently read in Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years that Nabokov slept approximately four hours per day. 

Lastly, according to a New York magazine profile, James Franco gets very little sleep and Franco fittingly wrote the poem "Nocturnal" in his volume of poetry, Directing Herbert White, about his battle with slumber, which I'm confident that a lot of other overachieving writers could relate to. 

Henry Miller on Writers, Writing and Artists

I recently did a post on The Allure of Nymphet's blog about author and famous ephebophile Henry Miller and his writings on nymphets and age-discrepant relationships. In addition, he has some gems in his novels about writing, writers and artists. The excerpts below are taken from Miller's Sexus.

"It's much better to be preoccupied with wonderful ideas than with the next meal, or rent,or a pair of shoes. Of course when you get to the point where you must eat, and you haven't anything to eat, then to eat becomes an obsession. But the difference between an artist and the ordinary individual is that when the artist does get a meal he immediately falls back into his own limitless world, and while he's in that world he's a king, whereas your ordinary duffer is just a filling station with nothing in between but dust and smoke."

 "'You've got to eat, haven't you?'...I observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity-creation."

"But Arthur Raymond had absolutely no regard for time; when he was interested in a subject he thought nothing of food, sleep or sex."

 "A painter can knock out a half dozen paintings in a year-so I'm told. But a writer-why sometimes it takes him ten years to do a book, and if it's good, as I say, it takes another teen years to find a publisher for it, and after that you've got to allow fifteen to twenty years before it's recognized by the public. It's almost a lifetime-for one book, mind you. How's he going to live meanwhile? Well, he lives like a dog usually. A panhandler leads a royal life by comparison. Nobody would undertake a career if he know what lay in store for him."

"There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in-work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play, and which just because it has not raison d'etre other than itself is the supreme motivating..."

"...they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because it is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me; it made sound sense. It was life-not the simulacrum which those about me worshiped."

"I want to start a new life with you. Let's go away from all these people! And I want you to quit that awful job. I'll find a place where you can write. You won't need to earn any money. I'll soon be making lots of money. You can have anything you want. I'll get all the books you want to read....Maybe you'll write a play..."

While I was re-reading the above excerpts I couldn't help but think about artists (i.e. writers, poets, painters, etc,) like James Franco and Nabokov. In a New York magazine profile that I wrote about in a previous post, Franco's assistant shared that Franco doesn't eat unless she, literally, puts food in front of him, and, like Tesla, Franco sleeps about four hours per night. Furthermore, Nabokov was so consumed with his translation of Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse that he worked on it for over seventeen hours per day. And what writer doesn't dream about being freed from his day job?