Yesterday was a funny day. It was the first day in three months I actually put aside purely for writing my book. I don’t do nine to five, I generally do 7 till 6, so it was a long day. Up until now I’d never focused on one of my stories for more than ninety minutes at a stretch. I’m just getting back on my feet after an operation, so physically I can’t push myself too much, but I felt completely vibrant, clear-headed, and raring to get going with both my business and my book after a two week break. Because I can’t lift much at the moment (doctor’s orders), I was left with a whole day to do nothing but write.
I absolutely loved it. All of a sudden, the stop-start tinkering of previous weeks materialised into a long, flowing stretch of proper output. I stopped here and there for tea and to talk to my partner, but by lunchtime I’d already focused for five hours straight on the book out of six. Normally, even when I work long days, I’ll take a quick ten-minute nap after lunch. My body clock usually keeps me honest at exactly ten minutes. So you can imagine my surprise when, yesterday, I woke up an hour later. I’ve never done that before. At the time I shrugged it off, assuming it was just the tail end of recovery from surgery.
After that, I put in another three hours in the afternoon and conquered more material than I’d dared to hope for. But something else unusual happened. Those lunchtime naps, if they overrun to twenty or an indulgent thirty minutes, usually wreck my nights sleep. So I went to bed expecting another patchy night of wakefulness, laptop open, bits of reading, writing, and maybe a few hours of broken sleep. Instead, I conked out by 8.30pm and, to my astonishment, slept for nine solid hours. That’s unheard of for me: I usually clock six and a half. In the space of one ordinary day I’d racked up ten hours of sleep, easily the most I’ve had in years. The only cause I could think of? The sheer effort of writing all day.
Researching, and it turns out I wasn’t wrong. Writing for long periods taxes the brain in ways you don’t necessarily feel at the time. Sustained creative work uses up glucose, depletes neurotransmitters, and demands constant switching between imagination, memory, and language processing. In other words, it’s a full-body workout for your mind. A de facto brain gym! Because, just like a hard gym session leaves your muscles craving recovery, a day of writing leaves your brain desperate for deep, extended rest. Sleep is when the brain clears out thought debris, consolidates memory, and recharges itself. Push it hard with hours of storytelling and it will demand payback in the form of a great big snooze. Almost a reward for ones endeavours.
There’s also the emotional element. Writing fiction means creating and inhabiting other lives, juggling threads, and holding entire worlds in your head. That kind of immersion is both exhilarating but, also exhausting. Your nervous system doesn’t always distinguish between the “real” and the imagined, so those dramatic conversations, plot twists, and emotional tangles are processed as real experiences. Sleep is the mind’s way of digesting them. Weird, but logical.
So yes, it’s no coincidence: one long day of writing knocked me out like a marathon, in my case 5 km. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. I pretty much now know if I go through one of my cycles of poor sleep that I can sometimes get over the course of a few day, just write!
#Writing A Book #Content Creation #Novice Novelist #Writing Fiction #Writing for Dummies
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