Some of us ”sweat the night into words,” the poet Bernard Spencer wrote in his poem “Night-Time: Starting to Write.”
Morning or night, day time or lunchtime, it really doesn’t matter when you write. A note, a recording, a scribble — we write it down to remember it now and for later.
Early morning, lunch break, on the train, late at night — it doesn’t matter. Find the extra hour, go to the same place, shut the door. No exceptions, no excuses.
John Grisham
Everything goes in the hopper
The writer often feels compelled to notice and the readiness to do too much. But being ‘always-on’ is part of the scribe’s professionalism, to remain curious and connected to the tone of social mores, forever stuck in a perpetual now and the now of yesterday.
Writers are collectors, not hoarders. They snatch ideas to remix into something else, a type of innovation of words.
Why write? To make something”
Claude Simon
It is in the prose the writer plunges and finds themselves.
The pen is an addiction, a duty, and a stress outlet, and pure enjoyment. It shatters the notion of work and life, swaddled into the need of an aliveness.