The moment when I prefer to write

There is a moment when I love to write: very late in the evening, when everyone else is asleep and only I am awake. When the night is deepening outside and the world is hushed by darkness. 

It is a moment when I love to work on a first draft. And at that moment, working on that first draft becomes almost relaxing: I take a piece of paper and a pen and I write and write, caring only about the story that is slowly taking shape and not asking myself if it is any good. 

When I was a child I invented stories as I lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come. So, in a way, writing at night is a continuation of this childhood habit, especially since it fueled my dreams of becoming a writer and taught me to use my imagination, and to create characters. 

I love that moment when the night and sleep overcome the world around me. A shift in the atmosphere. An owl hoots outside. All is still. The floorboards creak. It is the time when ghosts awake and wander once again through the world they should have left, remembering times, remembering people now lost forever. 

Being alone awake at night is sharing a secret with the house you are in. Sharing a secret as the night breathes a strange new life into it. The house remembers. Previous inhabitants, from centuries past. Sorrows, joys… It remembers and it dreams, as owls hoot outside. 

What better time to stir the imagination than this moment between wakefulness and sleep? What better time to make up stories? What better time to create? In those stolen moments of quietness, as the whole house sleeps. 

I especially love those moments when I am in the countryside. Then, the first hours of the night have a song of their own. The frogs in spring, and their enamoured croaking. Crickets in summer as the nights begin to lengthen again. The rustling of autumn leaves as the winds strengthens and rain threatens. The cold stillness of winter as the smell of frost creeps on the hills. 

All this is what makes this moment magical in my mind. All this is what makes it special. Inspiration grows as the dreams gather, and the story grows with the night itself. 

Of course, there are other moments when I like to write. In the morning, with a steaming cup of black coffee. During the day, in a café maybe, sitting by the window, watching people going to and fro. Those are straightforward moments to write, to edit, to correct. 

But the first hours of the night are shrouded in mystery. And in the stillness that characterizes them, the story you create is a secret, shared with the house, and the darkness, and the moon.

Walking and writing

 

Walking is good for your health. It helps you burn off all those puddings and cakes you ate, when you really should have not –or at least it appeases your conscious. However, it is not what makes walking so attractive. Walking is also a way to enjoy your surroundings, to take notice of details that would have escaped you, had you been driving or cycling by at great speed, trying your best to not be late at school/work/an appointment.  

In the country it could be the frothy lace of wildflowers in a hedgerow. An empty snail-shell, striped yellow and brown. A feather from the wing of a buzzard. Moss draped over the branches of an ancient tree. Clusters of blackberries, purple and plump. Or elderberries glistening like dark-blue pearls. Lambs playing in a meadow, stopping to watch as you pass them by. The smell of hay being cut. A gurgling brook, bounding over rocks, as if it was trying to escape from its bed. A pile of pebbles made as an offering to the fairy world. Pine-cones half-nibbled by vagrant squirrels. 

In a city it could be a tiny tea-shop selling homemade cakes and freshly ground coffee. A heavy, ornate, wooden door, dating back from Medieval times. A narrow cobbled street winding up a hill, leading to a hidden garden, or a castle-like building. A road you’ve never taken before, going to a part of town you’ve never visited before. Fragrant lilac spilling over a wall. Sparrows squabbling for crumbs of bread.

Walking is accepting a slower rhythm of life. It is forgetting the rush working or studying implies, deadlines, cramped timetables. Walking is allowing yourself to take a deep breath and look around you. But this is not the only good point: I think that walking is good for my writing. 

Walking gives you the leisure to look around you and take in the world that surrounds you. But also to daydream and let your thoughts wander –which is not the case of driving, if you want to stay alive, that is. All the details you consciously or subconsciously notice can feed your imagination, whether you realise it or not. An idea for a new setting. The seeds of a short story, of a novella, of a series of novels… The terrace of a café becomes the ideal spot for a romance. An abandoned house becomes haunted. The gait and clothes of a passer-by inspires a character. A dark passage-way, glimpsed as you went by, suggests to you the plot of a thriller. And the more you look at, and for, all those details with the eye of a (would-be) novelist, the more ideas they suggest as you walk by.

As I said, walking allows you to daydream. To daydream about your novel. I find that walking helps when I’m a bit stuck with my work in progress. As if moving my feet unclogged my brain, giving it a fresh intake of energy and inspiration. Being outdoors helps a lot when you’re going round in circles with your writing, not being able to find a good ending, or a good beginning, or whatever. But being outdoors and walking, being outdoors and being in movement, gives, in my opinion, even better results. As if being physically active allowed you to be intellectually active. 

I think about my novel as a walk. I “play” in my head different versions of the scenes I’m stuck with, until I find the right one. Or I just let my thoughts wander and ideas come to me, shaping themselves, being influenced by my surroundings and the mood of the moment…

The Night

I love the night, I always did. I never was afraid of the dark, not even as a small child: on the contrary I relished in its mystery. As the night falls, the frontier between imagination and reality becomes blurred: familiar surroundings become distorted by the play of shadows, by the touch of milky moonlight, by our own, altered perception. By our fears, by our dreams. Distances, proportions waver and change: gone are the rules and the logic of daylight. 

 

 

Warm summer nights, gazing at the stars. Seeking in their midst worlds beyond our imagining. A shooting star, a fleeting wish. The song of crickets in the background. Hushed stillness as the heat of the day lingers on. Bats swooping up and down, chasing moths. Above the dense foliage of trees, the Milky Way.

Autumn nights, smelling of fallen leaves and frost to come. Of woodsmoke, of roasted chestnuts. Shorter days, colder dusks. Glorious sunsets, dipped in golden light. Lengthening shadows, creeping over the land. A pale crescent, looming over the horizon, greets winter with a smile.

Winter nights, looking at the darkness outside from a brightly lit room. Hoping for magic, hoping for snow. Opening the window to breath in the cutting cold, to watch the lights of villages afar, to get a glimpse of what the stars reveal. Remaining by the hearth as the ambers slowly glow and die and let the darkness creep in and the night take over the house.

Spring nights throbbing with renewed life. Hundreds of frogs croak their song of seduction and love. An owl shrieks as it leaves its nest, and the brood within, for a solitary hunt. The first stars appear in a cobalt sky, pale and hesitant, glimmering shyly. A blackbird sings the day away.  

 

 

To be alone, awake, at night, is to be, for a moment, the only human in the world. In a world of secrets, where we do not quite belong. In a world when time itself, slows down, quickens, stands still, stops, mocking the regular ticking and the timid chime of the old grandfather clock in the corridor. 

When comes dawn, pale and grey, the night retreats, reluctantly, loath to relinquish its hold on the world it made its own. Chased by a chirping bird. Leaving as a parting gift spattered pearls of dew tangled in a cobweb.