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.
