A night owl’s tryst with writing

October 31, 2014 06:22 pm | Updated May 30, 2023 12:01 pm IST - Chennai

Haruki Murakami, one of the writers I idolise, is, like many other celebrated writers, an early riser. “I wake between four and five in the morning,” he says in his introduction to an anthology called Birthday Stories , “make myself some coffee (my wife is still sleeping), eat a slice of toast and go to my study to begin writing.”

I can never be a Murakami because I do exactly the opposite. I go to sleep precisely at that hour — between four and five in the morning. But I would like to prove someday that one can write like Murakami even by sleeping — instead of waking up — between four and five in the morning.

Medical science recommends — I am quoting a piece of advice given by a famous neurologist to a friend of mine — that one must be asleep between eleven in the night and four in the morning. It is during these hours, according to the doctor, that the human brain recharges itself. But in my case, it is only at midnight that my brain appears to be fully recharged for use.

Nothing matches the post-midnight calm, when the rest of the world is snuggled up against the pillow while you are giving shape to your prose. So pronounced is the silence that you not only hear your own thoughts loud and clear but also the breath of the reader looking over your shoulder as you write. “No, that’s a sloppy sentence,” the reader tells you, “rework it.”

The same cannot be said about the pre-dawn calm, when distractions are at your doorstep: the slap of the morning’s paper, the noise made by the iron gate of the neighbour collecting his milk packets, the chirping of birds and, finally, the sound of the neighbourhood stirring awake. You are soon part of the world and no longer detached from it.

There is something else rewarding about going to sleep between four and five in the morning: you experience the tranquillity of dawn with your senses fully alert. There is a sense of victory in ushering in the new day and then going to bed, rather than waking up to find that the day began while you were still asleep. Who wants Murakami’s sleeping habits; all I want is his talent and fame. The night is still young.

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