Midnight Musings

A cluttered desk illuminated by a soft lamp during a night writing session

Typing at 2 a.m. The room is silent. Distractions melt away. Now your brain decides to spout ridiculous ideas or challenge you with weird sentence structure. Writing in the middle of the night is weird and comes with its funny moments. You think you’re going to write a few sentences. Finish that paragraph. Write out that scene that’s been swirling in your brain. Nope! As soon as you sit down, you become part of a nightly circus.

The blinking cursor stares back at you. Seriously, who invented this curse? You try to type, and it blinks at you mockingly. You stop, and it blinks rapidly, laughing at your inability to come up with that great idea you thought you had. You continue to struggle and decide you need that coffee break.

Coffee is life and grave digging. Okay, maybe not grave digging, but when writing at night, you always need coffee or some sort of snack reserves for emergencies. There is something funny about trying to pour yourself a cup of coffee in the middle of the night. Spill it? Yes, it will happen. I’ll angrily watch it slowly inch across my desk. I hate wasting coffee! I clean it all up and realize… AARRGH! I can’t remember what I was going to do! 

Depending on the time of night, I’ll keep myself company with one of my dogs, Kimber. Usually, she’ll think it’s a great idea to lie under my feet halfway through writing. Outside, you can hear cicadas randomly chirping like it’s nobody’s business as the house creates its usual settling sounds.

There’s always that famous moment when writing late at night, too. You get these bursts of ideas that just come out of nowhere. The idea is so good that you can’t type fast enough to get it all down on paper. Some days I’ll even grab a notebook to scribble down this epiphany. You always think it will make sense the next day. Until you read it back, and your inspiration is scribbled down as total gobbley gook.

And don’t get me started on the crumbs that fall into your keyboard because you were trying to type so fast. Trust me, I do this all the time. I always end up snacking on something ridiculous in the middle of the night that has tons of crumbs. You end up spending so much time digging those crumbs out of the keyboard that you forget what you were working on. What was that good idea I had, and did I remember to write it down?!? AAARRRGGGHHH!

Writing in the middle of the night is a fun and weird experience. Whoever thought quiet time would help me create better than during the day, with all the noise? Oh, right, that was me. I love those funny quirks that happen when my deepest thoughts start to flow. Who knows what I could come up with if I didn’t take writing seriously seventy-four percent of the time?