A novelist’s brain has a will completely independent of the body within which it resides. It is also resentful of the person to whom it belongs. Take sleep, for instance. The novelist’s brain waits in gleeful anticipation of bedtime. Why? So that it can take over, of course, without anything or anyone demanding it spend time on more “useless” pursuits…like “the routines of daily life.”
Most people dream about things which either they desire or they fear, which relieves their subconscious of unwanted worry, frets, and stress. Some dream symbols, but never much in the way of “making any sense”…or that’s the general gist, anyway. Novelist’s brains, though, are creatures of a different sort altogether. Free of the onus of having to battle the conscious will of its host person and resident body’s demands, the novelist’s brain takes sleep’s opportunity to…WRITE, PLOT, PLAN, OUTLINE, LIVE, REINVENT, MANUFACTURE, and EXPLORE the stories it insists on spawning into tangible reality whenever it can coerce and induce the person it owns and the body which owns it to sit down and type.
I tell you, it’s an exhausting thing to go to bed tired only to wind up having to gallop around all night in fictional scene-scapes. But that’s what we novelists do, all night, every night. And you wonder why we’ve got bags under our eyes? Why we seem perpetually grumpy? Sleep is our nightmare!
Recently:
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