A question I get now 'n' then on this blog is "When do you sleep?" For some odd reason, folks look at the time stamps on my posts and get intrigued by this matter. One wrote recently to ask, "Is the time I see on the posting the time you yourself wrote it and posted it or is it posted via some sort of timer?"
Answer: Via the software here, I can post via timer — I could specify that this post would go up tomorrow morning at 5:27 AM — but I rarely have any reason to use that function. Sometimes, I write something and post it as soon as I finish it — as I will do with this post. Sometimes, I write all or most of a post and then manually put it up hours or even days later — as I will not do with this post.
I generally sleep five hours a night…sometimes, six. I do not seem to able to do much more than six at a time. Every once in a while, my body demands an extra hour in the form of a nap later but that is a fairly recent development and a sign of getting older. I don't think I ever took a nap between ages three and fifty except when ill.
Until I was around thirty, I often had trouble falling asleep. I'd lay in bed for hours — or for what seemed like hours — wide-awake, trying to calm my mind, which felt like a race car, revved-up to the max, waiting for the "GO" signal. It was especially bad when I was traveling and sleeping in a bed not my own. I finally figured out I was doing two things wrong, one being that I was underestimating the impact of caffeine on my system.
I've never liked coffee but I was getting plenty in Cokes and Pepsis. And being someone who occasionally has trouble with "the local water" in another city, I was consuming two or three times as many colas when I traveled. Once I realized how they were affecting me, I made a rule: I'd still drink them during the day but after 6 PM, I'd only have 7-Up or ginger ale. That helped my sleeping a lot and it also helped when in 2006, I gave up carbonated drinks completely. It has been a good thing for me that just about everywhere you got, you can now get bottled water fairly easily.
The other thing I learned to do was to find good stopping points in my writing. Before, I'd reach a point in a script where I had no friggin' idea what should happen next and if I gave up for the night and went to bed, I'd lay there trying to solve the problem. Now, I try to knock off and head for the mattress before I get to one of those points…or I stay up until I put a good dent in it. I also adhere more to two pieces of advice I often give other writers but occasionally forget to follow myself…
One is: If you get stuck on page 22, go back to page 19 and try it again from there.
And the other is: Have a little confidence in yourself. Maybe you can't solve it now when you're weary and functioning on about a third of whatever fraction of a brain you use at your best. But it'll be easy if you get some sleep and get the other two-thirds back.
This brings us to the question of what hours I sleep. Let me tell you about a writer I knew many years ago named Artie…
Artie was a good friend and a good writer but I thought he agonized way too much over his writing. Working hard does not have to mean working tense and he had this idea that he couldn't write anything good unless he was in Crisis Mode. Each script had to become a life-or-death struggle with various demons waiting to destroy him if it was not good. And of course, there was no such thing as getting it done even one day before the deadline.
The last few days before something was due, he'd labor all night, guzzling coffee and various stimulants to keep him at the keyboard. When he absolutely had to sleep, he'd set an alarm for two hours, then it was back to rolling that boulder up the mountainside. I don't think he ever got any of those scripts in on time but he'd usually come close enough…and then once one was in, he'd crash. For days. At some point, his life became largely disconnected with this thing called a clock. If you asked him what hours he slept, the answer was — truthfully — "Whenever I have to."
He did not sleep 10 PM to 6 AM or Midnight to 8 AM or any regular pattern at all. Monday, he'd sleep 3 PM to 7 PM, then Midnight to 4 AM, then on Tuesday from 11 AM to 5 PM, then he'd be up all evening and all night, crashing at 6 AM. He'd sleep all day Wednesday, then barely on Thursday. If I needed to phone him, I had no idea of a proper time to call. He was as likely to answer at 3 AM as he was at 3 PM. Once, I did call at 3 PM and woke him up. Barely conscious, he asked me what time it was and I told him it was three. He asked, because he honestly didn't have a clue, "AM or PM?"
For what I could observe, this was not good for his health. It certainly wasn't good for his career. He couldn't reach editors because he was asleep when they were in their offices. He'd make doctor appointments and then not show up for them because he was sound asleep. He could buy his groceries at all-night markets but for days, he needed to go into his bank to clear up a problem and could never somehow synchronize with the hours the bank was open. One morning, I got up at 8 AM and found an e-mail from him that read…
Please do me a favor. I have a 10 AM appointment with [name of producer we both worked for] but I've been up all night and I'm not going to make it. I can't find an e-mail for his office so please phone them when they're open and tell them I won't be in.
The e-mail to me was time-stamped 6:45 AM. That was, I guess, when he was going to bed. He ended up losing that job and then the best one he could get was one that required him to go into an office every day and write there from roughly 10 AM to 6 PM. He couldn't do it. He physically couldn't discipline his sleeping so he could be there with a full night's sleep at 10 in the ayem. After that, he had trouble getting work and his health got bad and the rest of the story is pretty unpleasant.
What he got into is a potential hazard for freelancers who can set their own hours and there have been times when I find myself slipping into it. It's not bad for a few days now and then but eventually it creates problems — problems with my health, problems with my career and just plain problems functioning as a human being. I need to be awake more or less when the world around me is awake and when the people in my life are awake.
I'm fortunate I don't need eight hours a night. Sometime between 1 AM and 3 AM, I start to feel drowsy enough that I can sleep and with luck, I also feel like I'm in enough control of what I'm writing that I can leave it for a while and not keep writing it in my head. That's when I'm off to bed, which means I get up between 6 AM and 9 AM, which is close enough to the normal world to not cause any problems for me or anyone else.
Still, I occasionally slide into an odd sleeping pattern for some period. It often happens when I'm writing for someone in another time zone, especially on another continent. One night, I was pounding away on a script for a producer in France and around 3:00 AM, I decided to call it a day. Before I could, I got an e-mail from said producer, wanting to know if I'd be available for a very important conference call in two hours — 2 PM their time but 5 AM here.
That's sometimes how it starts. Other times, I get so engrossed in work that I suddenly find, much to my surprise, that it's 4:30 AM or even sunrise. That can throw my life off for days and that's when I do my darnedest to get back to some normality. I keep thinking to myself over and over, "I have to get off Artie Time, I have to get off Artie Time…"