Writing at Night

The Guardian discusses writerly night owls.

From the piece...

I write this from a swivel chair at 4.17am. Twitter has gone quiet. There is darkness for miles. I can hear a watch tick. It's the longest night of the year, and if I time things carefully, I could avoid daylight for 48 hours. What's more, research suggests it won't just be me. There's a mislaid family of readers and writers at night, and at this hour there's nothing else to do but search for them.

Robert Frost was up late. So were Delmore Schwartz, Alan Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Charles Dickens and Carol Ann Duffy. "The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a dreaming child into the darkness of these pages," wrote Richard Brautigan. James Tipton seems to suggest that poetry itself is sleeplessness, a oneness with things only amassable at night. "A child," said Sylvia Plath, "forming itself finger by finger in the dark."

Does the night absolve the day? Susan Rebecca White wrote after long shifts at a Middle Eastern restaurant, "still smelling of hummus and lamb". Tennessee Williams wrote after days as a clerk at the International Shoe Company, Kafka after insurance, TS Eliot after banking. JD Salinger was sent to military school aged 15, where he wrote under bedsheets by torchlight. His last, unpublished work – written in slippers and robe in New Hampshire, and burned at dusk – was a song to insomnia, a "memoir of the night" of which only 16 pages remain.