What happens at 2:30 a.m.
A blessing or a curse?
Two days ago, on Tuesday, I visited a sculpture exhibition at a local country estate. Throughout the grounds and in a small gallery space there were over 300 works of art from around 70 sculptors. Much of the work was fantastic, and I’ll feature photographs of a few of the pieces in some upcoming posts along with an acknowledgement of the artist.
But that’s not the point of this post.
While we were having a drink in the café, my attention was taken by one of the patrons: a tall, slim, elegant-looking woman perhaps in her early fifties. For various reasons I found myself imagining that there could be a story attached to her i.e. it would be possible to invent a life for someone who looked a little like her.
So I decided to steal her.
It’s something I do often enough, mainly in coffee shops it must be said: I take an impression of someone home with me; sometimes they make it into stories I’m writing, sometimes not.
I suppose the potential story linked to this woman began to build in my subconscious from that moment on. It was a process which culminated - as it often does! - with sentences starting to form in the middle of the night. In this case it wasn’t just the odd one or two I could jot down and then return to sleep.
So it was that at 2:30 a.m. I was downstairs typing up an initial 800 words. I got back to bed about 45 minutes later.
But that wasn’t the end of it. First thing Wednesday morning the story was attacking me again: another 700 words before breakfast, then another 700 or so afterwards. I finished the first draft after dinner: around 2,500 words in under three hours.
It can get you like that!
And that wasn’t the only significant writing-related event of the last forty hours or so.