Do you wake early with arms stretched open wide to the sun, or are you like a barn owl, a bat, a bush rat, or a possum perhaps, who prefers the light of the moon?
Before I was married I used to binge clean and work on projects into the early morning hours. Rearrange my living room, organize a closet, work on a photo album, read a book, paint the kitchen. When I first started writing my book I had young kids so I would carve out minutes throughout the day to write, but when my husband would go play basketball at night with his men’s team, as much as it would bug me that I couldn’t play with them I relished the night alone to stay up late and write. His team would go for drinks after the game so he would be out until the bars closed. And on his return I would be up in my office plugging away at my computer and howling at the moon.
These days my husband doesn’t have many 2:00am arrivals, which is good because with that comes worry, but it also means I don’t often get the long uninterrupted silence of the night. If I stay up after my husband goes to bed, he can’t get to sleep. This is not good for either of us. So now I sit in the middle, I go to bed around 11:00pm and get up around 7:00am (give or take an hour or two on any given day).
I think we are born a certain way, preferring morning or night, however with some training we can find a happy medium, a rhythm that works for us and our family and our writing. I still prefer the silence of the night when I write, and take any free evening and push it into the early morning hours doing just that, but I have learned to search for times, under the light of the sun as well as the silence of the moon, to write and be.
Are you a morning person or a night person? How do you work that into your life and your writing?
WRITING PROMPT: Sun or Moon? Write about it.
