Mastering the Art of Sleepwriting

A Stipula fountain pen lying on a written piece of paper, Power_of_Words_by_Antonio_Litterio.jpg: Antonio Litterio

Creative Commons License, Antonio Litterio

I really wish I could master the art of sleepwriting.  I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. It could be something I just made up. Or, maybe it’s a secret writer thing that once you non-writers have heard about, I will have to be killed, or you will, or both. Sorry about that.

Of course, it could simply be a super-efficient use of time that allows me to get really high quality sleep while simultaneously filtering all the thoughts running through my head into brilliant, scintillating prose. Well, more brilliant than usual, I suppose.

I am starting to believe that I just made that up.

But, maybe I could invent sleepwriting, and master it, and then take on followers who are aching to learn this incredibly useful art, and I can charge them outrageously, and develop festive eccentricities and arbitrary and capricious rules for it just to mess with people.

I could start now, even. All I have to do is stay a few steps in the process ahead of my minions, I mean, stupidly wealthy students, I mean, generous benefactors, and they’ll never know I’m a complete and utter fraud.

Unless of course they read that. I’ll just edit that part later to make it more charmingly eccentric.

I suspect even insomniacs will want to pay to learn these techniques. Maybe even other artists or type-A personalities will want to know this method so that they can apply it to their own situations and be productive and rested all the time. I think this is clearly my ticket to fame, fortune, not to mention more rest and increased output.

Part of me suspects I might’ve been half asleep when I came up with this notion. Another part wonders if it was the offspring of one of those mornings when the alarm goes off to get me out of bed early to write, and I really wanted to stay there and sleep. A sliver of me thinks that it came from wanting an easy method to siphon off my thoughts when I can’t get my brain to stop and I’m trying to sleep. The largest part of me wonders how I managed to call all of those suspicions individual ideas, when they are probably all the same thing, and probably all true.

Looking back through these thoughts, I’m beginning to wonder how many parts of me there are. Maybe a quick nap will clear that right up.