Why is 4 a.m. such a good time to get writing done?
August 12th, 2007 by screenwriterguy
This evening is the first all-group meeting of my online sketch comedy effort. It will be the first time the writers, actors, and directors all meet each other. I’ve been gearing up for it for some time now, so I’m pleased to finally have it happen. I still have some handouts to finish preparing, but in general I’m pretty set.
Friday was the weekly writers’ meeting. We have been planning to hit the ground running at this first all-group meeting, and to present a handful of good sketches to wow the actors and directors. (We actually have quite a few to choose from after only a few meetings; I’ve been pretty stoked with how the writing team has turned out.) At the meeting, I said I’d be rewriting a couple of the sketches before we present them. They were both great premises with some funny jokes. I just wanted to brainstorm even more jokes together, and then polish everything up. The team came through on the punch-ups. Friday was definitely the day where we solidified not just as a group of writers, but as a writing group.
The thing is, I’ve been working for the last couple of evenings on preparing for the meeting, and these rewrites have been at the top of the stack of things to do. I tackled one of them each night. (And I’m pretty proud of how they turned out.) But both nights, it wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning before the rewrite really found form in my head.
What’s up with that? What is it about the creative process that I can’t possibly get the juices flowing until after cleaning my room, staring at the page, checking my blog stats, watching some episodes of Rome, downing some guacamole, staring at the page, reading Wikipedia articles about neural diseases, staring at the page, and swatting all the flies in the kitchen? Why can’t I skip straight to the part where the productive page-filling happens?
I’m pretty sure when I die, it will be some side effect of a broken circadian rhythm.
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