dog-ears in the wrong notebook

The write time of day
Lawrence Ypil

WHENEVER I find myself interviewing writers, one of the first things I’m always interested in asking them is about their writing rituals. Pencil or laptop. In the middle of a mall or at the heart of one’s home. At the end of the day or at sunrise. At high noon, or at dead of night. With music or without it. After a full meal or an empty stomach.

I guess it’s only part of the general curiosity we all have regarding writers in particular, and artists in general. Holding dear to our romantic notions of the mad-eyed feverish poet struck blind by inspiration in the middle of the night, but also realizing that the true seed of this blessed state is bound to be hidden well within the camouflaged heart of the writer (and therefore far beyond the reach of even our most intrusive questions), we settle to satisfying our nosiness with the seemingly mundane questions on the props of the trade. What do they write with and how long does it take? What do they listen to before hitting the page (or the screen)? What’s the color of the cap or the shirt that they wear when they’re on the right track to the final twist in the story?

Deeply in awe (and also sometimes deeply envious) of the blessedly productive (and almost miraculous) process of the writer-artist, we usually end up asking about the more earthly aspects of this highly spiritual matter. Surely there must be some way to make the ladder of Jacob if not the way to actually meet the angel.

Wanting to bring the writer-prophet back down to the practical matters of our own earth, we ask about the more humdrum (and accessible) implements of this heavenly vision. Because there certainly must be steps one can take to enter into “the zone”. And surely if all it took to write an epic was to wear the right pair of underwear, then we all might as well, by hook or crook, find out whether it was boxers or briefs. Feeling (and fearing) the full-on glare of the madness of making words, we begin our wary approach by figuring out its method.

And certainly the rumors (both confirmed and unconfirmed) abound: about Anton Chekhov keeping a rotten apple in the drawer of his desk, and Haruki Murakami running a whole five miles before he begins the day’s work. Someone I know sharpens a fistful of pencils, another one gets on a bus, sits at the back and takes the round trip going nowhere. Still another wakes up at four in the morning, or stays up at the dead of night, while everyone else is dreaming in their sleep.

Which I’ve never been able to do, considering that waking up at dawn leaves me feeling dumb, high noon lunch makes me sleepy and the midnight hour finds me wanting to do anything but write. Which really just leaves me with the few hours of fading daylight somewhere between four-thirty and seven in the evening, to sit and stare, and if I’m lucky, write.

Which explains, I suppose, why much of what I write is short (because really, how much can one do in an hour and a half?). Or why much of what I say is either melancholic, or wistful, or hopeful. Because who can actually stay dumbly blissful, or blindly optimistic when the day is ending, and the light is fading, and the sun is calling it quits as at hides behind a building?

And the night has yet to make its dark and dreadful certainty felt, being as it is, for now, still merely the promise of evening. So even the sadness here, and during this time, is merely the shape of a future regret.

Because between night and day, darkness and light, things lose their shape, faces fade into the comfortable shadows of their expressions like cars treading through the darkening streets without their headlights on, and there is neither death nor life.

Just maybe a kind of peace, or the version of it that we will ever be closest to. Or a happiness that’s more a smile or a smirk than a laugh, so it’s bound to last longer. Or a deep, unexplainable and almost mysterious urge to transform the world and write.

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