Last updated on July 2, 2025
I often write when I’m tired. Does that sound weird? Sometimes, I do it quite on purpose. Not because I’m trying to push through the fatigue or anything so banal, but because writing lifts me out of it.
I’ve dozed off in my chair with my fingers still on the keyboard only about a billion times, head hanging back and full-out mouth open snoring. Scrawled half-dreamed phrases in the dark on a notepad after something jerked me back from sleep and refused to wait until morning. I write with one eye squeaked open, words slanting sideways, and still, still, it fills me up. It never drains me. It never could. The restorative power of constructing the words, the act of spelling, focusses my intentions on that magic of creating something out of the nothing and the act makes me whole again. Makes me sigh in comfort and settledness.
This isn’t about discipline. It isn’t hustle. It’s devotion, the biggest component of my spiritual practice.
I’ve shared with you before that as a Bardic Druid, writing isn’t just a habit or a hobby or a job for me – it’s sacredness. It’s how I connect with all the planes and universal consciousness. How I root myself when everything feels as though it’s coming apart. It’s not optional. I’m compelled. It’s the way I keep my hand on my fellow spellers and how I know very concretely that I’m never alone no matter what my current isolating struggle might be.
It’s a touchstone and rest and a spark on a powder keg all in one.
As much as I wish otherwise, there are days when I’m still working twelve or fourteen or more hours at my day job, working circles around guys half my age, because I only have two speeds – all the way in or all the way out. Am pulled in too many directions, stretched thin by everything that needs doing in and out of work like ageing parents, my dad with dementia, grown kids who still need help, and guinea pigs who demand veggies. But when I sit down? Even only for a few stolen minutes to let the words come, something in me quiets. Grounds. Realigns.
That’s the difference between me and everyone else, I suppose. I don’t wait to write until I’ve had enough rest. I write to achieve that state. The act itself is what keeps my pilot light lit.
Spirituality aside, there’s a benefit to writing fiction, or anything for that matter, in a half-exhausted state. Inhibitions are low, and yeah, I sometimes use it on purpose. Things pop out that wouldn’t when I’m all the way awake – brilliant, strange, sometimes personally terrifying things. All the super-scary truths that I never want to tell, but that must be spoken in order to connect with other humans on those jagged points of the shared human condition. If I write myself into a corner? Writing half-asleep is usually the time i write myself out of it, because I stop over-thinking in that state. There’s no hiding there. Only what is and what could be.
Sure, I’ve got more half-finished drafts than time to finish them. Probably in four or five lifetimes. But the current is still moving. The work happens. The words are always there, humming just beneath the surface and that’s all I need. It’s my fuel and prayer and rest all at once.