What time of day do you do your best work? You hear people claim to be either a night owl or an early bird, but I would like to think that the habit of getting creative work done is something that can be trained to happen – we aren’t necessarily stuck in one mode for our entire life.

If you had asked me a few years ago I would have said NIGHT OWL all the way. I found that later I stayed up drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes the easier the thoughts flowed from pen to paper. Whenever I got stuck I would take a long walk down the hill by my house that leads towards the industrial district. On many nights I am sure I must have walked 3 or 4 miles easily. (I always take a small notebook with me.) Ideas cooked up in the middle of the night often can have a certain wildness, and creativity to them, they are a bit looser and less civilized than morning ideas. I feel that the midnight hour is the best time to write essays and short stories. (Poems are easiest in the afternoon.)

These days I am trying to train myself to become more of a morning person. I suppose this has as much to do with getting older and wanted to be healthier as it does anything else. It’s easy to live a healthy lifestyle if you are asleep by midnight.

I have also found it very easy to be creative in the mornings. As followers of this blog may already know I am writing a YA fantasy novel right now. I have found early mornings to be the perfect time for this. The trick is to get from asleep to the writing desk as quickly as possible. If you don’t let yourself get distracted by anything else you can harness the creativity of the sleeping/dreaming brain and transition directly to dreaming on the page.

But either way, whether writing early in the morning or late at night, I suspect that daytime creativity gets a boost from it’s proximity to sleep.