I’ve heard that Howard Hughes conducted business in the middle of the night when nobody could say they were otherwise engaged. I try not to make a habit of stomping about in the middle of the night but I’m certainly not a stranger to it. Being awake in the middle of the night is often a capitulation, an acknowledgement that one may as well get up as toss and turn worrying about something. It is of course a reliable method of battening down a flourishing issue. It can however be a luxury, the privilege afforded those who are not for some physical or psychical reason chained to their bed. It is normally a small compliment to recount anything I might accomplish in the middle of the night. Some people might like to read. I prefer to write. Writing isn’t for me merely a knee-jerk undertaking; I try for example to capitalize upon the sterility of the early morning hours to promote austerity in my accounts. Prolixity is among my failings. Additionally I subscribe to what I understand was Hemingway’s thesis that practice is a good thing whether for athletes or writers; there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s all about using that muscle, keeping it fit and toned.
The goal of “finding one’s voice” is I think related to unrestrained communication. The success in doing so seems to entail writing as one talks, not as simple a task as one might imagine. The written word obviously inspires reconsideration of what one thinks even though the spoken word can be as powerful. The trick is to translate the narrative as though it were a conversation. Too often fluidity is confused with stupidity; there is however no need to diminish the literary quality of one’s thoughts merely because they are natural. I won’t suggest that some people think in thirty-dollar words but there are those who actually have a vocabulary.
