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Is nighttime your best time?
Published: April 29, 2005 If you had a choice, what time would you get up: 5 a.m.? 10 a.m.? After noon? If you get up at 10 or later, you probably don't brag about it for fear you'll be labeled a layabout. Let's face it: In a 9 to 5 world, we're conditioned to hail the early risers as go-getters who will most likely succeed-and to look askance at those who sleep in.
Well, here's some good news for late sleepers-researchers have found that "the time one wakes up has little bearing on income or success," according to an article in The New York Times.
It is not surprising that among those most likely to stay up late and sleep all morning are people working in the arts or entertainment fields-artists, performers, musicians and writers.
Critically acclaimed writer Cynthia Ozick, for example, told the Times reporter that she goes to bed after 3 a.m. and sleeps until after noon. "I'm a creature of bad habits in the eyes of the world," she said. I say hooray for such bad habits, then, especially when they produce writing as fine as Ozick's.
The issue, of course, isn't when you write, but that you write. On these pages, you'll find advice and step-by-step instruction from top writers to help you with your craft. Children's book authors Judy Blume, Kate Dicamillo, David Elliott, Nikki Grimes and Anita Riggio talk about developing ideas into stories(page 32), while memoirist and editor Sol Stein shows you how to craft a compelling memoir(page 20).
Also in this issue, we bring you a new feature, "Classic Writer" (page 26), offerring timeless advice from The Writer archives, which has goodies dating to 1887. For our first installment, we chose novelist Evan Hunter's guide to writing a novel from start to finish. The creative urge can come at all hours, he says. When your novel is ready to be written, it'll be with you "literally day and night."
--Posted April 29, 2005
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