The Insomniac Writer: cure or endure?

by Teri Terry

I often have trouble sleeping - it isn't anything new. In fact in a weird moment of synchronicity, here is a memory Facebook threw up at me from five years ago, just as I started writing this blog. 

I can actually remember the first time I had trouble sleeping. I was in year ten at school and there was a big maths test the next day. Some kids were stressing about it and our teacher said those immortal words: 

The most important thing is to get a good night's sleep. 

I call this the curse of Mrs Lutz. It began a lifelong pre-exam/pre-job interview/pre-first appearance at Edinburgh etc inability to sleep.

The curse of Mrs Lutz - the can't-fall-asleep-because-of-worrying-about-something-reasonable-to-worry-about sort of insomnia - isn't the most dominant sort for me now, though. 

Most of the time I fall asleep easily enough, sleep for about three hours, and then ... wake up. And often that is it - for hours. Butterfly brain flits and races in so many directions! From things I plan to do the next day - usually my nighttime list is beyond anything reasonably attainable - to past events - and almost always: my current work in progress. Plot tangle? Character issue? You name it, I'm on it. I'll be awake for two or three hours and then fall asleep for another one or two. The problem that comes is if I can't have that last hour or two because I have to get up for an event or to let in electricians or any other pesky matter of real life - then I get in a too tired to think sort of state where I'm not much use to anybody.

From comments on Facebook and Twitter it seems apparent that trouble sleeping is a writer thing: another area for collective comfort.

The insomniac writer is nothing new:

There is a really interesting article by Greg Johnson published in VQR in 2003, "On the Edge of an Abyss: The Writer as Insomniac" that catalogues a long list of literary heroes and their battles with insomnia. From D.H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, William Wordsworth, Walt Wiltman, insomnia seems to be a badge of honour, sometimes loved, often hated - a creative time or a hell of self-doubt and insecurity. And is it a case of not being able to sleep, or refusing to allow sleep to come in and take consciousness away?

Here more recently is Debi Gliori from brainyquotes, one I really relate to:

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word.

Sometimes I'm so desperate for more sleep that I'd do anything ...

Is there a cure?

I went to a talk on sleep and dreaming at the New Scientist Live exhibition recently by psychologist and author Richard Wiseman. He gave top tips for better sleep, so here goes:

1. Napping: 
It is part of our biology to have a dip in alertness around midnight and around noon. If you nap when that dip occurs midday it will improve your memory and alertness and decrease heart disease! Sounds good. The trick is only about 25 minutes: any longer than this then you slip into deep sleep and feel worse instead of better when you wake up.

2. Get the length of sleep right: 
Sleep cycles - of light sleep, deep sleep, and REM (dreaming) - last about 90 minutes. For good health it is essential to go through these cycles: in light sleep you process psychological matters, in deep sleep you heal physically, and dreams work through your worries and concerns. You need to wake up at the end of the cycle to feel refreshed. So go to sleep in factors of 90 minutes, with about 15 extra to fall asleep. 

For e.g., if you go to bed at 10:45 pm, so hopefully are asleep by 11 pm, plan your wake up time at either 5 am (ouch) - giving 6 hours of sleep and 4 sleep cycles; or 6:30 am, which is 7.5 hours sleep, 5 sleep cycles; and so on. If you wake up at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. you'd be in the wrong stage of sleep, and get that jarred awake feeling when the alarm goes and feel more tired.

I found this interesting because my nighttime bouts of insomnia always seem to happen about 3 hours after I go to sleep; and if I get more sleep later in the morning about 90 minutes seems to be about right.

3. Alcohol:
Having a nightcap disrupts deep sleep and dreaming. Avoid for 2 hours before bedtime.

4. Phones and laptops:
Don't use screens for 2 hours before bedtime: light disrupts melatonin and sleep. Ten minutes on your phone before bedtime is equivalent to a two hour walk in bright sunshine.

5. Reverse psychology:
If you can't fall asleep, try to stay awake instead! Keep your eyes open and you'll soon fall asleep.

6. Music:
The right sort of music can promote sleep. He suggests something called Night School Music which he said can be downloaded for free; I couldn't find it on line so I'm guessing it might be linked in his book. Personally I find when I'm staying in hotels if I can't fall asleep in different surroundings, I put Mark Knopfler on low and it helps me drift off.

7. Distraction:
If you wake up and your mind is racing, distract it. Do something like an alphabet game (where for e.g. you name an animal or a piece of fruit for every letter of the alphabet in your mind), or read. I used to play scrabble on my phone as I found it does the same sort of thing, but - whoops - no screens, no. 4 above.

8. Get up:
If you're awake at night for more than about ten minutes, get up and do something in low light for a while - e.g. read, do a jigsaw puzzle - something that takes your attention. The reason to get up is to avoid associating bed with sleeplessness.

Cure or Endure?

There are some great tips on the insomnia battle there. I'm not much of a napper but I'm with him on 2, 3, 4, 6, and occasionally (if I have to get up early the next day) can make myself do 7, though it is a battle of willpower to make myself do it. But I can't convince myself to try 8. And somehow I think I've finally realised:

I don't actually want to. I like being awake, thinking, in the middle of the night. I may regret it the next day, but I don't want to let it go.

I'm not alone:

In it's early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge. 

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

I have patches of insomnia, and I'm fascinated by the otherness of the world at night. The stillness. Daytime preoccupations fall away, standards change, thoughts change. It's a canvass for reinvention ...  

Morag Joss

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia. 

Antonio Tabucchi

p.s. I would have sprinkled in interesting images through the blog but I'm SO tired after missing my later sleeping slot to let in the electricians at stupidly-early-o'clock, I just couldn't manage it ...

A ghost from the past - Halloween special

by Addy Farmer

Think this is spooky? Wait till you read my post and see a 'real' ghost ...

Ghosts -  can definitely live without them but can you live with them? I really love a cracking ghost story and it being Halloween, it seemed a good time to bring back to life my post on writing ghost stories (plus I forgot to post anything - boo!).And to entice you into going to the trouble of pressing your finger down on the link and clicking through to my post, I can guarantee you a real ghost taken by my sister-in-law in a little used church in the middle-of-nowhere - REALLY.

Oh whistle and I'll come to you, my lad

And for your further spooky delight take a listen (but during the hours of daylight) to the excellent radio 4 extra programme on 'real' ghosts. At the age of eleven, Diane Morgan saw a ghostly figure in a bedroom at her nan’s house which sparked a life-long obsession with thenormal. For Radio 4 Extra’s Diane Morgan Believes in Ghosts, featuring Maxine Peake, Steve Punt and Toyah Willcox, Diane’s searched the BBC vaults for the best real-life tales of ghost hunting, hauntings, and unexplained phenomena.

The Mezzotint, by M.R James

And to finish my spooktacular introduction to you reading my old and haunting post you could take a look at the actual science behind WHY we like being spooked.

Happy Halloween ...

Why I changed my mind about Facebook Pages for authors

By Candy Gourlay

For the past two years now, I've been co-running a Boot Camp for debut authors with writing pals Sara Grant (Chasing Danger) and Mo O'Hara (My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish).

The three of us bring useful skills from our real lives: Sara has worked in public relations and talks about strategy; Mo is a stand up comedian and an actress and talks about performance and school visits ... and me? Well I'm a former web designer and an all around geek – my role is to discuss how authors can take advantage of the digital opportunities available.

Mo O'Hara discussing the art of the school visit.

Sara Grant showing off her author kit in front of a board scribbled with the hopes and dreams of our audience.

Here I am with a roomful of debut children's authors behind me.

In past years, I have written a lot about author promotion, dishing out practical advice about websites, building a platform, how to do Skype visits, how to do Google Hangouts, how impoverished authors can make their own book trailers (part 1 and part 2), how to plan a book launch party and Facebook pages.

The very nature of digital opportunity is so fluid, what with technology constantly changing, that the advice is never the same. Looking back at a 2011 post I wrote about building your own websites, for example, so much has changed in the online world that I should really put up a warning note at the top of the piece, pointing out that I wrote it six years ago. Six years is a long time in a digital world.

Ten years ago, when the internet was just beginning to pick up speed, everyone suddenly decided that  authors must blog. Well the graveyard of defunct author blogs is now full to overflowing as a result. Later, Twitter seemed to have The Power. Today, thousands of books are not getting written because their authors have become Twitter addicted. While Twitter is a social network that connects individuals, it's not a great place to actually sell books. And then there's Facebook, virtual hang-out to two billion of the world's population.

At the beginning, Facebook introduced the 'fan page' – a thrilling way for authors to connect directly with fans who are on Facebook. Soon though, Facebook decided to 'monetise' fan pages via what one pundit called a 'bait and switch' – hiding your FB posts from your fans so that you will pay for them to be shown.

I was so disappointed I wrote a piece declaring that there was no point having a Facebook page unless you're JK Rowling and your fans willingly visit your page instead of waiting for you to appear on their feed. So for the past few years, I've been using my personal FB profile, instead of an official fan page, to connect with my readers.

But I kept an eye on Facebook. It's a no brainer that anyone wanting to be discovered should cultivate a good FB profile. But how?

In December 2016, I noticed that under the relatively new button 'Following' on every Facebook Page, a new menu was popping up (pictured right).

It gave fans the following new choices:

• They could UNFOLLOW your page so that they didn't have to see your postings, even though they liked the page.
• They could tick DEFAULT and let the FB algorithm decide how much or how little they see of the page.
• Or they could select SEE FIRST so that they could see your all of the page's posts on their feed as soon as they are posted.

Suddenly the game changed.

Facebook was giving users a way to keep track of pages that they absolutely wanted to see.

Yes, FB is still trying to encourage us to pay for promotions. But the social network has also realised that they have been alienating the people who create the content that makes the network social in the first place.

For us authors, it gives us a fighting chance to be discovered.

Book launch guru Tim Grahl says never make it about you, the author ... he says:

'Always focus on helping the reader'.

With the new improved FB pages, we now have the opportunity to post such compelling content that our readers will want to click SEE FIRST because they do not want to miss out. Tthink about all the things you find so compelling that you are moved to share them on your feed: heartwarming videos, surprising facts, amusing quizzes, urgent news ...

So what content can you create that will persuade your readers to click that SEE FIRST button?

The answer lies in several things:

• Your identity as an author.

• How useful/beguiling/compelling your content is to your reader.

• How original your posts are

• How much value do you, as author, add to what you post

Considering your identity, it might help to see how other authors are playing themselves on Facebook - Junot Diaz posts about social and political topics, if you're a fan of Neil Gaiman, you get to hear that gorgeous voice and witness the disarray of his hair in his videos, John Green posts about nerdy stuff, Kate DiCamillo (whose readership probably most matches mine) posts inspirational stories.

Me, I avoid politics but on my FB page, I comment on reading, writing and getting published (in childrens' books). As an 'author of colour' I am deeply concerned about diversity and inclusion. I use my skills as a former journalist to report on book events (you are welcome to read my blog post: Social Media: eight things we can learn from old-style journalism). It's also a chance to take photos and make videos (which I love!).

As for adding value – never post in a vacuum! Imprint every posting with the value of who you are – with a comment, a thoughtful reflection, a wise interpretation, a personal anecdote.

I only started my Facebook Page at the beginning of 2017 though I don't have a new book out until 2018.  I thought this would give me time to get to grips with the page, create fresh content and build an audience. If you're interested in following my progress, please like my page ... I really try to be useful. Oh ... and don't forget to click on SEE FIRST.

How is my FB page doing so far? Well, I'm feeling very positive.

Videos are a big hit, especially if they're about picture books. I am trying to do quickie interviews with the interesting people I meet – most recently, at the Pune International Literary Festival in India (see the playlist) where I interviewed a range of fantastic folk, from student volunteers to venerable literary stars.

The photo albums covering book launches (such as my friend Katy Dale's) and other booky events (like Melvin Burgess' nomination to the Hans Christian Andersen award, the Carnegie-Greenaway Awards, and the Dubai Literary Festival) attract many visitors (the secret is in the tagging – learn how to like other pages as your page). Some random visitors who come to look at pictures actually end up liking the page! I've noticed that the more original my posts – original here meaning, nobody else has posted it – the better it is received, with more likes, comments and shares.

As for links posting, I am always on the look out for interesting links, and so I find myself following good pages that serve up useful information that suit my page's personality. For example, I love the posts on diversity by Lee & Low Books (a multicultural publisher in the US) and have reposted some of their links. One of the most popular links I posted was an article by the author Grace Lin discussing Dr Seuss's early racism in his work and how he changed. I had more than a thousand hits in two days. A photo of my feet in Little Prince Socks on the day I went to my first day as a judge on Booktrust's In Other Words Competition got thousands of views though only eight likes! Why?



Still so much to learn. I'll report back in 2018 after my new books come out. Watch this space!

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Candy Gourlay thought she could not become an author while growing up under a dictatorship in the Philippines and became a journalist instead – but she was wrong. Years later, her novels Tall Story and Shine have been listed for many awards including the Waterstone’s, the Blue Peter, the Carnegie and the Guardian Prize.