Giving a lot of thought to the subject lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that the curse of insomnia isn’t so much an affliction of frustration as it is the result of an unease about the incomplete ideas that have formed over the years. When I was younger, I always slept well, maybe too well, owing to the fact that there wasn’t much to be concerned about. There was very little experience and connections to the wider world had not yet formed in any meaningful way. It’s like the difference between love and empathy. Young love is all infatuation, desire, and pursuit; a word I can never spell correctly, but an activity that was easy to fall into the habit of. The love of youth is fleeting, selfish, and you might even say it was vicarious in the sense that it is always about wanting to know how the target of affection feels about you.

Although I suppose it is possible to have naïve empathy, it seems to be a quality that is more a result of age if you are of the type that learns to take in the world as it is presented rather than interpreting everything. It grows as you accumulate information and experiences in an ever-widening circle where you eventually see the intersection of your circles with those of other people. At first, you might be stopped, as if slapped in the face, by the newness of what is found; if you keep growing those circles, you eventually see that your strangeness is as much of a shock to them. It is a ceaseless exercise and you never perfect it, but int time you have seen enough intersections that empathy is just a natural result. How could you not feel a deep-seated for others who are a very real part of your world?

I’ve never thought of myself as being a creative soul as much as a collector of vignettes and facts that I try to make sense of. Some are simple scenes of people I see on the street or composites of characters in stories or in movies. It’s a jumble of particulars that combine in my head and need some method of expression. I could keep them up here but they only aggregate and morph into new ideas and scenes that force their way to the surface. I suppose that eventually people will ask how I can come up with story plots, characters, and poetry. I know many writers say there is a muse that comes to them or sits on their shoulder that provides inspiration, but I know that the spark comes from feeling, seeing, or reading something very specific that sparks a confluence of stuff, and I do mean an undefined nebulous term like stuff, that comes into focus. It isn’t epiphany or a bolt out of the blue but a solid idea of what the piece should be. I still have to work very hard to define it and flesh out the details that will be comprised of pages and pages of notes, but I know what it is I want to write about and what form it will take.

Reading widely on the methods of writers and other creative types, I can say that I don’t think that my methodology is either practiced or recommended by anyone else. For generating ideas, it works for me and I don’t get writer’s block nor do I have a problem writing from prompts. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t been writing for very long, but in the eight or so years that I have been putting down words on a page regularly, I really haven’t had a problem generating ideas. However, that good result does have one very bad side effect which is insomnia. You might be tempted to tell me that I should trade it for a little writer’s block, but it just doesn’t work that way.