Joshua Mohr Recommends...

writers recommend
10.21.09

“I'm not sure many people think of insomnia as a good thing, but it is. As a ‘sufferer,’ I'm up until five or six in the morning almost daily. One thing I’ve found is that I write with the most imagination in the middle of the night, as though my subconscious and conscious are more in tune with each other—something about being liberated from cell phones and e-mails and other plights of the real world. So I recommend brewing some coffee at ten or eleven at night, settling in, and letting your brain get as reckless on the page as it wants, without any distractions pulling you back to earth.”
—Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me (Two Dollar Radio, 2009)

Photo credit: Shelby Brakken

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Comments

Loretta Worters replied on Permalink

Some things...Like sleep..Mean the World to Me

As a night owl, the idea of staying up late to write my book is a delightful option I have, on several occasions, exercised. As Amrose Bierce once said, dawn is when men of reason go to bed. It is obvious, however, that Joshua doesn't have a day job -- that annoying necessity to pay the bills so that we can do our creative work. If he does, then my hat goes off to him because I find I am a babbling fool when I've been sleep deprived one day let alone every day.

Loretta Worters replied on Permalink

Some things...Like sleep..Mean the World to Me

As a night owl, the idea of staying up late to write my book is a delightful option I have, on several occasions, exercised. As Amrose Bierce once said, dawn is when men of reason go to bed. It is obvious, however, that Joshua doesn't have a day job -- that annoying necessity to pay the bills so that we can do our creative work. If he does, then my hat goes off to him because I find I am a babbling fool when I've been sleep deprived one day let alone every day.

DANG THAN replied on Permalink

I've even written in my dreams

MY SUBCONSCIOUSNES JUST CREATED A NEW TYPE OF ENGLISH VERB!! Last night I stayed up so late and went to bed only when I couldn't sit up for more. I had a long dream, and then (almost at dawn) in my dream a miracle happened to touch me. I saw the superb Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo in red. He was rushing forward, adjusting the ball and covering it at the same time. Immediately a special verb appeared in front of me in printed form like this: "to adjust/clad". The second word is an old verb and adjective as well (amazingly and incredibly enough I haven’t known this word before!!), and I don’t know why it must be typed in bold form. Its bold form and position (after a slash “/”) may express: - that it is the main and important technique here; - that this action must be done in a close and secret way; - that you should do it in order to take the first action in a perfect way… Thanks to my dream, I am a "language inventor" now! Congratulate me, please! And as a result, I would now like to contribute some more verbs of this type to the ENGLISH LANGUAGE: to speak/clad, to write/clad, to fight/clad, to live/clad, to work/clad, to flirt/clad, to love/clad, to cry/clad, to die/clad, to kill/clad, to bribe/clad, to buy/clad, to sell/clad, to xyz/clad... then to kick/dance, to smile/hate, to conquer/stoop, to return/part, to go east/west (like Columbus!), to agree/disagree, to disagree/agree, to fuck/love, to love/fuck, to abc/xyz... and to bend/Beck, to pun/Joyce, to quote/Mahler, to compose/Wagner, to versify/Dada, to nod/Greek, to kiss/French, to think/Vietnamese, to write/Than, etc. -27 Oct 09

DANG THAN replied on Permalink

THX!

Thank you so much, Joshua Mohr, for your recommendation! I am a poet and fiction writer from Vietnam and a NIGHT OWL too :) In Poets & Writer Sep/Oct 2009 issue, Stephen Morison Jr. contributed a report about contemporary Vietnamese literature titled "Demilitarized Zone: Report From Literary Vietnam" in which I am also depicted. Please take a look if you are interested; however, it is a "Print Only" version. The introductory piece has this link: http://www.pw.org/content/demilitarized_.... Pleased to meet you, Joshua! -Dang Than (dangthan@live.com)