Sleep - tidbits for characters and writers

I don't think I know a single writer who doesn't struggle with sleep. Maybe it's because we so rarely can support ourselves sufficiently to "give up the day job." There always has to be a way to squeeze writing in alongside everything else, and sleep suffers. On the other hand, American society generally seems to be out of touch with the need for sleep - why else would coffee shops be cropping up in so many places?

So I thought I'd share some tidbits on sleep that I've picked up from my own experience. You can apply these to writing your characters' experience... and you may recognize them from your own.

• Different people need different amounts of sleep. Some are fine on five hours; others have to catch up if they get only eight. Children typically need more than adults. Newborn babies spend most of their time sleeping, even if they don't sleep at the hours when we'd like them to.
  
• It's easier to stay awake when your body would rather sleep than to sleep when your body wants to stay awake. This is something useful to remember when dealing with time changes like jet lag.
• If you feel anxiety about sleep, that only makes it harder to sleep (sigh). This affects lots of people with insomnia and anxiety. Sometimes if you assume you won't be able to sleep, then you feel better when you get some, whereas if you hope that you can sleep, you feel really disappointed and depressed when you can't. My husband used to criticize my "negative thinking," but especially when my children were infants it was the only way I could get through the night without hating life.
  
• If you are relatively rested, then you can push through a wave of sleepiness and get a second wind.
• If you are somewhat sleep deprived, you can develop the ability to nap almost any time - if anxiety or stimulants don't interfere.
• If you are sufficiently sleep deprived, you can enter a state in which you become incredibly clumsy. This is when walls leap out of nowhere to intercept you and you bang yourself on every available object.
• If you are extremely sleep deprived and running on hysterical or anxious energy, you may not be able to sleep when you lie down to rest - but this doesn't mean you shouldn't. Just lying still for an hour, though it seems like a waste, can get you closer to a point where your body will actually accept rest and let you sleep.
  
• If you are pregnant (I realize this typically applies to females, but guys, keep this in mind for pregnant characters!) then you may feel an intense, irresistible urge to sleep. When I was pregnant with my first child, I used to call this the "ten seconds to lie down" phenomenon. When I was pregnant with my second child, my first child used to take advantage of these intervals to do things like teach himself how to use the CD player.
• If you have been sleep deprived for a long time (and stimulant use may be involved in this), you tend to go into a very very low gear that keeps you functioning somehow but has very little resilience. Once you've reached this place, having a good night's sleep will make you feel worse before it makes you feel better. I tend to think about it as the sleep bank collecting interest. Your body will seize its opportunity and demand more. It took me months to get over the unpredictable sleep schedule I had when my kids were tiny - and now a sleepless night or two will hit me harder than it used to when it was doing it all the time. At the same time, a good night's sleep will restore me instead of making me feel more desperate for sleep.

I think any of these things could be useful for writing characters realistically. Keep in mind as you write how long it's been since your character last got some rest. It's easy to get caught up in the action and forget that they'd be basically dead on their feet at a certain point.

Watch out, too, for any time when you end a scene or chapter with someone falling asleep. Unless you work hard to build in tension, like them being in danger because of their lack of wakefulness, or them being in danger of having bizarre prophetic dreams, then readers are likely to take this as an opportunity to put the story down.

If you're working with aliens, sleep is one of the things you can play around with. I haven't often seen characters who have highly variable sleep patterns, but I always find them enjoyable when I do. Hibernating creatures, or nocturnal creatures, could add both interest and twists to a story.

And now, on the reality front...

I'm a big advocate of sleep, for writers in particular. I don't use coffee or tea to keep me awake, or to wake me up - which makes me pretty unusual. I try not to blame myself when I'm too tired to work during my "work times" and sleep instead - taking it as a sign that I really needed the sleep. It's hard. But I notice a huge difference in my mental and physical resources depending on the amount of sleep I've had. I like to exercise to keep myself in shape, but it's basically impossible to keep the exercise up if I'm exhausted. At the same time, lack of sleep makes me lethargic and also makes me overeat trying to keep up my energy. Sleep for me is the foundation on which my other general body-health activities rests. And being rested also helps me to avoid mental exhaustion, one of my major sources of writer's block. So on a personal note, I encourage everyone to think through the balance of sleep and other activities in their lives. Small adjustments could make a big difference.

It's something worth thinking about.

Should I write to a market?

If you spend a lot of time visiting writers' forums, you may encounter differences of opinion on whether to "write to a market." For those who may not know, writing to a market essentially means letting the market you wish to sell to dictate how the story you write will work. This can happen either before or after you have actually drafted the story: some writers will read quite a bit of material from a particular market to get a sense of what those editors might like, and then attempt to craft a story that fits those parameters; others will have an idea, sketch it out, then pick a target market and (again on the basis of reading what has sold to that market) tune the story to fit. The fit can be stylistic, content-based, or even one of length.

The argument for writing to a market goes something like this: "Of course you should be aware of what a particular editor likes before you send something to him or her. If you don't keep those editorial tastes in mind as you write, your chances of a rejection will go way up."

The argument against writing to a market goes something like this: "Of course you should be aware of what a particular editor likes before you send something to him or her. But chances are you'll be less true to your story, or lose touch with your Muse, if you try to cater to editorial tastes too directly. Your chances of a rejection will go way up."

Both of these agree on two points: 1. It's good to be aware of what an editor likes, and 2. Your chances of a rejection are quite high.

I confess I have difficulty writing to any particular market. When a story idea jumps into my head, I have to write it the way I have to write it. Some story ideas demand a higher word count for me, and others a lower. Some story ideas call for more description, and some for less. Some call for lush voices, and some for spare ones.

You could say that I write to a market now, because I do design stories specifically for Analog magazine. On the other hand, the fact that I wrote a story that Analog wanted to buy was pure coincidence. It was a story that asked to be told, and I had a great tip from Sheila Finch on where to send it. It was only after that that I decided I should deliberately look around for stories to tell about language and culture for the purposes of sending them to Analog. Fortunately for me, I find that alien design, and language and culture stories are incredibly inspiring. The fit is natural.

If you are not going to plan to write to a market, then finding a place to get your story sold will be a little like the process of finding an advisor for a Ph.D. At that point in your studies it's no longer a question of whether you're a good enough student (feel free to substitute "writer"), it's a question of whether there's someone out there who wants to work with you. It is a question of fit between what you can do and what the writer or editor wants.

I can't say I don't envy those around me who talk about writing to specific markets, particularly when they appear to be able to do it successfully. I suppose one could look at submission guidelines for clues, or read a lot of material from the magazine, or find editor interviews online. After that, though, a lot of guessing is involved until you actually manage to make a sale.

Be careful that you don't lose your convictions in your efforts to do what an editor appears to want. Many editors have idiosyncratic, eclectic tastes - you never know what may appeal to them. It could be that if your story resembles some they've seen before, that they'll love it - or it could be that it will strike them as derivative.

I believe that there is wiggle room. If you have a great story with a dynamite core conflict, and you manage to keep its drive going all the way through, then you can play around with thematic and textural elements to give it a somewhat different flavor.

I have a friend, though, who told me something quite fascinating about a discussion he took part in about international science fiction. Several of the people involved came to the conclusion that international sf was often more exciting precisely because people weren't writing to a market, and thus were pushing their ideas further than they might otherwise.

I encourage people to look for highly original ideas, no matter how they execute them. Originality can be tricky, but one thing I've found useful is looking around in my personal experience for story ideas rather than looking for them in stories I've read. Of course, taking traditional story tropes and turning them on their heads is another favorite hobby of mine.

In the end, I think it's important to write what inspires and excites you. Because if you can't get excited about a story, it's hard to imagine how anyone else will. Yes, I do rather believe in the Muse, though I think she's less intractable and more cooperative than many others do.

I wish all of you the best in selling your work, wherever it happens to land. Because I love reading good stories.

Body Models and Metaphors

I was talking recently with a friend about illness - we both have kids, so we do this quite a lot. We were discussing how to "read" a cold, to tell when we should take one of the kids to the doctor rather than just waiting for them to get better. During this discussion I realized that though she and I were trying to do the same thing, we were using different metrics for how to decide when we needed to worry.

My friend's model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on the passage of time. A cold that needed attention was one that had been going on for a long time. My model of assessing whether to go to the doctor was based on trends of change. If the cold had been slowly improving and then appeared suddenly to get worse, I figured it was time to get attention.

I think if you were to ask around, you'd discover that almost everyone has a slightly different model of assessment that they're using. In fact, I'd be curious to discover whether medical practitioners are taught to use precisely the same models, and whether that results in them applying the same models and metaphors to what they see, or different ones.

One of my kids' books talks about early health beliefs. These are things like the belief in the existence of miasmas - evil drafts of air that carry disease - or an understanding of the body based on the influence of the liver, or the influence of the spleen, etc. I think we're all familiar with the idea that the heart is the source of love in the body, but I didn't know, for example, that some people believed that function was performed by the liver. Or that the gall bladder was seen by some as the seat of courage. Or that others believed that Saturn rules the right ear and Jupiter rules the feet.

Different levels of technology have some influence on body models, because they give people the ability to observe how the body operates. On the other hand, it's good to remember that people have an enormously strong tendency to create metaphors for the operation of aspects of life and the universe. Rulii in "Cold Words" used his hunt metaphors and had quite accurate knowledge of body parts and their operation (as a result of his hunting experience), but couldn't conceive of the idea that it would be possible to look into blood and see things.

The aliens we create can similarly have different models and metaphors for the body and its operation, and if you use those things to your advantage, they can influence characters' behavior and judgments, and possibly even the plot of a story. If a character were injured for example, why would or wouldn't he/she decide to get treatment? How would that influence the course of the story? Would two people from different countries in a fantasy world have different ideas of how the body worked and what kind of treatment would be good for it? Might one believe that washing with soap was dangerous (as we used to), while the other believed it was necessary for sanitary treatment?

Actually, it occurs to me that a wonderful example of an elaborated health concept is in Janice Hardy's book The Shifter. Given that it centers on a form of magical healing, that shouldn't perhaps come as a surprise - but it makes for a very interesting example. The healers have precise terms for talking about injuries - "breaks," "bleeds," etc. and a very extensive sense of the body and its parts. But when they heal they literally pull the pain out of the person and into themselves, and then have to get rid of it into a type of magical metal that is a finite resource. You can imagine this changes everything about the healing process... and what Janice does with it is create an entire society with a pain economy alongside (and linked to) its monetary economy. She's taking the concept to a fully elaborated extreme that influences everything about her story - worldbuilding, characters, plot, etc. And while I'm not suggesting that every author do the same, I think it's worth taking the time to consider how the people in your story think about health and the body. The example of me and my friend should make it clear that this is true even if you aren't working with fantasy and science fiction.

It's something to think about.