The Honkytonk Method

Hemingway rose at dawn to write. Maya Angelou rose early too. Toni Morrison starts at 4 a.m. and so does Haruki Murakami. Although I am not exactly up with the chickens, the 4 a.m. method does make sense to me. Getting up that early can make the writing take on a dreamlike state because the writer is somewhere between asleep and awake.

Kafka, Nabokov, and Kerouac were my kind of guys. They all wrote at night. Obviously, I am not an inhabitant of the literary firmament, but I do have my druthers. I tend to start around nine at night and work till exhaustion. In order to establish atmosphere, I write with my office door closed and the lights dim. When I am working on a first draft, I listen to old country records on vinyl. It gets me in the zone. But when I am editing and revising, the music stops. Every writer has his or her groove, and this happens to be mine.

Here is Merle Haggard playing "The Way I Am," a song that spins on my home office turntable on occasion. In terms of a Texas connection, I feel very fortunate to have seen Merle Haggard at Willie's Picnic in both Fort Worth and San Antonio as well as at John T. Floore's Country Store in Helotes, Texas. Tunes like this get my fingers tapping along the keyboard.