Now, hear me out! This may be the sleep deprivation talking, but I’m going to share the very limited, but potentially very valuable benefits of sleep deprivation.

I came across this great Twitter thread by Delilah Dawson:

And it struck a chord. Boy, did it! I started writing as a hobby when I was 10, so I had a pile of childish (but incrementally better) manuscripts in my trunk by the time I hit 30. However, my singularity moment (the book that finally leveled up to the point I’m eager to query it) was written in a delirious haze around my first kid’s first birthday. He STILL wasn’t sleeping, so I’d gone a solid year pacing the hallway every night, losing my mind with exhaustion and barely writing anything.

I was so sick of not writing that I decided: eff it! Let’s do this! And I set aside whatever scraps of time I could–at 4 a.m. or during naptime or after bedtime–and wrote in a feverish, stream-of-conscious delirium. I wrote about cowboys and ghosts and mermaids and saber-tooth cats and whatever else popped into my head.

The resulting rough draft was definitely, well, ROUGH. But it was also definitely a draft. Soon after I finished it, I started sleeping (sort of) through the night again, and I had the brainpower to edit that mess into something more coherent. And then edit it again. And again.

Something happened to me in that hazy period. I didn’t have enough free time to do anything but stick to my outline–I wrote wrote wrote forward and didn’t look back! And I didn’t have the brainpower to question myself on the sentence level–my doubts turned off, because there simply wasn’t room for them.

And it resulted in something weird, and fun, and full of voice. (She says hopefully.)

Do I recommend purposefully losing sleep to achieve a dream state of coffee-supplemented productivity? HELL NO, IT’S LITERAL TORTURE! But I do recommend treating a rough draft like something that will never see the light of day. Write forward, write for fun, write without worrying about who will ever read it.

And then oh my goodness, edit the shit out of it. D:

It might not be the book you ever share, but it might just be the book that helps your style shake loose.