The maestro writes if you will in the imagination, when he is napping, just quietly lying while tired bodily in some form of dimly lit room where he is comfortable.  The bed is as much a tool of writing as pen and paper, typewriter, computer.  As if wafting off on the nap's breezes he becomes something other than who he is.  He becomes a great writer with some access to great thoughts and understandings;  wisdoms passed down from the ages, he gets them in the form they are in, and he sees them and interprets them correctly, almost as if, as he imagines, they were something like children's building blocks or geometric sketches or points on a map to be connected with other points.

Who knows what provokes in him the feeling of wishing to take a nap, some feeling identified in muscle or bone or stomach or eye or voice, and it just seems like a law of nature which would behoove him to follow in its biddings, as a greater wisdom is at work, and he works hard anyway, and the dating scene is difficult and requires a lot of energy if he were to do so on times deemed normal by the by and large.

The words will come to him, just there are always words, and they come to him just as birdsongs come in their little phrases in the blue earliest of morning light, in anticipation, even, of the dawn.  The words will take care of themselves, and it is a matter rather of not getting in the way, not overthinking.  As anyone knows who has pretended to be or tried his own weakly hand at it.  Eventually, well, the words come, and contrary to popular opinion and the needs of the book trade and the nature of the marketplace should one wish to come up with something written that might actually sell (and not be given away for free, as, more or less God intended), they do not need to be in any particular form.  The form will come.  The form will arrange the pieces by itself.

Thus if Shakespeare were to come up with a few phrases in his idle daydreams--"such a thing is man," how does that go? "how wondrous in nature, how like a god..." well, sooner or later such a great stream of thoughts would become akin to "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors," would assemble themselves into a form, with a little need here and there to put up a framework around the edge of them, a vessel to contain them.  Some line of story, well, I, old Will, will simply pluck one rather unoriginally from some other guy's play, no harm done, not at all.

Who knows when you will write anyway?  There is no sense to it, no logic, it just comes about.  Or course, it helps a bit not having to run off to some job, the entirety of it producing great bouts of strain and exhausting, but even so a job that provides through its motions itself a chance to think thoughts, though many of them will slip by perfectly unrecorded...


But maybe, quite possibly, the point at which the oldish man loses it, goes off his rocker on this knight errant kick, is when he assumes the voice, the voice of writer.  I mean, who told him that he could do it it, that he had any right to it, to say nothing of the talent required, the sheer patient work of story telling.  His craziness is to be believe that there is a worthy story within his own life, within his own so-called day to day reality, just to be told, as if it were some gospel pertaining to the life of an ordinary commoner of little or no significance but to the point where he is no longer doing his job and/or causing trouble in society.  It's this great voice of literature that comes out in him, that's the very craziest thing about him, that he assumed the mantle upon himself, as if he were--well--like Shakespeare, and you just don't get to be, boys and girls, a Shakespeare over night, no Sirree.

Thus it was important for him to maintain his job, his duties as a barman in highfalutin Washington, D.C., where there are of course actual people who are actually important to the way the world runs...


"Yes," he thought to himself, "it is the great savior Himself, who sets the model, composing his little sayings and parables and sermons and other things of great meaning, that of taking a nap in the ropes of a boat vessel, even when the storm is raging upon the sea.  It is that great model, yes, indeed."

And so he ventured back to take the second chapter of the nap he had started.  Who knows, anyway, where these creative outbursts come anyway...