5am, sleep hack, and writing patterns

I’ve momentarily joined the 5am club. I want to see how it affects my day. But I also want to battle-test a hack that seems to work against sleepiness.

The Hack: When you start to feel tired, lift your chin, open your eyes wide, and look up. Since I’ve learned it I haven’t had to brew my usual peppermint tea to get through the end of my workday. But maybe I haven’t been as tired. Today I’ll know if it works.

Supposedly it creates a physiological feedback loop.

I’m also starting my final set of topics on writers block. Previously I explored mental imagery. Next I’ll be exploring what I call episodic patterns.

A long time ago in the early days of the Internet I read a blog post where someone explained how they study the joseki, which are patterns of play in the game of go. From that article I learned that learning proceeds through four stages.

1. Rote memorization of patterns.
2. Breaking patterns down into constituent parts.
3. Building patterns into larger patterns.
4. Strategically adjusting patterns to the larger game or project.

When a baby is learning to speak they first practice making the sounds they hear by rote learning. Then they decompose the sounds into patterns like the “m” sounds which are different from the “b” sounds. Then they start to build those patterns into words like “momma” and “baby.” Finally, they practice strategies as they recognize that the word “momma” makes the nice lady smile.

When I read fiction, especially when I am studying a passage closely, I summarize what the author has written. I break the patterns down into their constituent parts, and see how they combine into larger passages. From this I’m able to study the strategic choices the author made. Sometimes I even recreate the pattern using different characters, settings, and actions.

These are what I call episodic patterns, since they’re related to episodic memory. Understanding these patterns helps a new author learn how to fill a blank page. Otherwise, writing just looks like a meaningless stream of words, and that way leads to writer’s block.