Between the page and sleep
Don't stop · 15 minutes · Published
Read this first
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913). Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922. Project Gutenberg #7178
The prompt
Begin from the moment between waking and sleep, when the light is out and you are not sure what you were just reading or whether you had become it, and write without lifting the pen for the set time. Follow every confusion as if it were true: let yourself be the building, the quarrel, the thing the page was about. Rereading is forbidden until the timer stops; then underline one sentence you did not know you had in you.
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Short version · 10 minutes
Ten minutes from the dark after the light goes out, following each confusion as if it were true, no rereading.
The move
Don't stop. Write for a set time without rereading or correcting, the hand always moving.
Tags: voice and memory.
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.