The Green Mile

Stephen King

    I go through cycles of insomnia – a fact that won’t surprise people who’ve read the novel chronicling the adventures of Ralph Roberts – and so I try to keep a story handy for those nights when sleep won’t come. I tell these to myself as I lie in the dark, writing them in my mind just as I would on a typewriter or a word processor, often going back and changing words, adding thoughts, deleting clauses, making up the dialogue. Each night I start over at the beginning, getting a little further before I drop off. By the fifth or sixth night I’ve usually got whole chunks of prose memorized. This probably sounds a little nuts, but it’s soothing? and as a time-passer, it beats the shit out of counting sheep.