Writer, with Kids: Nathan Deuel

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Nathan Deuel, author of: Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East

Age of kid: Loretta, 5

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

I wasn’t much of a writer before I had a kid, honestly. Sure, I wrote a few things here and there. But mostly, I was a turbo Manhattan media professional, self-obsessed and self-destructive, so one night I quit my job — at Rolling Stone — packed a bag, and started walking. Five months later, I’d made it from New York City all the way to New Orleans. Miraculously, my marriage survived, and with the two of us reunited, we ate good food and drank too much and listened to loud music and thought we might stay in Louisiana forever. Under a slow-moving fan one day, however, Kelly told me she wanted to move to Riyadh — about as far away from New Orleans as you could get. So in 2008, we found ourselves in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was a profoundly unfamiliar place. Needing to make a living, I really started writing, mostly journalism and essays. Our daughter was born in June 2009 and, for me, the life of the writer and the life of a parent have pretty much always been intertwined.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

It’s enormously difficult to be a decent husband, father, friend, and son when big writing is wanting to be done. I suppose most people who know me (and people like me) have more or less become accustomed to the fact that being near us is to be near a cranky bear who needs to hibernate. I wish it were different, but I can’t avoid needing vast swaths of time alone.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I write about my family all the time. The real question is how much will it change as Loretta gets old enough to understand I’ve written about her.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Time management, for now. But I do think that, as a personal essayist, the question of what’s off limits and what’s worth exposing will remain a huge one, especially when my daughter is old enough to toss me into a lake, which she has every right to do.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Get your financial house in order as well as you can. If you’re partnered, have some big conversations with your other half about how the two of you will be good parents, make time for solitary work, and leave enough room to be together as adults. It’s perhaps important — even crucial — to be realistic about what one’s art might accomplish, financially and otherwise. Have a backup plan, anticipate failure, be real — but, if possible, try to remain slightly insane and delusional and dream big.

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Writer, with Kids: Elizabeth Heineman

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Elizabeth Heineman, author of Ghostbelly: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2014)

Age of kids: And . . . here’s where it starts to get hard. 22 and 3? Or 22, 3, and the one who’d be going on 6 if he hadn’t died an hour before he was born?

What happens when you can’t even get past the background info?

You try to explain, ever so gently: Not everyone who’s had a child has a child.

You say: It’s my dead child who made me a writer.

I wrote books before my stillbirth. But I wasn’t a writer. I was a scholar whose means of dissemination was the written word. I loved being in the archives, doing research. The writing part was like pulling teeth. But more to the point, it wasn’t art. Not because it was bad; just because it wasn’t supposed to be art.

Thor’s birth and death changed all that. In the months following the stillbirth, a flood of words came out. A different kind of words.

I don’t know where that creativity came from. Writing helped me to fill the time. Do you worry that you don’t have time to write, now that you have kids? I had all the time in the world. I was supposed to be taking care of a baby. Writing gave me something more meaningful to do than grading papers or picking up groceries. It enabled me to give Thor a presence in the world.

But those were convenient side effects of writing. I couldn’t have willed myself to write in order to have a meaningful pastime or to give Thor a presence in the world any more than I could have willed myself to sculpt or to write an opera.

Still, when I hear people say, “My book is my baby,” I laugh a little to myself. They don’t know the half of it.

I wrote for a year and a half. Then I made a book.

I was lucky. I’m a professor of history and gender studies. My job is crazily demanding but flexible enough that I could declare Ghostbelly to be my major project for a while. My older son, a high school senior, was empathetic but basically living his own life, thinking about his friends, his art, his plans for after graduation. (How do you remain present for your family even when you’re deep in a project? Try having adolescents. Their hopes for your presence are pretty minimal anyway.) Iowa City was – well, Iowa City, with an incredible array of outlets for anyone who feels like picking up a pen.

My guilty burden is that Thor’s death allowed me to discover a talent I never knew I had. It’s possible that Thor’s death created that talent. The pleasure I take in writing – my son paid for it with his life. This is not OK. But I can’t escape it.

Two years after Thor’s death, my partner and I adopted. James is almost four. I now do my writing around James’s schedule and my job. Both are time-consuming. But I’m insanely privileged. I have good daycare for James, the kind that makes him bubble with stories at the end of the day. I have tenure at my job.

Still, some weeks I barely write a word. Other weeks I squeeze in a few pages. I can’t write the essay I’m supposed to write for this blog – how I manage writing as a parent – because I manage it so badly.

But it’s hard for me to get too worked up about it. Writing with a three-year-old is slow going. That next book – it’ll come when it comes.

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Writer, with Kids: Peter von Ziegesar

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Peter von Ziegesar, author of The Looking Glass Brother: A Memoir

Age of kids: 13, 16, 18

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Back when I didn’t have kids (it seems like an age since then!) I had what I considered to be a perfect working schedule. I’d start at about ten, work until four, then go for a run around the neighborhood or go to the gym. Those were halcyon days. Having kids subjected that schedule to a battering ram. There is an early ripping sound you hear when your first is born. It’s the sound of your old life going one way, and your new life going the other way. Having kids in diapers is a 24-hour operation and you snatch work whenever you can. I’m surprised I got anything at all done then. I had a kind of closet in our old apartment that was about 5’ by 5’ literally that I’d set up as my office, and I’d slink off to it whenever I could. That changed when the kids started going to school. Then my work hours were about equal to their school hours, from 8:30 to about 3 p.m. That is actually a pretty satisfying schedule that I’ve been keeping for a very long time now. Actually, since my youngest, Magnus, started getting around on his own (this is New York City), my afternoons have lengthened to a more normal five or six p.m. Barring catastrophes, which are frequent.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

I have to admit I can be a zombie sometimes. Physically I’m there, but mentally I’m still in Night of the Living Dead, with my tongue hanging out and limbs dropping off of me, staggering through the trees–i.e. still at work. I think being present mentally and emotionally requires decision-making, more or less minute by minute. That ripping sound I alluded to before holds all through parenthood. There are times when you’d rather be working, or sitting at a bar having a drink, or at the movies, or at a friend’s house, or reading a book. And you miss your time alone with your wife. Rethinking yourself, rethinking your role is hard. But raising kids is a labor-intensive business. You really have to put in the hours. And kids make it easier by being kind of beguiling, not to mention hilarious.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

Yes, it has, absolutely. Before I had kids I wrote about other people. After I had kids I wrote about myself, and the things that were important to me. Evolutionarily speaking raising kids is the only important thing that we do. Of course it’s a holistic process, requiring many skills and tasks to be done even half correctly. But I think having much less time to work and more time to think about what was important to me really changed my work. Plus, I’m not sure if this happens with other parents, but having children really stirred things up for me psychologically. I come from three generations of abusive fathers. I know that because my father and grandfather each wrote memoirs about their neglected childhoods! The irony was that each one reacted against the way he was treated and went on to treat his own kids in a diametrically different way – just not a very good way. My job, as I saw it, was to break that cycle, and I hope I did. All of that came out in my work, at least for a while.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

For me the hardest aspect, aside from the general loss of time and privacy, is the randomness of things that happen. A kid gets sick at school and has to come home, and your day is shot. Or breaks a thumb on the soccer field. No use in trying to plan anything. There is a marvelous scene in one of the John Updike Rabbit novels, Rabbit is Rich, when Updike’s hero Harry Angstrom and his wife take at vacation with three other couples in the Caribbean. They all start getting frisky, as people did in the Seventies (supposedly), and the women arrange for some serial wife-swapping. Harry is not overjoyed with the first wife he’s given, though she turns out to be okay, but waits impatiently for his next night with the most beautiful, luscious wife of all, the one he’s desperately lusted after for years. Just when it’s about to happen, he and his wife get a call that their teenage son has disappeared. There’s nothing to be done, they have to fly home, and Harry swoons with disappointment. That’s never happened to me specifically, but I know the feeling.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

I’ll make another literary illusion. Swerve, the book by Stephen Goldblatt, which is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time, and totally inspiring, is about how the swerve in atoms allows us to have free will. The book is actually about the poem On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius that put forth that theory two thousand years ago. To me, kids are the swerve that knocks you out of your preordained course and gives you free will. They add a richness and sweetness to your life and work that is incomparable. Their joy, their trust, their happiness to see you, the funny thoughts that run through their heads, their physical perfection, their growth, their change from day to day, the strange panoply of their traits, their obsessions with things, their superhuman strength, all of that is inspiring and wrenching and reinforcing beyond anything you will experience otherwise. Of course it’s a good idea for every writer who is a parent to establish and keep a regular schedule. Good luck to you!

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Writer, with Kids: Leah Bassoff

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Leah Bassoff, author of: Lost Girl Found (Groundwood Books) along with a co-author, Laura Deluca

Age of kids: 11 and 13

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Even before kids, I have never had a set writing schedule. Rather, I have always been someone who sneaks away to write. When I was just out of college and working as an editor for Penguin Publishing, I used to go to work early, when no one else was there, in order to have a place to work. At the time, I was living with three other roommates in a one-bedroom apartment. I went straight from living with roommates to being married then having kids, so I have never had that “room of my own.” Coffee shops have always been my writing “office.”

The most productive writing period of my life was when my first son was born. He was one of those babies who never slept for more than an hour at a stretch, so I was constantly up and constantly sleep-deprived. I began writing late at night to keep myself company. I wrote with the frenzied energy you might get from drugs, only my dreamlike haze was from sleep deprivation. Though I would never want to relive that insomniac period of my life, I look back on it with a sweet nostalgia.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

When I was younger, I was much more spontaneous. I constantly made friends with strangers and traveled to new places. As a mom, I could no longer do this. When I began writing a book about Africa, I longed to visit Sudan in order to do research for my book. However, I was too bodily attached to my children to leave them behind and too afraid of them contracting malaria to bring them with me. Instead, I had to do research for my book in other ways.

Even though I couldn’t physically leave my children, I also always knew it was important that, as my children got older, they saw me as someone with my own intellectual pursuits that went above and beyond doing their laundry. I always taught my kids that finding a creative outlet should be a life goal. My kids know that, when we have a free moment, my husband plays his guitar, and I write. They see that we both have our day jobs, but that we also have delicious double lives as well.

Because I was teaching and being a mom, my book took seven years to write. I always joke that the book was like a third child that grew up alongside my actual children. Although my family would sometimes wearily ask, “Are you still working on that same book?” I hope that my having stuck with the project for so long will teach my children to be persistent (and maybe a bit dogged as well).

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

My novel Lost Girl Found is about, among other themes, a mother-daughter relationship. Being a parent has given me so much more compassion for the rest of the world. I remember sitting up with my sons late at night when they were babies and ill, and I would think to myself, somewhere, in another country, a mother is up with her child, too, only this mother cannot afford medicine for her child, and this mother may lose her child. It was only after having a child that I began to believe that parenthood is the thread that connects us to all of humanity. As a mother, there are things you understand about every mother, no matter what walk of life she is in. This knowledge helped me understand and have more compassion for my characters as well.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

My own mother was a great model for me. She took care of us, worked full time as a psychologist, and wrote books. I do remember that, when she wrote, she would get a faraway look in her eyes, and she would sometimes be in her own world after emerging from one of her writing sessions. I experience the same thing as a parent. Sometimes when I get home from writing, I know that my mind is elsewhere. It takes me a bit of time to transition back to the world of my children again after I have been in my own head for a while.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

The author I idolize the most, Toni Morrison, once wrote about her son spitting up orange juice on top of something she had just written. Instead of throwing it out, she continued to write around the orange juice spill. I love this! The moral is keep writing, even when you are writing around dirty diapers or sleep deprivation. Other advice: take long showers. For me, the shower was the one place in the house where, for a few blessed minutes, I couldn’t hear my baby crying. I did a lot of deep thinking and story planning during these ten minute “getaways.” Finally, go on a real getaway, on a writing retreat. Go somewhere where you might not be accessible by phone. Trust in the fact that your husband or your child’s care taker will be all right without you for a day. Being away from home allows you to really focus on your writing rather than worrying about your guilty should-do list. Living in Colorado, my writing partner and I went on several retreats to the mountains. Sometimes we would bring our kids along, but, on other occasions, we would leave them behind and have an amazingly productive and restful time.

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Writer, with Kids: Amanda Miska

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Amanda Miska, author of short stories and flash fiction in (or forthcoming from) Whiskey Paper, jmww, CHEAP POP, Buffalo Almanack, The Collapsar, Storychord, Five Quarterly, Cactus Heart, Cartridge Lit, Counterexample Poetics, Pea River Journal and elsewhere.

Age of kids: 4.5 years, 1 year

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Back in the day: write whenever I’m passionately inspired (or, in the MFA days, churn something out whenever I had a story due for workshop).

Currently: whenever I’m passionately inspired, I frantically input Notes onto iPhone, and I try to give myself deadlines so that I actually complete them. I used to have a goal to complete/submit one piece a month. Sometimes I do more and sometimes I absolutely can’t. I try to give myself grace–but not too much. Because then I’ll get lazy.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

I am terrible at this…but I’ve always been terrible at remaining present. I am a daydreamer, a past-dweller, a forward-thinker, but especially during the mundane day-to-day, I have trouble staying in the moment. I’m getting better at it after having my daughters because I know how fleeting everything is, how important it is to savor their smallness right now. My husband can tell when I’m really out of it and will basically kick me out of the house or banish me to my studio to work. Sidenote: I couldn’t do any of this without a supportive, understanding partner who truly shares the parenting duties.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I am more motivated–I actually didn’t publish my first story until I was six months pregnant with my second child! It was important to me that I keep creating and putting myself out there, not let motherhood become my only identity (even if it’s my primary one). I knew if I didn’t start scheduling time and making things happen, I might never find the time/energy.

Before having kids, I’m not sure I ever wrote any characters who were parents. I have written a few parent-characters since having the girls because I know what a transformative experience it is. I don’t think I could have written a believable parent until I actually lived it.

I also write a lot more flash because I can complete a draft in the span of a naptime.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Finances, especially living in a city-suburb where things like daycare and housing are cost-prohibitive. Paying work has to come first, even if it’s not the work I want to be doing, even if there’s a story stirring away inside of me. I’ve been lucky to be able to work from home and have a lot of creative projects and flexibility. Before kids, I used to work in offices or doing editing that would leave me completely drained–I can’t imagine doing that and also parenting and then expecting myself to write. I’m grateful for the life I’ve been able to cobble together, even if it’s a struggle/hustle most days.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Your art is self-care. Self-care is an essential part of good parenting. It’s easy to lose yourself in parenthood–and for brief periods of time, especially in the newborn phase, that’s totally okay. But don’t forget that you existed as a person and artist before your kids came along and that working hard to do what you love is also a great example for them.

Also: don’t feel guilty. Do what you need to get by. Don’t compare. Your life/family/story is unique, so it will have its own unique journey finding its way out into the world.

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Writer, with Kids: Peter Mountford

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Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), and The Dismal Science (Tin House Books, 2014)

Age of kids: 2 and 4

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

Before kids, not only did I not have kids, I also didn’t have much of a writing career. A lot of people don’t like the word career next to writing, but I believe that writing should be treated like a job, or else it’s a hobby, and it isn’t a priority. That’s fine. Hobbies are great. But writing is also quite hard. Writing is hard and the work should be dignified, whenever possible. Before my kids were born, I had very little in the way of publications, and I did almost no readings, no interviews, no one was soliciting work from me, there was nothing like that. I wrote four hours a day, seven days a week. I walked around listening to music a lot. I was being showered in rejection, and I hated myself, but I was writing a lot.

I got my first book deal a month or so after my first kid was conceived with my now ex-wife. Then writing–or, the ancillary tasks related to being a writer–and the demands of life began a very startling avalanche.

Two years later: another book and another child. There was a time–in the thick of it all–when I had five hundred students, literally. Five hundred! I was writing furiously, too, taking care of kids. I stockpiled money. I was buying my own health insurance, and it wasn’t cheap, and I was worried that the sources of this income would vanish all of a sudden, because none of the sources in question were from ongoing contracts. They were all one-off things. Now, I understand that there are always other opportunities–more one-offs. The income ebbs and flows, month to month, but it’s there. I haven’t had a penny of credit card debt since I quit my last day job in 2007.

For six months, I also took care of my kids ten hours a day, five days a week. I still wrote during those months, but it was at night. And I taught at night, too, and on weekends.

Then the second book came out, and I got divorced. Right now, I’m teaching three classes, and I’m the events curator for Hugo House, and I’m managing a fellowship at Hugo House, and I’m judging a grant for The Loft in Minneapolis, and I’m Hugo House’s writer-in-residence, so I meet with people to talk to them about their writing, and I’m a writer-in-residence at Seattle Arts and Lectures. What else? There are other things, I’m sure. Oh yeah, I’m on faculty at Sierra Nevada’s low res MFA program.
I have the kids pretty often, too–it’s a complicated parenting plan. I wake up at five in the morning, and I’m with kids early or working until about nine at night. It’s fun, but it’s too much. I haven’t written a word of fiction in 2014–or not until last week, when aspects of my wage-work retreated abruptly and I started writing quite a lot again.

How’s that? Are you still awake?

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

I don’t work at all on anything when I’m with my kids. I don’t check email, don’t write, don’t do anything. I take them to meetings sometimes, actually, but I make sure it’s something that will be interesting or fun for them. I’ve heard it said that fathers, in particular, often become better parents after a divorce–the responsibility of caring for the kids is felt more acutely when the kids are staying in your post-divorce apartment with you. That’s certainly true in my case, I admit.
I will happily refuse an amazing opportunity in my writing life to spend more time with my kids. In fact, I just cut short an incredible heavenly trip for a writing conference–I was being paid to sit around and eat nice food and drink and hang out with my literary idols–I cut it short by several nights to go hang out with my kids.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

Oh, I think it’s changed my work a lot, but your writing is always changing, right? Mine is. It’s always evolving, as I grow. Any change in the day-to-day stimuli changes the writing–changes my point of focus, what I value. My understanding of the world is and will forever be a work in progress.

The more direct response would be that the primary relationship in my second book is between a man and his daughter. It’s very much about the parent-child relationship.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Money, of course. Financial insecurity, odd work hours. Also, before I had kids, I lived for writing. Now, I love writing, I really do, but I also love my kids. I try to balance the things, and I even try to have a life that isn’t about writing or kids, believe it or not. Writing is very immersive, and so is hanging out with small kids. They don’t overlap–they can’t overlap.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

This might bother some people, but I believe firmly that kids can play by themselves–especially if they’re accustomed to it. You can give them markers and paper and put them in a room without sharp objects, and they will actually entertain themselves for an hour or two–my one-and-a-half-year-old does that all the time. In bourgeois America these days (or at least in Seattle), that kind of hands off parenting is often regarded as monstrous, but of course it was the norm in this country until quite recently. And it’s still normal in most other cultures. And I’d argue that it’s actually good for kids to know how to entertain themselves. It’s a great skill to have. That’s where my love of writing was spawned–it’s where my imagination took flight, in the unstructured hours I was left muttering to myself in a room. The world neglects people sometimes, dare I say often, so why not give the kids a bit of a preview of that experience?

Also, as I said before, writing must be dignified. Most professional writers I know threw away a book or two before their career took off. They have a thousand rejections in a drawer. I certainly have that many rejections, and I threw away two books, three if you count a certain godawful collection of stories that even I recognized to be garbage. That’s what you can expect. And then it gets better.

So, if during the lean years one parent makes good money and is understood to have a real job, while the other parent is a “writer”–the air-quotes will be implied by tone of voice, a certain tilt of the head. The writer is possibly making no money, or even negative money. In this case, the temptation is to view the writing as a hobby. One parent works and the other doesn’t, and is therefore taking care of kid all the time. If the writing doesn’t have a place of priority on your list–it comes after the spouse’s paying job, after the kids’ needs and wants, after the bills, after the vacation plans, after changing the oil–if it is perceived as a shrunken hobby in the way you structure your life, then it will never be more than that.

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Writer, with Kids: Sharma Sheilds

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Sharma Shields, author of: Favorite Monster: Stories (Autumn House Press) and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac: a Novel (forthcoming from Holt in 2015)

Age of kids: Henry, age 4; Louise, age 2

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

I was a bit scatterbrained before children. Back then, I probably described myself as “spontaneous” or some shit, but really I was a mess, and unfocused. I wrote sporadically; once or twice a week at best, mostly in the evenings. I lost a lot of good writing time to excessive drinking and the resulting hangovers.

Parenthood did three astounding things for my writing: first, it forced me into a daily routine; second, it gave me a contrary activity from which writing was a welcome and much-needed intellectual reprieve; and third, it sobered me up. My writing, and my personhood, has only benefitted.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

I hire a babysitter. It keeps all of us sane. I slip away for 3-4 hours a few times a week to do nothing but tunnel into the writing netherworlds, and then I return and am fully present for the kids and my husband. It’s been difficult paying for babysitters because of how tight money can be, but man, it’s really worth it.

My husband is a writer and an artist, too, so we also give one another additional time away from the children to work on our individual projects. We know how important it is, and we’re eager to help one another. It’s much easier to be focused on the kids and on one another once you’ve gotten a good chunk of work out of the way.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

That’s a great question. I think it’s possible to write with emotional depth and clarity about children and parenting even if you don’t have children; I think writers are capable of imagining someone else’s world, whether or not they’ve lived it exactly. That said, my work certainly explores pregnancy and parenthood more now. My recently completed novel features women giving birth and having postpartum depression and raising young children. That’s no accident. I was likely writing those details because they are consuming me at this time.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

The most challenging aspect for me has been sheer exhaustion, which is considerably aggravated by my multiple sclerosis. I’m not really concerned with how exhaustion affects my writing – I write in the morning, typically, when I’m relatively fresh – but I hate how it affects my parenting. I become the stereotypical tired mom: grumpy, impatient, sometimes screamy (I’m working on this, believe me). And I really hate myself for it. It’s been extremely helpful to learn that parenting was not the sole reason for my exhaustion. I was diagnosed with MS in October of 2013, and I need to take care of the disease much as I take care of my children, by nurturing it and resting, stopping and listening to it if it starts to whine. When the kids go down for their afternoon naps, I go down along with them. That used to be time I would write. It can’t be any longer, and I’m learning to accept this. If I skip the afternoon nap, I’m a noodle in the evenings and can hardly move. MS keeps me on a tight tether, but if I respect it, I can regain some freedom after I give in and rest.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Half-jokingly: if you have a decent hometown where your family lives: MOVE BACK TO IT. We get a lot of loving help from Grandma (and aunts and uncles) around here.

And this: expect the love you’ll feel to knock your socks off. It really does. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my whole life. I’m almost used to it now, bearing this love around with me like a perpetual spear in the heart, but when it first struck me, I was completely bowled over by it. These children! I love them so much. And I’m so lucky to have them and my writing career and my fearless husband; it’s a great life, even with its flaws, and I’m so grateful.

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Writer, with Kids: Pamela Erens

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Pamela Erens, author of The Virgins; The Understory

Age of kids: 16 and 17

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

I spent the first nine years after college working full-time as a magazine editor. I wrote on the weekends; three hours per day was my goal. At a certain point I wanted to put more time into my writing, and I made arrangements to cut back on my hours at my job. I went to the office from 12 to 6, four days a week, and rented space in a writers’ room where I could bring my computer in the mornings. The aim was a solid 10-plus hours a week. I’ve rarely, no matter what my life circumstances, been able to break the 15-hour-a-week barrier. I’m just not one of those sit-down-and-write-for-hours writers. Around the three-hour mark my brain starts to fog over.

About two years into part-timing, I had my first child, and while I was on maternity leave I decided I wasn’t going to return to my editing job. I just couldn’t see a way that I could work and spend the kind of time with my kids that I wanted to and write. My husband made a salary that could support us both. So I left editing, although I continued to do a very modest amount of freelancing.

I kept to pretty much the same 10-to-15 hours a week writing schedule after the kids arrived, initially through the use of babysitters. My writing time was much more structured when the kids were very young. If I didn’t sit down when the babysitter was there, the writing didn’t get done. Later, when my kids were in school from 8 to 3, it was easier to procrastinate, and sometimes by the time I got to work, my focus wasn’t very good. I’m trying to return to that “sit down first thing” approach again–to avoid Facebook and e-mail and everything else until I put my hours in. That helps the writing, but isn’t always possible. (It is theoretically possible to avoid Facebook, but not necessarily e-mailing and phone calling connected to “household management.”)

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

The terrible truth is I never get that “sunk.” Along with not being able to write for long stretches, I’m most of the time not a writer who so fully immerses. My husband phones from the office, I check e-mail, I jump up to reheat my tea, I research something online, one of my teenagers texts with a question–I’m constantly in and out of my writing head. There are certainly times when I bark at my husband: “Writing now; is this important or can I call you back?” but usually I just drop the thread for a moment and then pick it back up. And once I put the writing aside for the day, I’m rarely distracted by it. I do continue to think about my work when I’m not in front of the computer, and I might jot a note or whatever, but it doesn’t keep me from focusing on whatever is at hand.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

Until recently the effect was probably big picture: Being a parent made me more patient, less impulsive, more playful, kinder, and happier. It made me a more sentimental person, and my experience of love much richer. I like to think that these facts were enlarging in some hard-to-pin-down way, that they encouraged work that was more generous and empathic. My third novel, which I’m writing now, is the first that actually deals with parenting–specifically, with pregnancy and the anticipation of having a child. I doubt I would have written about the subject if I weren’t a mother myself.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

It’s got to be money. I’ve noticed a push lately on the Internet to talk more honestly about writing and money. There’s a new magazine called Scratch, which is wholly devoted to this purpose, and an essay circulated a few months ago in which an author argued that those of us who have outside financial support should acknowledge it. (Unfortunately I can’t remember where the piece ran, and haven’t been able to find it again.) I haven’t always wanted to talk about the fact that my husband is the sole breadwinner in my family. What I’ve made through my writing, even this past year with a novel that got some nice attention, is a drop in the bucket. Being supported financially seems so . . . privileged. It is privileged! There aren’t that many artists who get to be in this situation.

If I’d had to contribute to keep our family financially afloat, I would never have published two novels. It’s just that simple. As much as I’m driven to write, as stubbornly as I’ve pursued this path over 25 years, I’m simply not someone who can make do on four hours of sleep. I would have been a horrible mother if I’d been sleeping four hours a night, and I didn’t want to be a horrible mother. Also, I don’t work well if there’s a lot of stress in my life, and a job plus kids would have equaled stress. I admire tremendously the writers who get it done no matter what, but we’re all wired differently, and the money issue would have defeated me. As it’s surely defeated other writers like me.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

Every parent is different, so it’s hard to generalize. Maybe, building on what I said above, I’d suggest that you should try to know and be respectful of your psycho-biology (if that’s a term). Maybe you can’t do it all–for now. Family is important. Most people are not super-people. There’s no shame in not hitting certain accomplishment markers by the time you’re 33. Writing is not a career–at least, not to my mind. It’s a calling, and an art, and so nothing about it is predictable.

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Writer, with Kids: Jimin Han

Posted on by Cari — 5 Comments ↓

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Jimin Han, author of short stories and essays, some of which can be found online at NPR’s “Weekend America,” The Rumpus.net, The Good Men Project, Kartika Review, and KoreanAmericanStory.com. I’m working on a novel centered on a college campus shooting in 1983 in upstate New York alongside the pro-democracy movement in South Korea that was taking place during that same time.

Age of kids: 15 and 12

 

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

The biggest change has been predictability. I could schedule writing before I had kids. Barring disaster of global proportions, I could depend on the time I’d planned to write. After kids, all was up for grabs and continues to be (probably even after they go off to college I’ll get a midnight call for help from them). You can’t know when you can write and when you can’t. Illnesses of all kinds strike without warning, afflicting your kid and the one who is hosting your kid at her house (the worst being the call from the mother that her kid has been vomiting in front of your kid because then you know the tidal wave of illness is coming straight at you and all you can do is grimace and bear it). Rise early, you say? Yes, well, your child might wake early with an ear infection. Stay up late, you think? Yes, there’s the nightmare/quarrel with a friend/tormenting philosophical questions that keep your child awake and in need of your counsel. Certainly, as your child grows, your writing time increases. They can wait out that headache they have in school because they’re having a party in math class and you won’t be called to pick them up, or you can bargain with them: go back to bed despite the nightmare and stay in bed or else you can’t go the waterpark the next day with your friends. (Just now my 12-year-old was trying to dribble a styrofoam ball in the hallway and I had to stop writing this, open my door, and ask: “Really?”) That brings me to point #2. Noise. NOISE. You have to learn to write with it. All kinds of it.

 

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

This is such a hard question because I don’t remain present for my family very well. And sometimes I can’t get deep into a project to write very well. Both are problematic. I feel like I’m failing at both being a parent and being a writer most of the time. That whole compartmentalizing mental thing people talk about is not possible for me. I have to work very, very hard at meeting deadlines for my family (that event at school I’ve signed up to bring in a snack for) and for myself (immediate deadlines and long term ones).

 

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I always worried before I had children about what my parents and extended family would think. My parents pounded into me the idea that what I did reflected on them. I never rebelled the way I probably should have as a teenager. So after I had children, I worried about what my parents and extended family would think and added my kids to that large audience of judges. What parenthood did for me though was give me a deep sense of unconditional love. My kids completely accept me and I feel buoyed by their love even when the writing isn’t going well. I find myself telling them to be brave and see that it can apply to me, too. I feel less stifled by other people’s judgements now. And I can see as they grow into teenagers that they’re capable of understanding complex ideas. So I think parenthood has helped me reach for deeper material even as it restricts me in terms of having time to pursue it.

 

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Getting enough sleep, sustaining long work when I only have short bursts of time, making sure there’s enough food in the frig.

 

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

I wrote a long list of “advice” and then deleted it. If you’d asked me right after my kids were born I’d have pages and pages for you, and I’m ashamed to say I unloaded many of those pages on friends of mine who had babies right after me (some thanked me, others did not). So now maybe there’s only one piece of advice I have that has remained true and others have said it so I can’t claim to be original: the only thing you can rely on is change. Whatever is going on with you and your child, it will change. The worst nights will change into hopeful mornings. Not much stays the same.

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Writer, with Kids: Elizabeth McCracken

Posted on by Cari — No Comments ↓

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Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Other Stories, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Niagara Falls All Over Again, and The Giant’s House,

Age of kids: 5 & 7

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

When I was young and lived alone I worked late at night, and for hours at a time: essentially I would procrastinate all goddamn day long until things became dire. In my 30s things got a little more orderly, though never all that orderly. When I was working, I worked every day, but I’ve always taken weeks off at a time. My permanent teaching position at the University of Texas has hit my writing harder than kids, I think—I write during vacations, or very early in the morning now.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deep into a current project?

I work in my office, with my internet turned off, and so I generally get hours and hours of time to write while the kids are at school or camp. At the end of the day, I’m happy to be dragged out of my own head. I’m lucky: I’m married to another writer, who also has a flexible schedule, and we are pretty good at picking up the slack when the other has a deadline or is on an excellent spree.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

My child dialogue is much better. I think the anxieties I write about lately are different, though that’s surely because my daily anxieties always work their way into my work. How else? It seems crazy that I can’t quite remember, though that I have always had an absolutely terrible memory for my own inner life (why I probably became a writer). I might have been happy and bursting with ideas before children, and am now comparatively blockheaded; I might have been miserable and depressed and am now dripping with honeyed understanding of human nature. The fact is, I can’t remember in order to compare.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Heavens. That’s interesting. I can think of the most challenging aspects of being a working artist, and the most challenging aspects of being a parent, but not an intersection. They feel very different to me.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

For pregnant people: if the writing is going slowly, give yourself a break. I got little worthwhile done when I was pregnant, but my brain cleared up instantly—I mean, in the hospital. Don’t sleep when the baby sleeps: write while the baby sleeps, when you can. When my children were infants I wrote at least sometimes when they napped, and I was so happy that I could measure progress in wordcount when the days had a dreamy sameness. Remember that writing will make you happy and that your children will benefit from your happiness. I don’t believe that a real writer must write every day: for me, it’s easier to break time into big pieces, to remind myself that I need to get a certain amount done within a month. Time does slip away, and if you tell yourself again and again that you’re going to start writing every day tomorrow, you may never start. Give yourself a break; be vigilant against laziness. It’s the same advice I give to everyone, with kids or not.

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