The Juggling Act

I was once asked this question in an advice column for writers on their way toward agents and book contracts. 

"How do people just write, then pause, make dinner and whatnot, and then go back to writing?"

Maybe it was the whatnot, but it made me laugh. It might have been a joke, but it suggested that the act of writing was too fragile and tenuous a thing to be interrupted for mundane tasks like making dinner. Indeed, would a surgeon pause in the middle of an operation to pick up drycleaning? Would the rescuers of the Chilean miners have halted their rock-burrowing shuttle to pick up kids from preschool?

But I played it straight, and focused my answer on surviving interruptions and finding your way back to your train of thought. Practical things like how important it is to wind down toward the end of a session instead of leaping into a new scene, or to take notes on where you would have gone if you'd had the time.

But in the time since I wrote it, I've realized the question was more about The Writing Life. About how some people might have lives organized around the writing, while others squeeze it in best we can around the edges. Day jobs. Raising children. Maybe, for people more well-rounded than I am, other hobbies. Lives in which the writing has to pause to make dinner a whole lot.

It's a valid question, because most of my ideas — and most of the time I have an urge to write — don't happen to be when I'm sitting at the computer (late at night, and when I hire babysitters). So I have to get creative. Send myself texts from the waiting room at the pediatrician, take notes on whatever paper I dig out of the diaper bag. This can be risky business. I've written myself notes on the backs of permission slips or teacher-conference forms (How well can a husband and wife really know each other?), only to have the paper shyly returned. "You might want this," one said, eyes averted.

I don't know how many writers are able to spend their days in creative seclusion, writing up a froth while forsaking social responsibilities and basic hygiene. I imagine that's what it's like to be at a writing colony, hour after hour of uninterrupted focus, day after day. Once a year or so, usually for a Christmas present, I get a weekend away when my husband stays home with the kids. If I were to honestly describe how this feels, how very much I value that time of no-parameters-no-safety-net- no-one-calling-my-name, it might come across with a passion that would make you a little uncomfortable.

Writing without borders. A land without clocks. For most of us, it isn't like that. The reality of the daily grind is a longing to write when you can't, and interruptions when you do. It all adds up to a very long time getting the draft finished, getting the queries out, the revisions back to your editor. Some ideas will get lost while we make dinner, the spilled milk of the writing life. The fact is, we simply can't do it all. There are choices. And whether you have a job or have to go grocery shopping or go feed the chickens, sometimes writing has to take its ticket and stand in the deli line. You can be jealous of your friend who's won residence in a writer's colony, and writes in a cottage with warm roast beef sandwiches delivered for lunch in a yellow tin bucket. But for most of us, that's not where we are.

When I get too envious of the tin bucket, I remind myself how lucky I am to pursue what I love, that I get to have a big raucous family and a book coming out. A book that took longer than it might have if I didn't have the raucous family, but a book nonetheless.

And something else: At the end of the day, I feel lucky to know what I love to do. I have a friend who used to be in marketing, and after her kids hit elementary school she wanted to find some new kind of work. Chefs cook, she said. Carpenters build, writers write. What do I do?

Call it the color of your parachute, or call it the thing that floats your boat. But that knowing what you do, in my book, is worth the interruptions that sometimes keep you from doing it.