Too Much Work in Progress: Juggling Life and Writing

WIP It Wednesday: Works Not-So-Much in Progress

  (image from abagond.wordpress.com)

I should be writing.

I should be working on the WIP that I haven’t touched in a week.

I should be typing the revisions to the sequel to Snark that I promised an editor and spent the weekend making instead of making progress on the WIP.

I should be outlining the other projects, or getting ahead on blog posts, or working on the scavenger hunt with my Indie Ignites friends to promote PRIDE AND PREP SCHOOL, or compiling that list of interesting facts about me for the guest post feature on someone else’s blog.

I AM WRITER. HEAR ME WHINE.

This is, of course, a paraphrase of Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem that rocked the Women’s Movement and was part of the soundtrack of my life as a child of the Seventies. And as a Seventies girl, I grew up, thanks to women like my mom and Helen Reddy and Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King and

Marlo Thomas and her Free to be You and Me, believing that I would have a full-time fulfilling job as part of my life as an adult woman. And I do, as a professor of writing and literature at a New England university.

So let’s add to the above list:

I should be reading student papers.

I should be reading revisions of student papers.

I should be reading and preparing lecture notes and discussion questions for tomorrow’s classes.

I should be checking in with some students’ advisors to see why they are not attending class or handing in assignments or keeping up with the material.

And don’t get me started on what I should be doing as a wife and mother, like the laundry and mopping the floor and buying onions and figuring out the source of the vaguely unpleasant smell in the living room, all before I pick up the kids, feed the kids, take them to various extracurricular activities and help them with their homework (true confession: I am actually relieved that I cannot be called on to help with some of the homework now, as algebra mystifies me as much now as it did in eighth grade).

This is the universal lament of all writers and all working women (and men, probably) everywhere: I don’t have enough time for it all.

When I was studying nineteenth-century women writers as a grad student, I was struck by the number of those women writers who were unmarried and childless, because it seemed so impossible at the time to be able to be both writer and mother.  The list of those who did’t live long enough to even consider undertaking that juggling act, or lived but did not even attempt to perform it, is pretty impressive: all three of the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Christina Rossetti . . . (the list goes on). Author Elizabeth Gaskell did juggle both jobs, and her journals are filled with her worries about failing at both of her duties as writer and wife/mother – as well as some pretty disgusting sounding recipes for puddings that could be left in the hearth to cook all day and allow Gaskell a little writing time (she may have been the unacknowledged master of the Victorian “crock pot.” And as a child of the seventies, I know about the crock pot).

I don’t know any writer – especially women writers – who don’t feel this way, especially since most of have to work at other demanding jobs in order to have the luxury of writing (in the hope that one day we will be able to sustain ourselves on royalties from that writing). It’s especially hard because by its nature, writing is a pretty solitary job that requires long periods of uninterrupted time to think, to imagine, and to wander around in a completely made-up world until we get our bearings and can render what we see there to others. And that’s hard to do when you have to squeeze it in between your day job, drives to and from dance classes, and all of your other responsibilities.

But I don’t post this just to whine (though thanks for letting me do this a little).  I wrote to ask those of you who find yourselves in this category - trying to write while maintaining another job in or out of the house and trying to be a parent/spouse/partner – if you have any survival strategies you’d want to share.  How do you carve out work time? Keep your sanity? Manage to be the “good enough” mother and writer and worker, to borrow DW Winnicott’s phrase from object-relations theory (psychoanalysis)?

I’ll leave you with one strategy of my own: Have a support network. Mine is the virtual mutual admiration/talk-me-down-off-the-roof society that is Indie Ignites.  Just this morning one of us was freaking out on Facebook about not getting revisions done quickly enough, and within hours we were online offering support, wisdom, cheerleading, and bad jokes when appropriate. Even if we never see each other, we know what it’s like to juggle all of these concerns so we can empathize, sympathize, and even apply a kick in the pants when necessary. It’s amazing how far an online pep talk can go toward keeping you writing and functioning.

Please post your suggestions and strategies in the comments below.  It would be nice to think we’re in this together, wouldn’t it? (How about a little Seventies’ style solidarity? )

What I’m reading:

What I’m listening to: