When I was pregnant during the last year of my MFA program, there was a fellow writer who came up to me, looked down at my belly, and sneered, “I could never be a mother. I don’t want anything in my life that would compete with my writing career.”
“If you don’t want kids, don’t have kids,” I told her. “Not wanting them is reason enough not to have them. Every child should grow up feeling wanted and cherished. But being a writer has nothing to do with it.”
Most of the people I know who don’t want kids came to that decision either because of circumstance or after years of soul searching. These people are generous and community-oriented and have very rich friendships, and they are often mentors or part-time caregivers of other people’s kids or elders. They just don’t want kids of their own. I respect and honor their decision and I think society should applaud them for their self-knowledge.
However, this writer-acquaintance of mine was clearly implying that because I was pregnant, I had no brain and I would never produce anything as a writer ever again.
Say what?! What a bunch of malarkey!
I’ve never bought into the idea that a person had to choose between being a writer or being a parent. I can think of a whole list of authors who had children and still managed to write book after book. J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, Anne Lamott, Roald Dahl, Ayelete Waldeman, Michael Chabon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Strout, Jennifer Weiner, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Updike, Pat Conroy, Liane Moriarty, George Saunders, Maya Angelou, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Roddy Doyle, Eloisa James, Diablo Cody, Ali Wong—and these are just the super famous ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are plenty other authors who write for a living and still manage to pick up their child from school on time. There even an interview series called Writer Mother Monster, that is dedicated to showing that being an author and being a parent is not a binary choice.
You do not have to choose between being a parent and being an author. It is possible to do both, if that’s what you want.
However, making the time and space to write while caring for small kids at home does require a greater level of structure, self-discipline, focus, and organization. I wrote two novels before becoming a parent, and two novels after becoming a parent. Those first three books I wrote were not publishable—but the fourth one was. That book is titled, Candid Family Portrait, and it is a love story about a couple dealing with the changes in their marriage after having a child as they try to figure out how to pursue their dreams in a world that has a very narrow view of how a family should be. I wrote the book during the years when my son was 3-6 years old and published it during a pandemic. It took organization but it was possible.
In case there are other parents (or prospective parents, or writers with busy lives) out there who want to write, here are some tips for getting your first draft written.
First, understand the difference between fast and slow work strategies
A few years ago, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote a book titled Thinking, Fast and Slow about two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast, instinctual and emotional. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and logical.
I haven’t read this book yet, but just from reading the back cover I’m pretty sure the same applies to creativity—or at least my experience of my creativity.
Fast creativity is those flashes of energy that have you running for your notebook so you can jot down an idea before it escapes. Slow creativity is the meticulous, detail-oriented trudging kind where you spend hours trying to fit a square peg into a round hole until finally, it fits. Fast creativity is a dance floor on a Saturday night; slow creativity is church on Sunday. Fast creativity thrives on distraction and chaos; slow creativity demands focus and order. Fast creativity is inspiration; slow creativity is perspiration.
Radiolab has a couple of lovely podcast episodes about creativity. The first one is titled “Me, Myself, and Muse” and includes an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert before the publication of her book, Big Magic. “Me, Myself, and Muse,” has a bunch of wonderful anecdotes of what fast creativity feels like and how a person can make space for it (and set limits on it) in their lives.
The second great Radiolab podcast on creativity is called “Radiolab Presents: TJ & Dave,” which is an interview with two improv artists, TJ Jagodowksi and David Pasquesi, who have an act where they walk on stage with no notes and no scene and just perform based on whatever comes to them in the moment. Every single night is different. The way they think of themselves is as conduits, where stories just arrive and they get to share space with them. They have a film-version of one of their shows titled Trust Us, This is All Made Up. This shows that creativity doesn’t have to be tortured or constantly revised, but you do have to be mentally present for it.
When thinking about slow creativity, I recommend listening to this 2017 Hidden Brain interview with Cal Newport titled “You 2.0: Deep Work.” The interview is about Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
You are going to need both kinds of creativity to finish a project, but your ability to access the slow kind is probably going to depend on childcare, at some point. (Although there are plenty of workarounds if you don’t have access to childcare.) Just know that ahead of time and plan your work accordingly.
For me, fast creativity is best for getting ideas and writing first drafts, and it has been relatively easy for me to fold this type of creativity into my daily life. Slow-creativity is often about planning, rewriting, and editing, and it’s easiest for me to access that analytical part of my brain when I have large, predictable uninterrupted chunks of time. During the times in my life when childcare wasn’t available, I would get that quiet time during the couple hours in the morning when I was the first person awake in the house.
Here are some other tips on harnessing fast creativity.
Always have a place to capture those ideas.
Have a dedicated app on your phone where you capture ideas to be processed later. Dropbox, Evernote, Scrivener, OneNote, Apple Notes, and Google Drive are good ones because they sync between your phone and your laptop. Don’t make it too complicated for yourself. Just choose one and stick with it.
I have multiple Scrivener projects synced over Dropbox between my phone and my laptop. Each book or story idea gets its own project. One Scrivener project is just for random, unattached ideas that aren’t ready to be worked on yet: I call this my “Story Idea Factory.”
Laptops and tablets are light enough now that you could probably always keep one in your bag. It’s good to always have your project at hand in whatever room you’re in, so that you can rush over to write a sentence down as it occurs to you. I’ve written many scenes, a sentence at a time, with my laptop open in the kitchen or living room.
Analog notebooks are great too. Author Piers Anthony would handwrite his books in a notebook so that even if he were stuck waiting in the dentist’s office for 10 minutes, he could use that time to write the next paragraph or the next idea. One of the interesting things about writing longhand is that it forces your brain to think and build a story sequentially, one sentence at a time, which can be a bit like narrating a movie in your head, slowed down to one-third speed.
Paper notebooks do not need to be charged. They are not connected to the Internet or social media. They won’t beep at you or distract you with a calendar notification. Notebooks are quiet, simple, and always waiting. Other famous authors who have handwritten their first drafts are John Irving, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and, of course, all the great authors of the pre-typewriter world: Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare, etc.
I also think children see you differently when you’re writing in a notebook or reading a paper book, rather than staring at your phone or a laptop. People complain about how much screen time modern children have, but I think children’s screen time is dwarfed by adult’s screen time—especially if you’re counting work and recreation. Having your children see you unplug is important. It makes your advice more credible so that conversations around technology are less of a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing.
For outlining or quickly jotting down ideas, I like using index cards. I get the spiral-bound kind that acts like a tiny notebook so that I don’t have any loose cards floating around and I like how the cover keeps my ideas private until I’m ready to organize them. When I’m ready to work on an idea, I can pull the cards out and sort them to see which ideas connect. I often use index cards when I’m writing an outline.
Author James Scott Bell also talks about using index cards in his writing book Plot & Structure.
David Sedaris keeps two notebooks: a small one that he always carries with him to jot down details and dialog throughout his day, and a larger journal that he uses to turn those scraps into scenes and essays. Once he has something with potential, then he moves onto a typewriter or a computer.
Pro tip: If you’re handwriting your first draft, I recommend:
- using notebooks where you can pull out the pages
- only writing on one side of the page
- starting a new scene or chapter on a new page.
This way when it comes to editing, you can pull whole chapters out, staple them together, and re-order whole chunks of your book on the floor before you transcribe it. The reason it’s important to only write on one side of the page is in case you need to snip a scene or paragraph out of one chapter and tape it into another chapter.
Pro tip: For people who like handwriting, you might want to keep your notes, grocery list, to-do list, or journal in another notebook. Or, a neat trick is to flip your notebook upside down and write from the backside. When the front-side and back-side meet, it’s time to get a new notebook.
Keep your chaos organized.
There’s nothing more annoying than coming up with a brilliant idea, and then forgetting where you put it, or worse—losing it. Try to clean-as-you-go by immediately putting the note in a place where you know you will find it again—even if it’s just a shoebox where you know you keep your ideas.
Your future self (your slow-creativity self) will thank you.
I keep my index card ideas in a specially-built for 3×5 cards. I have dividers for various categories, like “Dialogue,” “Anecdotes,” “Love story ideas,” “Horror story ideas,” “Favorite quotes,” “Non-fiction essay ideas,” etc. A large project, like a novel, gets its own box.
Keep your current project at the front of your mind by thinking about it first thing in the morning, and right before bed.
One of the tips I’ve found helpful was from Monica Leonelle’s book The Eight Minute Habit, which recommends spending the first eight minutes of your day—before you even get out of bed—working on your book. Dorothea Brande recommends a similar process in her classic book Becoming a Writer. There is something magical about spending the first moments of your morning thinking about your story. This practice can unlock huge amounts of creativity throughout your day.
The way I think it is that my creativity is like a winter lake that is liquid at night when I am asleep, but from the moment I wake, it begins to ice over. It’s easiest for me to break through the ice early in the morning, when I’m still relaxed and dreamy, rather than waiting later in the day for when the ice has thickened and hardened.
Also, the more days that pass between writing sessions, the harder it is for me to break through the ice and get into the flow.
In practice, I either keep a notebook beside my bed, or I have my current project synced to the iOS version of Scrivener on my phone so that when I wake up in the morning I can spend the first few minutes of my morning working on my book, rather than checking email or the news.
I recommend the Hidden Brain episode, “Creatures of Habit,” for people trying to establish a daily habit.
Set daily or weekly quotas to get your zero-draft (messy first draft) written.
A page-count quota, a word-count quota, or a time-quota.
Lots of people swear by the 250-words a day quota, which is about 1 page a day. If you write a page every single day, by the end of the year you’ll have 365-pages worth of material.
I gained a lot from being part of the Magic Spreadsheet Facebook community, which recommends 250-words, or 25-minutes a day. They created a spreadsheet that gamified daily writing so that you get points for consistency, rather than hitting high word-count numbers. The spreadsheet also has a leader-board, in case you feel like being competitive. I’m not part of the official Facebook/Google Spreadsheet group anymore, but I do keep my own private tally on my calendar. I’ve written something or “checked the box” on a writing task daily for over 1,500 consecutive days. (I learned about Magic Spreadsheet from this Mur Lafferty podcast, “At Long Last, The Magic Spreadsheet” and “The Magic Spreadsheet Returns!“.)
Accountability is a great motivator for consistency. For a while, my brother and I were playing a game with each other where I would email him my writing (or editing) for the day, and he would email me a summary of the music he composed. If either of us missed a day, we’d have to pay the other $5.
I’ve also had nice consistency from meeting friends regularly at a cafe (during pre-pandemic times) or daily over zoom. Author Anne Hawley shared her story with The Writing Room about how setting up daily writing sprints with some of her colleagues has really helped maintain consistency and motivation.
James Scott Bell likes to start his morning with a “Nifty-350” words, which he then tries to double later on in the day. He also recommends having a weekly quota, rather than a daily one, because it’s more flexible.
Some of the Story Grid people like using the “Rule of 530,” which is 500 words, and 30-minutes of studying craft. Danielle Kiowski has also written a book about it titled, The Writer’s Daily Practice: A Guide to Becoming a Lifelong Storyteller, which is available through Story Grid publishing.
Elizabeth Strout would give herself a quota of 3 handwritten pages of fiction, or 3 hours spent editing. Three pages a day is also recommended by Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way morning pages practice. (Incidentally, Julia Cameron also wrote a book titled, The Artist’s Way for Parents.) I think three pages a day is probably a comfortable amount for most people to handwrite without giving themselves carpel tunnel. Higher daily word counts require more physical stamina, at which point it’s good to switch to dictation to protect your body from a repetitive stress injury.
Ray Bradbury’s quota was 1,000 words a day, or 4 pages. (Or, I’ve also heard him talk about writing a first draft of a story on Monday, the second draft on Tuesday, the third draft on Wednesday, etc. And then he’d mail it on the following Monday and go home and start a new story.)
NaNoWriMo’s quota is about 1,600 words a day, or 7 pages.
Stephen King’s quota is 2,000 words a day, or 8 pages.
Piers Anthony’s quota was 3,000 words a day, or 12 handwritten pages.
Romance writer Bella Andre would write 5,000 words a day, or 20 pages.
Science fiction and fantasy author Rachel Aaron has written a book about how she went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000-words a day. (Note: Rachel Aaron is also a parent.)
Some people prefer to count scenes or chapters, instead of words.
Some people prefer counting hours or “pomodoros” instead of words.
For some people, two hours a day in the chair is a solid day’s work, whether they wrote one sentence or 10 pages.
Pro tip: Write multiple times per day.
Pro tip: Rather than constantly keeping track of word counts, you can use Scrivener’s Writing History function to track your writing word counts. For people handwriting, you can just start your writing day by writing the date in the margins.
Personally, I’ve found that it’s better to have a really small quota that I know I can achieve and surpass no matter how my day is going. Mary Robinette Kowal wrote wonderful essay on having three sentences as her quota for a while because “Sometimes Writer’s Block is Really Depression.”
I like Monica Leonelle’s A-B-C method, which I read about in her book book The Eight-Minute Habit. Plan A is your ideal work day. For me, Plan A is a fully written scene that was written, edited, and is complete. (Truthfully, I almost never have Plan A days.) Plan B is your most-likely workday. For me, Plan B is part of a scene, or an outline for a scene, or an editing task, or any measurable bit of forward progress. Plan C is your “Catastrophe Plan” for what you do when your life is chaos, or you’re on vacation, and you just want to check-the-box for the day. For me, my Plan C is 15-minutes re-reading a section of the work and doing light edits, or 15-minutes freewriting trying to get myself unstuck, or planning my next scene.
Plan C days may not look like much, but they are better than nothing. I know that if I stir the pot a tiny bit each day, it’s way easier for me to eventually get back into doing Plan B and Plan A level work than if I did nothing and tried to revive a cold dish. I try to get my Plan C writing done, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed. Then, later in the day, I may plan out another writing session or two to do more.
Be like Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption: just keep scratching at that tunnel and you’ll eventually bust through.
Daily quotas are not the right choice for everybody. For some people, their work schedules, family obligations, or mental chemistry doesn’t work with rigidly trying to work every single day, and trying to force themselves into being daily writers just sends them into spirals of depression or physical breakdown. In Joanna Penn’s books, The Healthy Writer and The Relaxed Author, she writes about how for the sake of your sanity and your body it’s sometimes best to just follow your life’s rhythms. Your health and your relationships are more important than some dumb quota.
Some people have long commutes and can only write on weekends, so they give themselves a weekly quota. Some people only write in November-December for NaNoWriMo and spend the rest of the year editing that NaNoWriMo novel into a publishable manuscript. Ian Flemming famously wrote his James Bond novels during his summer vacations and wouldn’t write anything else during the rest of the year.
Some writers are marathoners, and some writers are sprinters. It’s okay to make peace with how you work best. It’s important to adjust your writing practice so that it fits your actual life rather than pining for some fantasy life where you have no job, no bills, no relationship obligations, and a squadron of servants cooking your food and cleaning your house for you.
Pro tip: Whether you’re handwriting or typing, you will get stuck. Don’t panic, it happens to everybody. You can still meet your day’s word-count quota by freewriting about the problem. You keep your hand or your fingers moving as you do a focused meditation, trying to write your way through the problem. Whenever I get stuck, nine times out of ten, this exercise helps me figure out a solution and get back to writing the scene. Sometimes the fastest way to get back on the road is by pulling over to a rest stop and get your bearings. This can still count toward your word count goal, but mark it in some way, either by putting brackets around it, or by changing the font color, so that when you’re editing you can find these sections easily and delete them, or move them to a separate document. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers and Writing with Power, talks about how these writing digressions are sometimes critical to evolution in your thinking so that your finished piece of writing is deeper and more considered than if you’d just stuck to first-level creativity.
Pro tip: Have an outline or a reverse-outline. These are two versions of the same thing. An outline (for planners) is when you plan out your big moments before you write the draft. A reverse-outline (for “pantsers”) is when you write a draft and then have a separate sheet of paper where you summarize the main event of what you just wrote into one sentence. In either case, the point of this exercise is to help you zoom out of the sentence-level writing to get a sense of the big picture and the direction the story is going. Roy Peter Clark, in his book Writing Tools, calls this “climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction.” Dean Wesley Smith also describes this reverse-outline technique in his book on discovery writing, Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel Without an Outline.
Pro tip: Don’t lose the flow of writing your first draft by researching every little detail on the Internet. Rather than pausing in your story to look up a street name or car model or what type of tree grows in Florida, just write your question or guess in brackets and move on with the scene. Fixing those small details is a good warm-up or editing activity to do later.
Pro tip: Use a sand timer. I learned about this technique from science-fiction writer, Mary Robinette Kowal. Like her, I have one that’s 15 minutes, because I know that the hardest part of my writing is usually within the first fifteen minutes. I sit down to write, and all of a sudden I have to pee, or look up something on the Internet, or get a glass of water. Usually if I am just in one place for 15 minutes, I’ll get into the flow my desire to run away from my desk goes away. The benefit of a sand timer, as opposed to something that makes noise, is that it is silent and once I enter the flow of my writing it won’t beep and distract me. For my first writing sprint, I am not allowed to follow any of those urges until the sand timer is up. Thirst can wait 15 minutes. Go to the bathroom before you start the sand timer. ;-)
The sand timer is an especially helpful negotiation tool for writing around toddlers and teaching them patience. Small children don’t understand time, but they do understand a physical sand timer where sand from the top has to get down to the bottom. Sand timers can be used for quiet time, or teaching kids how to take turns, or helping them build a daily reading habit. You can say to a kid, “While the sand timer is going, it’s my turn to work. When the sand timer is up, then it is your turn again and we can play.” The sand timers are great.
Learn how to dictate
Most phones have built-in speech-to-text, or you can subscribe to a dedicated app like DragonAnywhere or Descript.
Dictation is great for when your hands are busy, but you have a bit of quiet…like when you’re folding laundry while the kids are napping, or when you’re taking a walk while the kids are in a stroller.
The high words-per-hour of dictation means you can accomplish a lot more in a short amount of time than you could handwriting or typing. For example, you can dictate a 1,500-word scene in about half an hour, whereas that same scene might take 3 hours if you were typing it.
If you want to read more about dictation, I recommend the following resources:
- Joanna Penn’s website has a great overview about dictation.
- Joanna Penn has a video explaining her dictation process.
- Fool Proof Dictation by Christopher Downing (I recommend getting the paperback version to make it easier to flip between exercises)
- The Writing Productivity Bundle: The 8-Minute Writing Habit; Write Better, Faster; Dictate Your Book by Monica Leonelle
- Kevin J. Anderson’s blog post on Dictating, Writing, and Hiking: “Talking to Myself.“
There is a learning curve to dictation (just as there was a learning curve to learning cursive, or learning how to type). It can feel awkward at first to speak the punctuation phrases, but after a while, it will feel normal. You can practice using speech-to-text software by reading aloud from a favorite book, or as a way to transcribe something you’ve handwritten. (I still like to read-aloud a scene from a favorite book as a vocal warm-up before I start my own dictation session.)
From there, you can start capturing notes and eventually dictating first drafts.
My favorite way to dictate a scene is to write an outline ahead of time and then go on an exercise walk for 20-40 minutes, speaking the scene aloud. Sometimes I like using Christopher Downing’s loop-method of performing the scene in 2-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute versions.
For extra credit, I’d do the “one out,” “one back” technique where I’d dictate one scene on my out-going walk, and then turn around and dictate a second scene on my walk back home.
I learned about this walk-and-talk method from Monica Leonelle. Kevin J. Anderson also uses this method to write his books while hiking.
(Note: As of 2021, Dragon Naturally Speaking only transcribes MP3 recordings in their Windows version of the software. Their Mac version was discontinued a few years ago. Mac/iPhone users can use their DragonAnywhere app, but this only works if you have an internet connection, which kind of defeats the purpose of going on a walk-and-talk. I haven’t used Descript yet, but I believe they can transcribe MP3s. Or, you can use whatever speech-to-text software your phone comes with.)
One of my favorite parts of dictation is that it can turn into improv-acting, where you can move around and can take on the voices and physical mannerisms of the different characters in your story.
Dictation has some downsides, though. Here are some of the hard lessons I’ve learned around dictation:
I prefer to dictate when I’m alone, but I’m rarely alone—The process of getting into character and walking around the living room doing voices is so embarrassing that I prefer to have zero witnesses. This isn’t really feasible during a pandemic when we are working, homeschooling, and always hanging out together. The way I’ve gotten around this is to dictate either early in the morning when my family is still asleep, or while I’m outside walking the dog.
The high word count and ease of creating first drafts has made me spoiled—Writers can get overly attached and superstitious about their favorite pen, or their favorite typewriter…and when their favorite tool isn’t available they can become blocked. For me, I got this way around dictation. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking, “If I can’t write 3,000 words in one hour…why bother?” The best tool for the job is the one that has me practicing my craft consistently, diligently. My most important writing tool is my brain, not my phone, dummy!
I shouldn’t don’t edit as I dictate—the whole beauty of dictation is that is only for first-draft work. Trying to fix dictation errors while dictating will just cause the software to glitch, the phone to crash, and then to lose everything. I’ve found it’s best to work in two separate phases: the dictation phase, and the clean-up/editing phase. I have found that whatever time I spent dictating a scene will probably be the same for editing that scene. If a scene took me 30 minutes to dictate than it will probably take me 30-60 minutes to edit into a polished draft.
It’s better to “do another take” than it is to try to edit a scene that didn’t work—Sometimes the messy first draft really is too messy to bother editing. When that’s the case, it’s better and faster to just create a new outline and dictate the scene over from scratch.
“If a short story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, then it never will.”
John Updike
“The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, ‘What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,’ you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender, not a tight-ass.”
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
I shouldn’t wait too long between dictation and editing sessions.—Don’t dictate a whole book and think to yourself, “Right. Now I have a first draft and all I have to do is edit it!” I did that and it was a huge mistake! I dictated a 100,000 word “book” in 30 days and then spent 2.5 years trying to edit that monster into a novel. It was terrible. I should’ve abandoned those 100,000 words and re-dictated the book over from the beginning with an entirely new outline (this is ultimately what I did, and what became Candid Family Portrait). Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. (For more on when to quit and when to stick, I recommend reading The Dip by Seth Godin.)
When I wrote Candid Family Portrait, there were large sections of it that were dictated. I learned my lesson to keep my writing/editing loops short. I’d outline a chapter, dictate it, then edit it. Only when the chapter was finished would I allow myself to work on the next chapter.
My dictation scene-editing process is now this:
- Copy the dictated words into Scrivener
- Check my Story Grid Spreadsheet to fill out the five commandments based on what I might’ve learned from my dictation session (I keep this in the Metadata of my Scrivener file)
- Separate each chunk of text into labeled beats explaining the tone/purpose of the beat (“stranger knocks at the door,” “ring around the Rosie,” “first kiss,” “running from love,” etc.)
- Highlight each beat and do a front-to-back edit/rewrite/clean-up of the scene so that it flows and there are no dictation errors
- Read it through. Delete my beat-labels. Highlight any names, places, or timeline details in case they need to be changed later.
- Fill in the entirety of my Story Grid spreadsheet metadata. Change the label to “First draft done.”
At this point, my first drafts are pretty clean because each scene goes through 3-9 cycles of editing before I consider it a professional first draft. My criteria for a working-first-draft scene is that it has all five commandments in it, there are no dictation errors or sentence fragments, it moves the story forward, it reads like its own mini-story, and I wouldn’t feel totally embarrassed if someone read it as-is.
Stay tuned for a future blog post on Slow Creativity strategies for parents.
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