How to Write

A few methods, some of which work some of the time

Okay, I know I have theoretically been doing it for almost four years, but can someone explain to me how to get writing done as a parent? —Lindsay King-Miller

Lindsay posted this request when she had a four-year-old and a baby, as I recall, maybe five years ago. I started to reply, “good luck with that.” A hero of my youth, Alta, editor of the Shameless Hussy Review, demanded, in the 1960s, “how many times have we had clean sheets and nothing on sheets of paper?” She also had young children then. Not much has changed, apparently, for women who want careers, family, friends and art too.

Failing to write regularly myself, I sought the secrets of those who succeeded. Write every day, they said. Yes, yes, I replied, but when do you sit down to write? Or if you’re Hemingway, when do you stand up to write? Early morning? In my forties and fifties, I got up at 5 to teach, couldn’t do that. Nights? In my twenties and thirties, by the time my stepchildren were asleep, I was braindead.

Murakami rises at 4 a.m., writes for five or six hours, goes for a run or a swim in the afternoon, reads in the evening and goes to bed at nine. Knowing that makes me kind of hostile toward him. Murakami and his wife decided against having children, and in any case, that Spartan schedule of his developed after he made money by selling his bar. I’ve seen a photo of his orderly desk, in the right-hand corner a jar full of freshly sharpened pencils. A clue? Or a nod to Hemingway, who ritualistically sharpened pencils before beginning to write?

A place in Taos where I once got some writing done

The great Spanish to English translator, Margaret Jull Costa, who translates the likes of Saramago and Marías, told us in a workshop that she writes all morning, then goes for a swim. Sometimes while she’s swimming the solution for a translation problem comes to her.

Should I have taken up swimming? Or sharpening pencils?

Tillie Olsen’s Silences, 1975, was a revelation: she knew what I was talking about, unlike the mostly male “how I write” narratives I’d read. “I know I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates,” said Olsen, talking about the long silences in the careers of writers, particularly women. Women writers before my time had mostly been childless. Olsen lists them. But she also lists those of the 1970s who had children, including some I admire, like Joan Didion and Ursula Le Guin. Women artists with families are even more common now. More common. Not easier.

Maya Angelou sometimes got a hotel room, tried to be there by 6:30 each morning to write, had art removed from its walls, turned it into a nun’s cell and wrote there until two in the afternoon. But that was after she’d made money. She had one child, and although she wrote sporadically throughout her performance and civil rights activist years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was not published until that child was grown and she was 41. And yet, a successful writer, she still needed that hotel room.

I suspect it was because at home, she would see the dust on the windowsills, the laundry that needed doing, and be constantly looking to see what’s in the fridge. (Oh wait: that last one is me.) And probably she needed that room because it is harder for a woman to say, “I cannot be interrupted now,” than it is for a man.

Stephen King worked as an industrial laundry laborer while managing to write and sell stories to men’s magazines. He said those stories paid for his children’s health care. He wrote his first novel, Carrie, on weekends and evenings while teaching high school English. I taught English too and don’t know how he did that. My evenings and weekends were consumed by planning lessons and grading papers, cleaning house and cooking meals. King had a wife. I did not.

He wrote in the garage during some of those years. Surely his wife Tabitha kept the three kids occupied, although she’s also a writer. She once said she put ten years into establishing his career. When did she write? Seldom, it seems, until her husband had a couple best sellers and the kids were in school: then her first novel became possible.

García Márquez wrote a page a day. Do that for a year and you’d have a novel, or at least the first draft of one. I have a friend who sets the bar lower even: one paragraph a day. Sounds simple. Never was, for me. I blame the years I had another woman’s children, although I wouldn’t trade those kids for any number of books. I blame having to earn a living, the consuming nature of teaching. But I also blame my own resistance to writing and where that comes from is another story. Olsen again: “The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken…”

Remind me, Lindsay asks. Writing and parenting: how’s that work again? Someone said, family, friends, a career and being a writer—you can do three of those things, but not all four. I only began to write daily after I retired from teaching full-time; after I abandoned most social engagements; after I began staying home in my quiet house, in my nearly-a-solarium study, in what Rilke calls “unconfined solitude.”

Lindsay, by the way, has now published her second book and has a third coming out in August. Both children are in school these days.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781683694649?fbclid=IwY2xjawLiVzhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHiEPYYE6psOMpnWRPRtXBAHhRnzHtJBZrwQWlaDgiiYb68JOXIHlUqvHUlPm_aem_K__1y4ULSsf1eNxyd1cvOw

Even given my ideal circumstances, I’ve recently spent days avoiding the difficult work of revising a memoir piece. Writing daily, sure. But I was giving that thorny memoir a wide berth. I’m not too worried though. My memoir workshop meeting is coming up. Those women cut no one any slack. They demand pages. I’ll make that deadline. And that’s another way to write.