Juiced On Writing

Leo Babauta, on his Write to Done blog, lists seven writing habits of some famous writers. Some are slightly outdated – as in Truman Capote, who wrote in bed, including with a typewriter(!). Leo also lists several authors who are obvious morning people, and then there’s Stephen King, who insists he writes ten pages every day without fail, even on holidays.

Although interesting, and telling in some cases, I think the question from a commenter, Tamara, is even more telling. She points out that none of those on Leo’s list have children, and asks what the habits of a successful woman writer – with kids is (aka JK Rowling perhaps?).

Rather than being told – hey, that’s a great question, Tamara got told by one woman – well, go and find yourself some childcare so that you can give your muse some time, and by another person to stop whining and being such a baby. Great support from fellow writers, there.

And I’m still intrigued to know what habits successful women authors with young children do have. Because I’m sure I, too, could learn from their experience.

But, in answer to the overall question Leo Babauta left on his blog, although I’m not successful (yet!), and just starting out, here’s my own writing habits which I have developed recently (regarding fiction and non-fiction) -

My Own Writing Habits

As a part-time working mother, with school pickup duties, and other family and personal activities to work around, I write daily (on five days a week) with a system of spending 20 minutes each school / working day, simply doing some writing / morning pages. If you write everyday, you get better at writing everyday (hinting at my next post…)

Why only five days? – I setup our morning routine together, my daughter and I, so that after we’re ready to walk to school and we have that time free and waiting around – I use it for this writing, she gets to play and relax before school. This routine will probably change if there are any other children welcomed into this house, naturally (we are currently as a family in the adoption process). In fact, all of it may…But, importantly – I don’t feel guilty if life gets in the way, or my family wants – or needs – a full day of my time, and it impacts on this writing time. When I’m on holiday – I’m on holiday(!), but I do, if able to, take a laptop and use it when the muse strikes – which happens when you least expect it, of course. And there’s the ancient custom of actually handwriting into a notebook and all of that (against my geeky grain, but when needs must, I guess).

When my daughter is at school I am lucky enough to have five hours normally to myself – and this time is important! When I’m writing a novel, I AM Writing a Novel – this becomes 24/7 and I can be known to spend twelve hours per day writing it. When this overlaps with my daughter being home, then I do not stop her interruptions (or that of the dog’s needs), despite repetitive ones being annoying. I figure that the universe is giving me a message to stop and look around for a while, even if I’m not interested in doing so.  And there are still the cooking dinner duties which serve as needed interruptions also. After years being a woman, I guess I’m good at multi-tasking (yes, I am intending that to be funny), and then getting back onto target with my main writing priorities.

When my daughter was younger I worked full time, and she was in childcare. This, and the commute to and fro work left me with only the weekends for family time, and only the late evenings for any spare time I might have (and some of it should have been used in maintaining a relationship with my equally hard-working husband). At the time I hadn’t decided on writing, so instead, I used this time quite productively and successfully on a hobby. That “creativity” time, whether it be writing or creating something with my hands, is what keeps me relaxed, and sane. It sits at the very root of the person I am.

On analysis, it appears that although I am, by nature, a morning person (I loathe late nights – I’d prefer to be asleep, and dreaming); I am as a writer – an afternoon and evening person. Although when I wrote my first (and so far only) novel, I spent from 9am to perhaps 6 or 7pm writing, with only an hour’s break (without bothering to eat normally) I recognised that my best work – the work where I really didn’t want to be interrupted, was in the late afternoon.

Unfortunately, this is at the same time as my family arriving home from school / work, and my task of having to cook the dinner, read homework, read a bedtime story with my daughter, plus many other routines – which sometimes I resented a little, for that period of time of being a novel writer. In the best of worlds, if I were a successful and professional writer with contracted books to get out, I would hopefully be able to pay for somebody to cook the dinner for me at that peak time – perhaps only for a month or so – but doesn’t that sound nice?

And let me point out something here – if you’re a mother with younger children, life is much much harder. Not for you the luxury of six hours at school – toddlers and babies are much more demanding of your time. But they still have naps and sleep a lot (hopefully!), so when my daughter was a baby, I made sure I used that time for my own projects. I also negotiated to ensure I made my husband aware of my own needs. If he got to go to the football, then I got equal time to myself alone, somehow.

Because I know how difficult this can be for some people – I was lucky I had my husband to depend upon, but I didn’t have any local friends who I might ask a favour of, so had no other means of childcare – I would gladly offer babysitting services for a morning or so if I found out any local parents were trying to write for themselves, and they were struggling to get that time alone. Unfortunately I live in a small village community in the U.K. where there is no reading group, a part-time library and no known other writers in the village.

My online writing  – this blog being one such project – is another matter. My blogs and other writing projects are as the result of several current courses, some of which I’ve paid for to improve upon this online writing and general writing business. As such, the projects are calling upon my time a lot lately. I am organising my writing approaches towards these using a cross-mix between several productivity systems (Leo Babuata’s Zen to Done being one of them, with Nick Cernis’s Todoodlist plus some geeky software also – because I’m a geek). And each project has dedicated writing tasks scheduled in on a rota basis to allow me to work through each. That means my fictional work has had to ramp down most recently, but behind the scenes there is more planning going on for a new novel.

I know that I am lucky in that I have a supportive husband and an understanding daughter towards “Mummy being on the computer all day”, and that’s something a lot of other writers don’t have. I also would suggest that because until recently I worked full time in a corporate job, and was still a parent and wife with it; that in that time I learnt that I can’t NOT create. That time, scheduled into most every day for me (without being precious about the occasional missing day, or if it’s only one hour writing some blog content, or indeed on what format my “writing” may take me) is paramount to my own sanity – “and a happy mother is a happy family“. My house may be a little messy compared to others who don’t allocate in their own time to achieve something – whether it’s a quilt, an online business, or a short story – but in the scheme of things, my daughter and husband just don’t care, and nor is it going to go down on my gravestone that I was bad at vacuuming. But I’m hoping that something on my gravestone will indicate I created something memorable and successful that was all of my own. I’m hoping it will be something I wrote.

I think possibly the biggest thing learnt from this prompt, thanks to Leo Babauta’s post, is that every writer needs some kind of writing routine – (not necessarily every day, or even every month – someone on his comments suggests he writes seasonally!) but find a routine, and stick to it.

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