Maplewoods Mirror #11
One of my former students, Natali Escobedo, wrote happily to
say that she and her husband had a baby five months ago. Her life’s changed in huge ways and she
could, and often does, spend the entire day doing things for and with her
son. She has not been writing since his
birth, and now she’s wondering how do other parents who are writers manage both
family and avocation? As she said, her son is “fun and alert, and along with that goes his need for lots of interaction,
exposure to outside stimuli, etc. I like
motherhood. However, I find myself sleep deprived and am just now coming out of
a fog where I realize that I can and need to have a life outside of Mommy and
Me.”
It’s a great topic,
and for you parents and parents-to-be, I asked a few writers with children to
add to my forming thoughts. One huge
difference between my creative writing classes at USC and those at UCLA
Extension is this issue of parenthood.
At USC, my graduate students are in their twenties and thirties. Some are married, but no one has children
yet, and the students’ primary focus is writing and getting a master’s
degree. Graduate school can be overwhelming,
so the more focus the better.
My extension classes,
in comparison, have people in the same age group and older, and most have
college degrees, including graduate degrees.
Most are professionals of some sort—often teachers and lawyers, and,
interestingly, once a rabbi. Writers in
both groups tend to love the swirl of reading, writing, discussing, and
chatting with other writers. Those with
children, particularly young children, have an extra hurdle.
Last quarter in my class at UCLA, one of the writers, Dana Bowden, had had her first baby three weeks before the first class. She kept up with the fast pace of the course. She’s the first person I asked for thoughts on this topic.
She
prefaced her thoughts with, “I'm a total novice both at trying to find
writing time and at motherhood. Both have been going on less than three months.
Also, I'm not working, don't have other kids, and have a super-easy baby.” That said, she gave four pieces of advice
for new mothers. (Fathers, I’ll get to—hang
in here.)
“Taking
a class helped by setting deadlines for me to meet,” Dana said. “It also meant
my husband was forced to get used to taking the baby on his own for several
hours at a stretch. Now that he's confident about his ability to do this, we
can also schedule evening or weekend time for me to write (or go to the gym, see
a friend, sleep, and more).”
Her
second tip is to have another new mother as a kind of swim buddy. If you happen to know someone who has the
same challenges, help each other out by checking in with each other often. “I have a friend who's also a new mom and is
trying to find time for her drawing,” wrote Dana. “We're trying to check in
weekly to share strategies and hold each other accountable. We set a goal to
write/draw at least five days a week. Thirty minutes is the minimum amount
required to ‘count’ a day. Because that’s it's not working out so well with
her…I'm trying marking the days I write on our family calendar on the
refrigerator.”
One tip
I would have never come up with has to do with breastfeeding. As Dana wrote, “There is the potential for
significant contemplative time during breastfeeding, if you can resist turning
on the TV or reading the newspaper. Those blocks when your hands are busy but
your mind is free were definitely not part of my life before, and are a pretty
amazing gift.
“What
works really well for me is to get that thirty minutes of ‘required’ writing in
while my son is asleep before his 9 a.m. feeding. Then while he's nursing, the
pressure is off because my obligation for the day is done, and whatever
problems I ran into in my writing are still on my mind. I can work on them in
my head for the twenty to forty minutes we're sitting there together, and often
I get ideas that make me want to sit back down again later in the day. This
often results in a lot more time spent writing.
“Finally, I think
it's really about prioritizing. I find I do have time on my hands, but it's in
little chunks, so it's hard to feel like there's ever enough to accomplish
anything. My first priority if I have twenty or thirty free minutes is to nap
if I'm tired. Otherwise I'm useless for motherhood or writing. However, I try
to make my next priority writing if I haven't done it yet that day. Dirty
dishes, laundry, email, etc. all come after those first two.”
My next stop was another Dana, Dana Crowell, who I know from
an online novel class I was in. She has
two children, eleven and thirteen.
She’s written a fabulous novel, Between
Worlds, which was honored as one of two finalists in the Unpublished Novel
competition hosted by the San Diego Book Awards Association. Her story is about a young reporter, Sheila
Nash, in Berkeley, California, who witnesses a hate crime and discovers that telling the truth can get
her killed.
Dana is now looking for an agent, soon will be starting her next novel, and will be taking another online class. Even though I teach, I occasionally take an online class too because it does for me what it does for other parents and writers: puts me on a schedule, and I get up to a dozen other people reading my pages as I write. I feel like Charles Dickens that way, knowing there’s an audience there.
Dana has several points for parents: “Parenthood definitely puts a crimp on writing time. I was so sleep-deprived that even when I made time to write, I found myself with little to say. I mean, just how interesting is it to ‘write what you know’ when my life at the time was filled with changing diapers, washing formula bottles, reading the back of baby food jars, and flipping through Parents magazine trying to find that one article that would cure my son of napping in the car?
“Seriously, I find that in the first year, and really until they start preschool, it is difficult to write any project that is long or requires concentration (a novel). What did work for me is Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’ as described in her book, The Right to Write and her workbook The Artist’s Way. Morning pages kept me writing, kept me sane, and later, when reviewing the notebooks I’d filled at the playground, during segments of Barney, Teletubbies, or Thomas the Train videos, I found ideas for articles for parenting publications. I even found my frustrations about motherhood were funny to other people when I wrote about them. This helped me to find the ‘silver lining’ in a job that is too filled with laundry, cooking, and cleaning and too short on creativity, intellectual stimulation, and world-changing meaning.
“If I were to give advice to your friend, I would say, be patient; the baby days end so quickly and are so unforgettable. Enjoy them, see them as the living that needs to be done to prepare for the writing to come, and keep a journal via morning pages to maintain and improve your writing skills.
“I also enjoyed, Judy Reeve’s A Writers Book of Days, which has daily encouragement about writing and a daily writing prompt. These prompts are short exercises that inspire and can be completed in the span of the afternoon or morning nap. Several of these exercises later turned into full-length stories for me.
“As your baby gets older, it is important to carve out time for your writing. If you don’t, your life will be gobbled up by the PTA, soccer, and more, and you will find you have ‘no life.’ I make writing a priority by making sure I write every morning, first thing, so that I don’t let a day end where writing has slipped away. By writing every morning, I felt good about myself, felt as though I were still ‘something’ besides a mother, and found I enjoyed my time with my child much more because I felt less drained. Nourishing myself, I discovered, nourished my child as well.
“Until my kids were older, I wrote only when they were at school or had gone to bed. I made it a point ‘to be there’ for them when they were home, especially after I overheard my kindergartner tell a friend that I couldn’t play with him because I was a writer and spend all my time in front of a computer, writing. Honestly, that broke my heart.
“Yesterday was my son’s eleventh birthday, and as I gazed at how tall he’s grown, watched him run around Disneyland with his friends, I realized that the day where he doesn’t need me at all is just around the corner, and I felt sad. Kids grow up fast. The important thing is to balance your creativity and writing with motherhood. If you spend too much time doing either, you will miss out. Balancing your creative needs with the needs of your family is the only formula that I know works. Good luck!”
I’m so impressed with the two Danas’ advice, I only have a little more to add. Fatherhood has changed since I was born. Few fathers now are like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Troy Maxon in August Wilson’s Fences: men who are absent for most of the parenting as they focus on bringing in the money. Dads are now there at the birthing with cameras. We’re off to the store daily for diapers, for little jars of food, or for a new pound of coffee to keep us going. We change diapers. We stay at home while our wives need to get out. We walk and burp the baby.
When my son Zaq was born (nearly twenty years ago; it goes fast), my wife and I were wonderfully naïve. We brought him home from the hospital, and I shot a few roles of film. Look, he’s smiling. Look, he’s burping. Look he’s… oh, he’s, he’s… grimacing. Oh, that smell. Want to change his diaper?
On day number one, we went to bed at ten p.m. as we usually did, setting Zaq in his bassinette next to us. We all happily slept. Then a bomb exploded. No, it was a cry, a baby’s cry, and the sound was so unusual, we both leapt up—something must be wrong. Was he cold? Was he sick? Only two hours had passed, so it had to be something terrible. However, after a quick breastfeeding, he was out again. Two hours later, there was that bomb again and us lurching awake. Despite Lamaze classes, instructions from parents and neighbors and more, no one had told us babies only slept a few hours. After a few days of this, I knew, too, of the fog of which Natali speaks. It was six months until he slept through the night.
And no one told us diapers were so expensive. We’d buy big packs for prices higher than pounds of prime rib, and the diapers were used up in days, thrown away—but that’s another topic. The point was, I received little sleep, and I, too, wasn’t writing much. Then I received the best advice anyone had given me. It came from screenwriter David Franzoni (Amistad, Gladiator), a guest to my CalArts’ creative writing class. He had a young son, and David said this: “Get up early. I get up at 5 a.m., and no one else is up. It’s just you and your words.” At that point, Zaq was sleeping on a schedule. He’d wake up at 7 a.m. Because I was a morning person compared to my wife, I was the one who’d get him dressed and fed before I had to leave for work. I was the Institute Writer at CalArts in those days.
The first week of getting up at 5 a.m. was difficult because the bed was warm and my office in the garage was cold. Who in their right mind would get up? But I had to try. I learned three things right away. 1) A space heater made my office warm quickly. 2) I needed to be in bed no later than ten p.m. to get seven hours in or getting up was far too hard. 3) Those two hours in the morning, five to seven a.m., were the greatest. No phones were ringing. No one was asking me for something. I could think. (Consider it the male equivalent to breastfeeding.) I sat at the same desk the same time each day, and I transported back in my mind to where I was the day before. The paragraph where I’d left off called to me.
A parent who writes can’t wait for a muse—you just have to leap at it. I would write until I could hear Zaq stir on the speaker, whose matching unit was near his bed. He was clockwork: 7 a.m. As a morning person, 5 a.m. worked for me. If you’re a night person, do it at night.
I leave with one other story. A writer in another online class I was in happened to be a pediatrician in Minnesota. When she was on call for the E.R., she would have a 90-hour work week. She said it was also hard on her because a child occasionally died, and such a loss was always emotional. In those weeks when she was on call, she found 15 minutes a day to write. Otherwise, she would find thirty minutes—no more. She wrote a novel on that schedule. If she can write like that, then I have no excuse.
For further thoughts from well-known female writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion, and Alice Walker, I recommend Janet Sternberg’s wonderful, The Writer On Her Work. Read about it here: http://www.amazon.com/Writer-Her-Work-1/dp/0393320553/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-7181215-4735206?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175634127&sr=8-1
If you have other suggestions, please write me, and I may
include them in the next Maplewoods Mirror.
Now it’s 2007, and my
son is in college, my stepdaughter Ellen, age eight, wakes up just before six
a.m. to feed the cats and dog (she’s trying to convince us to get another dog),
and I teach, which means I don’t have to be in an office by 8:30 a.m. I write after everyone else goes to
school/work and before my late morning class starts. My cat sits on the warm modem just above my desk, which
oversees my work area. This morning, I rewrote a chapter of my
novel-in-progress by writing on the printed page. The pages built up to my left.
My cat watched. I did not notice
her stomach convulsing until it was too late, and she spontaneously threw up a
hairball right on my freshly rewritten Chapter Four, splattering both fur
and a brown liquid on my pages. I
screamed and ran the pages to the toilet where the hairball fell and the brown
liquid drained. I could see the ink
from my hand-written notes was starting to run, so I had to pat the pages dry
carefully with toilet paper. I ended up
madly typing in my corrections while I could still read or at least remember my
changes. Thus, the writing life isn’t
all about juggling kids. Pets want to
be included.
A new session of “Writers’ Workout” starts Tuesday, April 17th, at 7 p.m. on the Occidental College Campus in Eagle Rock. It’s an eight-week course where I put writers through their paces, covering basics in a fresh way with film clips, writing assignments, in-class exercises, and stories to read. Only a few spaces are left.
I’ll be offering a new and intermediate course this summer, “Fiction Writing with Rigor.” It starts July 3 and runs for six weeks, also at Occidental.