Lately, I’ve been fielding a lot of requests for writing advice. Questions are wide-ranging, but some crop up time and again, and so I thought in order to maximize my efficiency while still being able to help out anyone who wants my perspective, I’d put my answers to the FAQs of my direct messages and inbox here. I plan to cover one question weekly-ish, and am going to start with the Biggest Ask: how do you write as a job and fulltime parent at the same time?
To start with, a disclaimer: I am very fortunate in that while writing is my profession, I have a spouse with a job that provides health insurance, and a reasonable baseline income. I need to earn, yes, but I’m only able to do because I don’t need to earn that much (for most authors, writing as a career does not pay well) and I don’t need a job with insurance. However, in addition to writing as a career, I homeschool two children, and live nowhere near family. I do not have any childcare assistance beyond my spouse being the point person for our kids on the weekend while I work. I am also, for the most part, able-bodied, though I do have a chronic undiagnosed condition that causes fairly frequent pain, and that can entirely derail a day on occasion. Those are my supports and lack thereof, for you to mull over from the beginning of this conversation, because it bugs me when people write about juggling work and parenting only to reveal in the last paragraph that they’re independently wealthy or have a nanny or some such.
Back to the question: how do you write professionally and parent fulltime simultaneously?
In order to build a writing career while fulltime parenting, and to sustain both of those things over a lengthy period, you’re going to need a survival kit, because writing and parenting are both emotionally fraught, life-consuming endeavors. And if you do both at once, they will inevitably fight and try to eat each other. Your job is to constantly separate them, find a sliver of space in between (that’s called your “free time” and it is very literally going to be a sliver, do not expect to have much of a life beyond writing and parenting if those are two things you plan to undertake simultaneously), and then repeat the whole exercise over and over when the tricky beasts that are your twin vocations escape and fight again.
Like I said, you’ll need a survival kit.
And the first and most indispensable thing you’ll want in that kit is FLEXIBILITY.
You are going to get crushed by these undertakings if you’re too dependent on rituals or scheduling. Writing as a job means that sometimes you go for weeks twiddling your thumbs and other times, you’re on a deadline so tight it feels like it’s sucking your soul straight out of your eye sockets. Parenting, similarly, sometimes has its peaceful moments. But more often not. More often, it is an exercise in controlled chaos. Kids can derail your schedule and plans at the drop of a hat. They get sick, they have a hard time processing the world, they want to tell you long rambling stories, they need you to look and listen and love them. Writing wants your whole attention (publishing especially, but you shouldn’t give it). Kids want your whole attention. You cannot give it to both of them at once, but they will both require it sporadically. So be ready to upend the way you’re used to doing things.
For example, authors often get asked if they have any writing rituals. And I laugh, because I started writing with the goal of publication when my youngest was six months old. At that point, I wrote while I was nursing her. Later, I wrote while she (and then her younger sister) napped in the afternoon. When she dropped naps at age three, I started writing in the evening after the kids went to bed around 6:30. Now, my kids are nine and seven and don’t go to bed till nine. My oldest often isn’t asleep and requires a bit of attention until 10pm. Evening writing is a thing of the past. On hard deadlines, I sometimes go to bed at the same time she does, then wake up at 5am to fit in my words.
Because kids change constantly, and their needs change constantly, you have to be just as ready to shake things up if you plan to write and parent without losing your marbles. When COVID happened, we abruptly went from being a family where the kids went to school and I wrote while they were in class (half-day preschool and first grade) to a family that homeschools. I taught them all of kindergarten and second grade, and we’re now midway through first and third grades. From an education and parenting standpoint, homeschool is amazing for us. The kids are thriving, I love teaching them, the whole experience is fantastic.
From a writing standpoint, homeschooling has been an apocalypse. Because I cannot wring a day of teaching two separate grades and a day of writing out of my brain. So once again, I’ve had to change the way I do things.
And this is where your next survival tool, COMPARTMENTALIZATION comes in.
Neither school nor writing take up a full eight hour “work” day for me. They’re mentally very rigorous, but they do leave me with extra time. So what I do is this: Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday we have school, and I do not write (unless some flash of masochistic inspiration strikes). I do, however, keep up to date on my social media accounts and continue with all the hours and hours of admin work that come along with writing. Answering emails, going back and forth about projects with my agent and editor, organizing and executing giveaways and preorder campaigns, creating promotional graphics and posts for my socials, working on mentorship opportunities I’m involved with/manuscripts I’m critiquing or blurbing, etc.
This adds up to 4-5 hours of sitting down school time (a lot of our learning opportunities and outings take place above and beyond this timeframe) plus an average two hours of extraneous author job stuff. So, you know. Still a pretty full day.
Writing happens on non-school days. Saturday and Sunday, and Wednesday. No, I do not routinely take weekends off. When I’m getting very worn out, I will take a few non-writing days. But on a regular basis, I cannot get both these fairly demanding undertakings done to a reasonable standard while having regular days off. Instead, I compartmentalize. My grandmother was fond of saying that a change is as good as a rest–it’s an adage I’m currently living by. Fortunately, a solid day of writing for me is shorter than a solid day of school and admin. I do less admin work on my writing days, and they tend to average three hours. Not bad, and I’m still able to do some leisure activities/have family time.
The next characteristic I think is indispensable to anyone wanting to write as a career while also parenting fulltime is RESOURCEFULNESS.
You need to be willing to completely rethink the way you’ve done things when the aforementioned need for flexibility kicks in. My creative process has entirely changed from what it was when I started writing and my kids required less emotionally and intellectually intensive time. In order to maximize efficiency, I went from being a pantser (someone who makes up their books as they go along) to someone who writes from a chapter-by-chapter outline–every time I sit down to work, I know from the get go what I need to be writing that day. I also, as mentioned above, pull 5am writing sessions to supplement my non-school day writing time when on a hard deadline, because I find myself able to teach after writing, but not vice versa. You will need to understand exactly what your writing requirements and parenting strengths and shortcomings are, and take them into account at every turn. No one is going to hand you time when you’re trying to do two all-consuming jobs at once. You will have to search for it, scrape minutes together, and get extremely creative with how you organize your schedule. Time is absolutely not something you’ll be able to be precious about.
The last tool I think is a requirement for managing to parent and write at the same time is MARGIN.
Remember that sliver between your two warring vocations I mentioned above? It may be small, but it needs to exist. You cannot draw from a dry well. It won’t yield words, and it won’t yield a positive relationship with your kids. Figure out what you can fit into the margins that will refill your creative and spiritual well. I like to watch an episode of Star Trek on my phone every evening–no one else in the family watches it except me, and I don’t write scifi, so it’s a thing I’m doing for no one besides myself. I also, when the kids are both busy with work at the same time during the school day, either read or knit. I always have a non-fiction book on the go–again, I don’t write non-fiction, so it’s not something I’m doing for my job. In the spring and summer, I garden. Sporadically, I bake. You must find time to maintain hobbies and an identity beyond writing and being a parent. Those are both great things. They’re both things that require a great deal of time and energy. But they are not who you are. It is dangerous to wrap up your identity entirely in an activity. You need to be more than the sum of your parts if you’re going to succeed at either of these undertakings, otherwise any momentary failure will crush you.
As you may have surmised, writing as a career and parenting fulltime is not a combination for the faint of heart. But if those are your twin passions–if you can’t see yourself giving either up–there are ways to make both work. They’re not always going to work at the same time–sometimes one will succeed in partially, or even for a season, wholly, consuming the other (parenting, I’m looking at you) but you can always regroup down the road. You can get flexible, compartmentalize as needed, tap into your resourcefulness, and draw from the creative well you keep filled by maintaining that small but necessary degree of margin.
Full disclosure: it won’t be easy. Sometimes it will downright suck. I’ve spent many late nights or extremely early mornings on my office floor in despair. But at the end of the day, I get to write novels for a living–the dream job of my childhood–while also spending the lion’s share of my time with my favorite people on the planet, ensuring they get a great education and days filled with wonder. For me, being able to do both those things is worth some of my seven-year-old’s favorite and most frequently referenced commodity–blood, sweat and tears.
