How can I write amidst the chaos of parenting?



Dear Literary Ladies,
I’m having trouble juggling parenting and writing. I can’t live without writing, but every day brings a thousand interruptions, and I’m just not getting anything done. How can I make this a more positive experience, and feel less frustrated? Did any of you manage to raise a few kids and create a body of work simultaneously, and if so, how did you do it?

Perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words. One of my daughters made this abruptly clear to me when she came not long ago into the kitchen where I was trying to get the door of our terrible old refrigerator open; it always stuck when the weather was wet, and one of the delights of a cold rainy day was opening the refrigerator door. My daughter watched me wrestle with it for a minute and then she said that I was foolish to bang on the refrigerator door like that; why not us magic to open it? I thought about this. I poured myself another cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette and sat down for a while and thought about it; and decided that she was right. I left the refrigerator where it was and went in to my typewriter and wrote a story about not being able to open the refrigerator door and getting the children to open it with magic. When a magazine bought the story I bought a new refrigerator . . .

It is much easier, I find, to write a story than to cope competently with the millions of daily trials and irritations that turn up in an ordinary house, and it helps a good deal—particularly with children around—if you can see them through a flattering veil of fiction. It has always been a comfort to me to make stories out of things that happen, things like moving , and kittens, and Christmas concerts at the grade school, and broken bicycles; it is easier, as Sally said, to magic the refrigerator than it is to wrench at the door.

—Shirley Jackson, Come Along with Me, ©1948

5 comments:

Andrew Rosenberg August 6, 2009 at 8:56 AM  

This has left me hanging. Does she ever get it open, or does she just toss everything out when she gets the new fridge???

Nava Atlas August 6, 2009 at 9:10 AM  

I'm not sure. You're right, it is not apparent. But that's how she ends this little episode. Sounds like she used her writing to get a great new fridge, though!

Happy Older Hippie Woman! August 10, 2009 at 8:25 AM  

My mother was a meticulous household cleaning whiz. However, long ago on one comfortably warm Summer morning in 1967, it was a day of infamy for the old Kelvinator. Millie(my mother) wasn't in a good mood to begin with, and when cleaning out the tiny - 2 ice cube tray with enough room for a couple of pints of neopolitan ice cream - freezer, she decided to use a hammer and screw driver to hack away at the globs if ice attached to the bottom and sides of the compartment. Well, it didn't take long before she drove the screw-driver through the bottom, immediately releasing the freon that completely hissed it's way out of the body of the fridge. Though she protested it was an accident,...me? I was convinced otherwise.
That's how Millie got her new refridgerator.

Happy Older Hippie Woman! August 10, 2009 at 9:03 AM  

I'm sorry about the it's that should have been its...thanks!

Rachael Levy August 11, 2009 at 3:00 PM  

I'm thoroughly enjoying each post. Thank you!

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Wouldn't you love to get advice from  classic women authors on writing and the writer's life? Here I fancifully pose the questions, and the Literary Ladies answer in their own words.

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