Not Now, Sweetie, Daddy's Worldbuilding
I'm not a full-time writer. It's much worse than that: I'm a guy with a day job who also has enough freelance work to keep a full-time writer busy. In the past couple of years I've made more money from writing than I have in my job as an editor at a trade magazine, but in my attempts to pay down the credit card debt accrued in my misspent early twenties, I've kept the day job even as my writing workload increased. At this point, I do a couple thousand words of non-fiction a week, and I'm almost finished with my current book contract (which required me to write four novels in two years); add in the occasional short story, book review, and articles like this one, and, well, you can imagine, I spend a lot of time typing.
All of which made me a little anxious when my wife (also a writer, Heather Shaw) and I started talking about having a kid back in 2006. The timing was right in a lot of ways; we weren't quite as flat broke as usual, we weren't getting any younger, and, more importantly, we wanted our own little bundle of pooping screaming joy. But I'm no stranger to kids. I knew having a baby would utterly transform our lives — mostly, but not entirely, in positive ways. The not-so-positive ways I imagined included sleep-deprivation and a general time-crunch, but I figured, hey, people have been having babies for a few hundred millennia, and it hasn't spelled the doom of all art and culture and civilization, so I'm sure we'll cope.
But after my wife got pregnant and we began spreading the news, I started to get the comments. The knowing, nodding comments from other parents, some of whom were also writers. "That's it for your writing career for a few years," they'd say. Or, "Get ready to become an appendage to a tiny human," they'd say. Or, "So long, sense of self!" Well, hell. Seriously? I could live without my sense of self, but having a kid would trash my ability to write? That was problematic, since the only way we could afford to have a kid, at least without switching to an all-macaroni-and-cheese diet, was with the extra money I made from writing. If parenthood and cranking out words were incompatible, I was pretty well screwed.
Fortunately I saw a few counterexamples. Creative parents who'd managed to keep producing work, while still enjoying their kids. Many of them used resources I didn't expect to have, though — nannies, for instance. Or babysitters who came in to watch the kids for a couple of days a week. Or, and this seemed crucial, not working the equivalent of two full-time jobs. I knew writing and parenting an infant could be done — I just wasn't sure how I, in particular, would do it.
Our son River was born on November 8, 2007. The birth experience was harrowing and transformative, and once everything was settled down and mom and baby were okay, I was as happy as I've ever been. We spent the next few days in the hospital, where my wife slept in a hospital bed, my son slept in a little tiny baby bed, and I slept — or, rather, failed to sleep — on a cot that was essentially a large block of wood with a yoga mat stapled on top of it. At one point, having gone a day and a half without rest, but unable to sleep, I thought, "Okay, let's do a proof of concept. Let's write something."
I'd done that kind of ritual psych-yourself-out magic before. I went to the Clarion writing workshop in 1999, right after college (remember that debt I ran up in my misspent twenties? Spending six weeks at a workshop was one of the causes of that). At the workshop, I heard about the "post-Clarion slump" that afflicted many writers. After spending six weeks being hyper-critical, a switch got thrown in some people's heads, and they couldn't write a damn thing for six months or a year or two years or four, because they couldn't turn off the internal editor. I was terrified of something like that happening to me, so immediately after returning from Clarion, I wrote a novel. In about 90 days. I didn't sell the novel or anything, ever, but I proved to myself that I could still write, at least as well as I ever could.
So while my wife slept, and my son slept, I sat in the hall outside the hospital room, and I wrote. When I finished the story, and my wife woke up, I read it to her, and to our son (he wasn't much of an audience then, but I don't hold it against him). The story was called "The River Boy," and it appeared in this very magazine in January. I proved to myself that I could still write (salable!) fiction, even after not sleeping for 36 hours, in terrible conditions. That was an important moment. That got me over the psychological perils of writing as a new father.
At the time, I thought, "Ha! I showed you, assorted naysayers!" Boy, was I dumb. Sure, I'd overcome any potential psychological block — but that didn't help much with practical matters, did it?
I am, by nature, a binge writer. I like sitting at my computer, cranking up iTunes, and tippy-tapping the keys for six or eight hours at a go. (With breaks to occasionally stare out the window or eat a cheeseburger.) A couple of years ago I finagled things at my day job to get a schedule that's perfect for me. I work four days a week (nine-hour-days, no less), and get every Wednesday off. On those Wednesdays, I would write — freelance non-fiction stuff in the morning, then I'd take a walk (both an attempt to exercise my sedentary corpus and a chance to think about the afternoon's work), and then I'd work on fiction for the rest of the day. I was crazy productive. I kept on top of my book-every-six-months deadlines, never turned in a review or column late, and even wrote the occasional short story, just to keep my hand in.
But with a kid, everything changed. My wife was on maternity leave for a while, and when I got home from work, she was justifiably exhausted and ready to have me take over the kid for a while — something I was happy to do, having missed him all day. As a newborn, he didn't have a sleep schedule so much as a series of randomly-occurring naps of no set duration, which made it tough for me to get enough sleep to function as a human being, let alone compose words of deathless (or even usably disposable) prose. I could usually scrounge a couple of hours each week to get work done, which was enough to stay on top of my freelance deadlines... but what about my novel, the fourth and final one on my contract, due shortly before my son turns six months old? And what about after my wife's maternity leave ended and she went back to work, too? We wrangled our schedules such that we could avoid day care — I take the kid into the office with me a couple days a week (it's a small office, and baby-friendly, which helps), and my wife works from home a few different days a week, so between us, the kid is always taken care of. But that means a distinct lack of what you childless types call "free time." Where was I going to get seven or eight hours in a row, ever, to binge-write fiction?
Well, nowhere. With a kid, long chunks of time to write is like perpetual motion or zero point energy. You just can't get it, at least, not without putting more energy into the system than you get out. I was seriously contemplating hiring a babysitter for a few hours just so I could write — but with the kind of money fiction writing pays, that quickly becomes a losing proposition, economically speaking. So... I adjusted. Turns out, that's what being a parent requires. Yes, I'm a natural binge writer. Yes, my preferred technique is to slip into that wonderful zen state of flow for several hours and emerge with twenty or thirty pages of prose. But you know what? Too bad.
Let me tell you how I write now: in ten or fifteen minute increments. Sometimes a whole half hour on my lunch breaks at work. Or, when my kid wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and wants to eat, and I pour a bottle down him and know he'll sleep for a couple more hours, I don't go back to bed — I take advantage of that two hours, and sleep-dep be damned. We've got this toy — we call it the "sun spinner" — that's basically a colorful mat with some toys dangling above, and big mirror, and it spins and sings and talks. Our kid loves it. Put him on his back under the mirror and he giggles and coos for ten minutes, or 20 minutes, or even 30 minutes. That's when I write — hell, that's when I wrote most of this. Now, at four months old, he's finally getting into something resembling a sleep routine, with a morning nap and an afternoon nap. The naps don't always happen, and they aren't of dependable length, but on a good day he'll snooze in the swing for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, and if I'm home from work that day, I get into work-mode and I crank.
I am no longer thrown off my game by interruptions, phone calls, knocks at the door. Such things, once enough to distract me and wreck my productivity, now don't even rate notice. I can pick up a plot thread abandoned two weeks ago mid-sentence and make it work again. I can type one-handed with a baby hanging on my other arm, gnawing on my bicep and kicking my keyboard tray. I plot while I push him in the stroller. I read page proofs while bottle feeding. I check copyedits during tummy time. I put him in the baby harness on my chest and type while he hollers about how incredibly bored he is just watching black marks appear on a white screen.
I just do it. It helps that I have no choice. Deadlines have a way of concentrating the mind. Is my writing as good now as it once was? I have no idea. It's definitely different. I worry about the flow of the language, that it might have lost something since I'm producing prose in such short bursts. I worry about having less time to revise, and about having more typos and continuity errors than I used to, and producing generally rougher and more hideous first drafts. And it's not like I've got this thing figured out for all time; I mean, my son is four months old right now. He's tiny, he pretty much stays where we put him (flailing and early attempts at rolling aside), and he's overall easygoing. What will I do when he can get out of the swing on his own and do himself bodily harm if I don't keep a close eye on him? What happens when the terrible twos start and he begins testing limits? When he needs help with his spelling homework? When I'm trying to work and he comes in after school and says, hopefully, "Daddy, will you play with me?" Will I really be able to look at him and say, "Not now, kiddo, daddy's plotting?" I don't know. I don't know how it'll work. I just know it will, somehow. Learning that I'm capable of absorbing major disruptions to my beloved routines, that I can make adjustments to do what's necessary, is the first thing my son taught me. (Because I already knew how to change poop-filled diapers.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Pratt lives in Oakland California with his wife Heather Shaw and their son River. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and last year his story "Impossible Dreams" won a Hugo Award. Just lately he's been publishing a series of urban fantasy novels under the name T.A. Pratt, starting with Blood Engines in 2007, with Poison Sleep and Dead Reign to follow in 2008.
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ISSN 1937-7843 Clarkesworld Magazine © 2006-2018 Wyrm Publishing. Robot illustration by Serj Iulian.
Mike Jasper wrote on April 1st, 2008 at 11:32 am:
Great article! You proved the naysayers wrong. And that's what you do with kids -- you find a way to make it work. And you keep on adjusting as they grow.
It certainly keeps things interesting!
We can all sleep when we're old...
JS Bangs wrote on April 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm:
Thanks for the encouragement. My firstborn will be here in about 8 weeks, and I'm delighted and terrified. Good to know that this isn't the end of my writing time :).
Shaun Farrell wrote on April 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm:
It does get more difficult once he can crawl. My son is 10 months old, and his favorite things in the house are the wall heaters, the power strip, and kitchen cabinets that contain deadly chemicals. I spend most of his waking hours making sure he survives his waking hours. But fear not, Tim. You're the kind of guy who will always get his words in.
Durand Welsh wrote on April 4th, 2008 at 4:58 am:
My son is 1 now. What I found was that around 7 to 11 months he would be asleep by 7:00 at night and I would be able to write 2 hrs or more a night until 09:00 or 9:30. Now he doesn't get to sleep until later, so I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do my 2 hrs until 6:30, at which time he wakes up like clockwork and I get ready for work and my wife gets the little fella ready for daycare. You just have to be able to continue to sleep less than your kid. That's the trick, I think. :-).
P.S: Blood Engines was great. Keep up the good work. And I'll see for myself what Clarion is like this year. :-).
Nicole Kornher-Stace wrote on April 5th, 2008 at 2:51 pm:
Oh thank you so much for writing this.
(typed while being kicked in the arm by a 4-month-old)
Sharon P. wrote on April 12th, 2008 at 2:56 pm:
As a mother of three (ages 14, 11, and 6) I remember the challenges first faced as each newborn entered our lives. Next year my youngest will be in school for the full day and again my writing patterns will change. The love of writing makes the adaptations through the years possible. Some of my best ideas come when I'm at the park with my youngest, driving someone--somewhere, or making dinner. The trick is to always remember that you are working even when you don't have pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Dreaming/worldbuilding happens in the mind before it happens on the screen. And those kids "screaming" for attention? In their own way they have inspired many a story, been a much needed distraction when I'm struggling with a story or my book, and the best medicine for the writer's blues.
Yes, kids make it harder to get large blocks of time for writing, but they also teach you to adapt and in that adaption, you may be amazed at what you can accomplish.
You have lots of wonderful years ahead of you. Congradulations.
Dave Thompson wrote on April 15th, 2008 at 1:32 pm:
If you can make it work at that age, you can make it work no matter how old your boy is. I have a lot to learn (my daughter's just about 3) but I think the name of the game is flexibility, and taking what you can get whenever you can get it. You will figure it out as you go along.
Fantastic article. Thanks for the inspiration.
Ken McConnell wrote on April 16th, 2008 at 3:14 pm:
Just wait till they get older. Bedtimes are strongly enforced at our house, so that Mom and Dad can connect and Dad can write. I also get up at 4:30am on weekends to write. You find the time. But don't fool yourself into believing that you're all that with one infant. When they get bigger, so does their need for your time. More kids, more time spent with them. But that's as it should be.
Linda wrote on April 18th, 2008 at 4:48 pm:
Congratulations! Your son will be a source of information and inspiration, and he will take you places you'd never have gone if you didn't have him (possibly places you wish you didn't have to go, too, but it's all right) You will see the world new again through fresh eyes. Your writing will go in strange, new and often twisted directions. Enjoy it. Make use of it. My kids are grown now. It sure went fast.
Steven Klotz wrote on May 1st, 2008 at 10:26 am:
I fully support my favorite writers procreating, and I feel that an article like this is thus a public service announcement on par with "Only you can prevent forest fires." Keep writing, and I'll keep reading.
Jeffrey Hite wrote on June 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am:
When I read things like this I have both a positive and negative reaction. First, I am so very happy to hear about your great news. Children are a joy to be enjoyed. To those nay sayers I say, "What is wrong with you?"
Here is the deal. I am not a professional writer, but I would love to be. I do write for fun, but that does not stop me from having a full time job. (Little joke there.) I produce at least one story a week, (1200-1500 words) enter a couple of contest, (usually the 100-200 word kind) and manage the rest of my life. The rest of my life is the part that those nay sayers seem to rail against. As I said I hold down a full time, serve my country in the one weekend a month two weeks a year way. Keep the yard tended (mostly), the chickens alive, the garden growing, all while managing to help my wife raise and educate our seven children, all under the age of 12. They (meaning the children) have not sucked my life away, they have not stifled my creativity, if anything that have made me become more creative because I have to create time to write, as well as create the thing that I am working on.
All I really wanted to say here is that I don't like it when people say that a child will ruin your life. Change it forever, yes. Will there be negatives, or at least things that you don't expect? Probably. But, the positives so over whelm the negatives.
Again congratulations on the new addition to your family. Thank you to all the others who left positive comments. It makes me happy to see that there are more positive people then negative. I am so very glad that you wrote such a positive piece. And, if you ever feel like you can't find the time to write, come visit my house for a weekend.