The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [259]
After a few months of this kind of struggle, though, it finally occurred to me that the major reason one’s family behaves this way is that they are threatened by your writing (the writing, of course, is threatened by them, but that’s another consideration). Therefore, if you can find a way of assuring your family of your undying affection, they will be much more tolerant of your idiosyncratic hobby.
For example, you can’t really blame a husband for disgruntlement if his wife rises from the dinner table, announces that she is going to write, and decamps, leaving him alone with the children and America’s Funniest Home Videos, not to be seen again until breakfast the next morning. Likewise, children know darn well when they are being abandoned—and will take preventive action, like demanding snacks every ten minutes, staging fistfights with their siblings, and grabbing you by the ankle as you try to leave the room.
Much better if the would-be writer watches AFHV with the family, reads the kids stories, and tucks them in bed, then retires to the bedroom for a spot of marital R&R. Then the writer can rise, tiptoe upstairs, and work without hearing a word of complaint from the family, who are all peacefully asleep, secure in the reassurance of her devotion. Of course, this means the writer doesn’t get much sleep, but one has to decide what’s important in life.
I do have a short, snappy answer for the question “How do you write with a family, job, etc.,”—said answer being, “I don’t sleep, and I don’t do housework.”
I learned how not to sleep when I had three children in four years (on purpose, no less. It’s not as bad as it sounds; they’re spaced two years apart); a talent that’s stood me in good stead in the years since. While it is possible to write while all around you are losing their heads (to say nothing of their car keys, their lunch bags, their homework, and a couple of fire-bellied toads) and blaming it on you, solitude is a really nice thing for a writer to have a little of—worth going short on sleep.
You will likely have to stay up late or get up early (most people can’t do both), but even half an hour of listening to nothing but your own thoughts is worthwhile. Once you have a foothold on the day’s work, it becomes easier both to keep thinking about the work while going about your daily business, and to return quickly to said work, whenever a moment’s opportunity occurs. You won’t have a lot of time to write, at least in the beginning; you don’t want to waste any of it by sitting there, wondering where to start.
Of course, there’s a physical limit to how much sleep you can do without and still write coherently. Catnapping isn’t an altogether satisfactory substitute for eight hours of the dreamless, but it’s a lot better than nothing. You will quickly learn how to do this, within about forty-eight hours of commencing the stay-up-late or get-up-early strategy. I used to lie down on the floor of my university office and sleep while waiting for phone calls to be returned (I often wonder what I said to the people who called back).
If you can’t manage to do without sleep in any appreciable quantity, you’ll have to eliminate some other activity in order to use that time writing. In the interests of Preserving the Sanctity of Family Life, I don’t recommend eliminating dinner, bedtime stories, or sex. However, I am unaware of any studies linking frequency of vacuuming to frequency of divorce, and while all things are possible, I don’t think your children will come back as adults and sue you because they’ve suddenly discovered repressed memories of you not cleaning the refrigerator.
Hire someone to clean the house, or get used to dirt. I do both. A nice person with much higher standards than mine comes and cleans the house three times a week, and the rest of the time, it is a Big Mess.
(There is a third alternative—force your spouse and/or children to do housework. This strategy is effective in the long run, but, at least in the beginning, will eat up a lot more time than it