The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [21]
More seriously, I don't see that being a writer is all that more demanding of sacrifice from one's family than any other career or job, and in some ways less. I started writing when my kids were ages one and four. I had more time, and much more flexible time, with my kids by working at home what amounts to part-time, than I would have had putting in eight to ten hours a day at some office, factory, or hospital. I never had to negotiate with the boss for time off when a kid was sick; I was always there when they got home from school, no need for latchkeys or complicated child-care arrangements; vacation and holiday schedules were variable at will. Yes, I had to call on help from relatives or sitters now and then, particularly when running out to do publicity things like conventions, but the total of time taken was still much less. And for whatever the experience has been worth to them, as they grew older I was able to take the kids along on a lot of travel opportunities. They met a wide variety of creative and interesting people.
On the minus side, writers have no backup, in the form of a boss or organization, to lend them credibility or clout in defending their working time. With an outside job, the boss, safely absent, gets to be the bad guy who is blamed for taking you away. If you work at home, you have to be your own bad guy. No one will give you working time; you have to learn to take it. (This leaves aside the little point that no one but you can possibly know when you are mentally ready to sit down and write.) And most other breadwinners are given sympathy and credit for having to go off to work; work is not regarded as a privilege for which they must beg and negotiate time. But a writer's family may suspect (rightly, as it happens) that she's really secretly having fun, and tend to treat the demand for respect as well as some sort of attempt at double-dipping.
LSC: Writer Ardath Mayhar talks about writing an entire novel while one of her sons banged on the typewriter with a spoon.
LMB: I know another who typed her second novel one-handed while nursing her baby. (It was probably her best chance to sit down uninterrupted.) It actually may be less confusing for the kids to have a parent who makes a clean break and leaves the house to work, than to have one who's there, but not paying attention. One of the problems of being a writer is in identifying "time off." If the book is always running in your head, niggling at your brain, you're never quite altogether present to the people you're with. I suspect this can become frustrating after a time, but the people you really need to ask about the effect of this absentmindedness are writers' family members themselves.
But all that said, on the whole the experience of being a parent, watching real kids grow, has given me back human content for my work a hundred times the value of the time it's taken away.
LSC: If your family has given you content for your stories, so has your reading—and not just fiction but lots of nonfiction as well.
LMB: A nearly universal trait among writers—if we didn't love to read, why else would we want to make more books? I pick up a lot of ideas from historical reading—to paraphrase, history is not only stranger than we imagine, it is frequently stranger than we can imagine. Real life provides jumping-off points for my fictional ideas, but they are frequently turned inside out or upside down before they land on the page, re-visioned, revised. Reading, observation, music and songs, experiences people tell me about, my own life and emotions—it all goes into the stew. But inspiration isn't just knocking into an idea—everyone does that all day long. It's hitting the idea, or more often cross-connection of ideas, that sets off some strong resonance inside one's own spirit, that hot pressure in the solar plexus that says, Yeah, this is it; this matters!
Sometimes inspiration falls freely from the heavens; sometimes you have to hunt it down and kill it yourself. Then there is reverse-inspiration,