Writing as a Working Parent

And how lowering your expectations is key

The writing world is full of advice on how to be a successful and productive writer, from daily word count goals, to scheduling your writing time, to only doing it in a distraction free environment, and on and on. But even those first three examples are practically impossible for—and unfair to expect of—working parents.

This “sage wisdom” often comes from writers of the 19th to mid 20th centuries, all men, who didn’t have primary day jobs and for whom the concept of parenting was either nonexistent or very, very different. I’m looking at you, Thoreau, and you, Hemingway, and you, Bradbury.

These unrealistic expectations persevere today, especially in American culture, in the form of toxic work idioms like “hustle mentality,” “fake it till you make it,” “I'll sleep when I'm dead,” and my favorite, “you’re not serious unless you commit 100%,” as if the one obstacle in the way of artists spending all day making their art is commitment to their craft. Forget needing a day job to pay for housing and food and health insure and childcare; forget if you have health issues that put regular and exorbitant medical bills on top of it all; forget if you want to spend time with your family after you get home from work.

I have a piece of advice for working parents who are trying to find time to write:

Lower your expectations.

Even Margaret Atwood admits that she doesn’t write every day. She tries to, but her life is not shaped the way Ernest Hemingway’s was. And that is okay. It’s good, in fact. We are meant to live our lives. But for working parents, it does mean that we are going to be interrupted—a lot. As Atwood once said:

It’s a question of being able to improvise your time.

So, for that reason, you have to be prepared to be interrupted.

Give up the idea that you can “manage your time,” or that you will have some special place where you can write undisturbed for any specified duration. This is a fantasy, and an unfair expectation of yourself, and of others—especially if you’re married with kids.

My only writing routine is that I try to do it every day. I squeeze it into the cracks, whenever and wherever. But I don’t have a daily word count goal or a designated work space; these are luxuries I cannot afford. Instead, I make use of opportunities that arise, those random, unexpected pockets of time that present themselves. And when they do, I don’t check social media. I don’t play video games. I just get to work. Because those windows are short, and are sometimes cut shorter by a screaming toddler. And while I consider myself to be a productive writer, I attribute my productivity to a recognition of two things:

• the value of my time, and how little of it I actually have

• and how important writing is to me

Almost four years ago, when my daughter was born, I still considered myself what Zoolander refers to as a “slashy.” I was a Writer/Artist, working on my latest comic book. By that time, I had already made and self-published another comic called Koltar, so I knew the time it took to do both the writing and the art (and the inking, and the lettering, and the layout)—comics are hard. And so, one day, after writing the script to my next comic adventure and starting initial illustrations and layouts, I found myself sitting at the dining room table with a sleeping infant in one arm and an inking pen in the other. And in that moment, I realized something:

I would be more than happy to let someone else draw this thing. In short, I realized…

I just want to write.

I love drawing; I love animating (which is my day job) too. But it’s just something I’ve always done. I’ve always been good at it. And it’s something that people have always praised me for. It’s easy to look at a picture and say, “hey, that’s cool.” It’s harder to ask someone to read your writing, especially when you’re young. That’s why the three people who were NOT surprised when I told them about my writing revelation were my mom (my first reader and foremost champion), Robert Kaplow (my high school A.P. English teacher), and my wife (who always knows when I’m being honest with myself).

It took me until I was in my thirties to realize that telling stories is and has always been the through line of my artistic self. Even as a visual artist, the intention has always been story; as an animator for documentaries, my primary question is always “how does it serve the story.” And the recognition and acceptance of this fact has been both a liberation and a necessary, self-imposed limitation. Because, while I would love to eventually write and illustrate more of my own stories, I simply don’t have the time to do both right now.

Accepting this reality has been so freeing. It has allowed me to focus on the stories that work best as prose, that don’t need accompanying illustrations. It has allowed me to focus on what I love most: telling stories.

Once, when I was a teen, making one of several no-budget vampire films with my friends, I remember griping to my dad about a lack of resources to tell the story adequately. I had dreams of epic crane shots, dozens of extras, and buckets of blood for my gory magnum opus. And my dad reminded me of Robert Rodriguez's struggles making dolly shots for El Mariachi with a stolen wheelchair. Then he reminded me that art is born of constraints and dies of freedom. I have found this idiom to be true, whether those constraints are self-imposed or from without. Just look at George Lucas. The original Star Wars trilogy, which was stricken with constraints by the studio and other collaborators, is the best work Lucas ever made, while the later prequels—with which he had more freedom and control—are so bad they are almost unwatchable.

I am content with the amount of writing I am able to do in a day because I have accepted the limitations of my available time, and made sacrifices where I can in order to give myself a little more. But most importantly, I have learned to be okay with the days when writing doesn’t get done. Because sometimes there’s laundry that needs folding. Sometimes there’s work that goes overtime. Sometimes there are movies that I want to watch with my wife.

And sometimes I just need to get some sleep.