In the mid-2000s, Guardian Weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms”. As a secretly aspiring writer (is there even another kind of writer?) I couldn’t get enough of looking at photos of book-lined studies furnished with beautiful antique desks. These images seemed to represent literary success as well as the key to it.
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Featured writers typically view their rooms as retreats from the churn of daily life, where they can close the door and reach a place of deep creative focus. There was no suggestion that what he was harboring ever resided within him in the form of guilt, longing or doubt: it seemed that a private, dedicated space to write was all he needed to do the work.
Virginia Woolf’s essay on this topic was published in 1929, where she famously declared, “If a woman is to write fiction she must have money and a room of her own.” But in a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell in 1930, the plot was deepened: “How any woman of a family puts pen to paper I cannot understand. The bell always rings and the baker calls.”
Part of what I find so contradictory about writing as a mom is the fear that I’m wasting time that could otherwise be spent with my kids on something that may ultimately amount to nothing.
I don’t know whether Woolf’s theoretical “family lady” even had a room of her own, but this quote made a deep, affirming impression when I first heard it. A closed door, no matter how solid and heavy, is no match in my experience for what we now think of as a household burden.
The specifics of infiltration may have changed over the past century, but the chronological status of the female writer appears to have stubbornly remained. Even though he has a highly active partner committed to equity (which I do), and disciplined enough to keep the mess away by blocking the Internet on his devices (which I rarely do), the Phantom Baker still persists; It is not necessary that the bells of existence stop ringing.
For me, writing fiction requires entering a state of mind that is hard to reconcile with daily life, filled as it is with constant action and interaction. The hours move by in a predetermined rhythm, completely indifferent to my meager word count – meal time, housework, school drop off and back, work. To write, I need to be able to tunnel downwards, away from the present moment: a laborious, often frustrating process, like being a lone archaeologist in a field, armed only with an old rusty shovel and the vague hunch that there might be something valuable somewhere beneath the vast surface.
I’ve read enough author interviews and essays to know that I’m not alone in finding the multiplicity of roles and duties in my real life sometimes difficult to reconcile with writing, and that others have found ways — not always entirely traditional or straightforward — to get, if not the best of both worlds, at least a durable foothold in each. In a recent podcast, Lauren Groff described the physical, signed paper contract she made with her husband that guaranteed her four completely uninterrupted child-free hours to write every morning. When Miranda July was still married, she made an agreement with her partner whereby she would spend every Wednesday night in his studio, ensuring her a full day of work every week where she would not have to negotiate the logistics and distractions of family life.
I find these examples very powerful because they are so unusual. It is almost taboo to make formal, inviolable arrangements for a woman to spend time away from her family to pursue creative work, and it is difficult to imagine a male writer or artist ensuring his rights in this way, because there would be no need for it; In fact, in this day and age, he would probably be condemned as a chauvinistic egoist.
Yet without such firm, recognized boundaries, it is all too easy for women writers (in these cases, both in heterosexual marriages) to surrender to the many inevitable unscheduled interruptions and obligations—unexpected school closings, sudden roof leaks, surprise rodent infestations—that blight domestic life, not to mention the powerful allure of spending as much time as possible with our wild and precious children while they go through a wild and precious childhood of their own.
Perhaps this issue seems so hot among writing moms because it raises the specter of drastic steps taken by some of our predecessors. Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing both famously abandoned their children (Spark with her parents; Lessing with her ex-husband) to pursue their writing. If “full-scale abandonment of the child family” sits at one end of the scale and “hopelessly entangled to the point of creative stagnation” sits at the other end, then an official agreement protecting a regular, set period of time seems a reasonable, and almost necessary, safeguard for the writing mother (albeit disappointing from the perspective of gender politics).
Back at my desk, when I close the door and pull out my draft, I can almost believe I’ve reached the writer’s room I once romanticized, where progress is fast and attention is limitless.
My personal method is something I just like to think about Temporary Abandonment – Three or four days, a few times a year, when I hide somewhere other than my house to do nothing but write. This is far from a flawless strategy, requiring a game and available adult to take full responsibility of child care (shout out to my husband), as well as generous relatives who are also fond of traveling and happy to stay at his house in his absence (big deal to my brother-in-law) or – and this is a thing of last resort – spending cold, hard cash on housing, which adds a nice layer of financial jeopardy to an already fairly shaky sense of confidence in the whole endeavor.
Part of the thing I find so contradictory about writing as a mom is the fear that I’m wasting time that could otherwise be spent with my kids doing something that may ultimately amount to nothing. When I hear those same kids cheering as they come home from school happily, or when their dinner time passes and I can see them chatting animatedly over plain pasta without me in the kitchen, I find it hard to shake off this doubt and guilt. Being so close but separated from them is my personal, internal version of Virginia Woolf’s bells – but the call is coming from inside the house and the only way to silence it is to completely escape for as long as I can bear, before it finds me at my new address (at which point I hurry home, positively glowing at the prospect of preparing a bland, beige meal that requires four different pans).
These short stints have been quite successful so far, with good progress and I’m looking forward to the next few months in the real world. Back at my desk, when I close the door and pull out my draft, I can almost believe I’ve reached the writer’s room I once romanticized, where progress is fast and attention is limitless.
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Natural disaster by Lisa Owens is available from Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
