The Passionate Writer
Home and family, my passions, swirl through everything I write like a cinnamon ribbon spirals through breakfast bread. I stand at the kitchen sink, my brain ticking off Fifteen After-School Snacks that Spell Love to Your Teenager. I separate the t-shirts from the socks ruminating on Five-Minute Recipes to Romance Your Husband. I walk to the mailbox pondering How to Stuff a Christmas Goose with Herbs Grown in Your Own Backyard.
But much of it never gets written down. There’s dinner to get on the table. There are kids to pick up, and posters on ancient Assyrian civilization to help find supplies for.
Whose Time is it, Anyway?
Take yesterday morning, for example. I could have worked on a book chapter during the few hours a day that are mine. But I had to help locate Ben Franklin glasses and a period costume for the tenth grader’s European history project. I had to take the ninth grader to his seventh doctor’s appointment in a month to have the cast taken off and pin removed from his left thumb, which was broken in the fourth football game of the season, which I also attended.
Seems the hours that are “mine” aren’t, exactly.
In order to perfect 1,500 words on “Holiday Traditions to Help Your Family Stay Connected,” I would have to skip the questionnaires I’m drawing up to help celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary with a commemorative photo album. I’d have to skip scrubbing the trumpet player’s marching band shoes for the upcoming state championship competition. I’d have to say no when my husband calls and asks if I can meet him at the park for a deli sandwich and a quick walk.
To tell you the truth I can’t do it. I can’t give up time with my actual family to simply write about them. The biggest “problem” I face in my life as a writer is my passion for my subject.
Immersion Therapy
But a writer can never have too much passion. Rather than a problem, I prefer to look at the realities of my schedule as wonderful opportunities for research. Like the journalists who are advised to spend days tailing the celebrities they write about, I’m privileged to spend my days immersed in the world of family and home. The book for homemakers that I’m writing – the one I’m often too busy homemaking to actually write – will be richer as a result. It will be the difference, I believe, between instant powdered soup and a long-simmered broth bubbling on the stove, each ingredient melding to form a full, fragrant flavor.
Five Strategies for the Overextended
To continue making progress on my book, I had to come up with some strategies.
. Write in the car. (As I write this, I’m sitting in a parking lot, waiting for “Ben Franklin” to be finished with history class so I can return his costume to the rental shop.)
. Set small goals. I no longer shoot for four-hour writing sessions at the computer. If I get an hour to write, I count the day a success.
. Reward yourself. For a while I recorded completed chapters on a thermometer-type chart, the kind the PTA uses to record scrip sold. My current motivator is the same one that helped me potty train my kids: stickers. Each day that I write for an hour or more, my calendar gets another sticker.
. Listen to books on tape while carpooling or doing other household tasks. Good writing inspires my own writing; the right book serves as research for my current project.
. Don’t stress. There really is time enough to do everything that’s important to you. It just may take longer to complete your project than you’d planned. As my old friend Solomon wrote in the ancient book of Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for every event under heaven – a time to give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted . . .” A time to write about loving your family, and a time to simply love them.
And, oh yeah, a time to return the Ben Franklin costume.
Lynn Bowen Walker is the author of Queen of the Castle: 52 Weeks of Encouragement for the Uninspired, Domestically Challenged or Just Plain Tired Homemaker. She wrote much of her book while in the car waiting for her children to finish practices. In addition to making a mean chocolate chip cookie and having written for many magazines, including Today’s Christian Woman and Glamour, she has contributed to a number of humor books and is raising two sons with her husband, Mark.
