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 Writers on Writing: Balancing Writing and Motherhood The beautiful things about writing is that if you are born to do it, nothing will stand in your way. Not even a roomful of screaming children. Here, some talented mothers share how they made it...even if it wasn't easy. 
"I'd take weekends off, and when the children got home from school at 3:30, I'd stop. I didn't
want them to be latchkey children. And that's one of the wonderful things about being a writer,
is that it can be done at home. I do enjoy being there when the children get home and they come
into where I'm working at my desk and they put their heads up under my arms and I smell their
hair, and for five years I have said, 'You smell like school.'"
— Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster, A Virtuous Woman "There was a lot of guilt involved. I was taking time away from my children at a time when they really needed me more than ever, and so I had to overcome that. I had to make sure that the sacrifices that all of us were making meant something, that this was really worth everything that we were giving up for it, and I had to answer that question, 'Yes.'" — Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean "It's hard to find the balance between real life and the imagined life, because real life is always there, and I think the writer wants to go down into the well and the little children, they're always interrupting you, so you have to climb up out of the well and deal with their needs, and then there's this moment of peace, and despite yourself, you tend to go back into the well." — Jane Hamilton, The Book of Ruth, A Map of the World 
"I've always loved those stories where the woman says, 'Oh, my baby would come with me to my office
and sleep in a basket and I would write and all that.' My daughter never did any of that. She was
always awake, and lively, and talking, and wanted to be involved in your life. ... What I learned
to do was write late at night, and I did that for a long time. But I think it's very difficult
when your children are young, because you have to at a certain point say, 'This is a living
human being...she's never going to be six-months old again.'"— Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day "While I was writing, he spit up orange juice on the tablet that I was writing on, and I distinctly remember writing around it, because I thought I had this really perfect sentence that might not come back if I stopped and wiped up his puke." — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Paradise, The Bluest Eye 
What authors have most inspired you?
More Writers on Writing |
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