I have worked at home for seventeen years, eleven of them with children in the house, and so the current state of affairs is not dissimilar from my normal life, or at least less cumbersome than it is for many parents, who have to hide out in the bathroom to make work calls while their kids languish, starved for fresh air and stability. That I have not had to adjust to the same degree is an extraordinary privilege. I don’t take it for granted. Nor am I unaware of how deeply most people are struggling right now.
In part for these reasons, and in part in spite of them, I hesitate to complain. Because yes: Having kids around while I’m trying to write can be a pain. They make noise. A lot of noise. They don’t always remember the rule that they’re not supposed to knock when my office door is shut. They don’t always remember to knock, period. In our family, the wide age range—aside from our preteen son, we have a four-year-old and a toddler—guarantees that someone’s always experiencing a crisis, and the responses those crises demand can be anything from tech support to field medicine, adjudicating screen time to titrating dessert. Sneaking downstairs to fix a cup of tea carries the risk of twenty minutes lost. And of course there are the eight words every professional writer dreads:
Daddy [Mommy], can you please tell me a story?
A story?—so say I, or pretend to say. What kind of story? Perhaps you could be a trifle more specific? A story, pray tell, about what? About whom? Do you require a minimum word count?
Have you any idea the work that goes into building character? How long it takes to construct a plot? Establish tone? Setting?
Do you think I let just anyone see my first drafts?
Here? Now?
For free?
GTFO
So, yes, it’s a pain.
More significant and less easily appreciated are the extraordinary benefits that having children around confers upon a writer.
Hemingway said that “writing, at best, is a lonely life… [The writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” To a great extent I agree with him, though I myself have written five books of my own and five in collaboration with my father. While my dad and I come together to plan, plot, and offer feedback, and we revise each other’s drafts, the actual, generative act of writing is always done in private. And while I know of collaborators who work at the same time, in the same room, it’s very difficult for me to imagine writing fiction this way.
But if solitude is necessary for the writer as a creator, too much of it carries high risks for the writer as a human being.
But if solitude is necessary for the writer as a creator, too much of it carries high risks for the writer as a human being. For one thing, it’s depressing. More: It harms your craft. Most stories—I won’t say all—but most stories we care about are about people, and about those people interacting with other people. Even hermits like Proust draw on a deep fund of remembered experience. Writers mine their lives for emotional ore; pen in hand, they refine that ore into words. (Which is why, of course, you should never say anything to a writer that you don’t want to see in print.) Solitude and companionship; a love of people and the ability to step back from them, critically—both work in tandem to produce fiction that credibly represents the human soul.
My wife sometimes describes me as an extrovert doing an introvert’s job. There’s a reason those tea breaks can stretch for twenty minutes: I get lonely. every time I walk downstairs and run into my kids, I get a hero’s welcome. How could I not be happy to see them? They are unreservedly happy to see me, loving without restraint as only children can. When I pry myself loose, the tears that invariably follow are a potent reminder that, while I might need to be alone for a while, I need not be alone forever. I can crawl out of my cave.
There are other benefits, selfish benefits, that extend beyond the psychological. At heart I believe that there’s nothing new under the sun; everything I could write has already been written, better. Yet each day I wrap myself in cognitive dissonance, coming to the page in the hope that, today, I will see clearly; perceive some small thing in a way that is fresh and unique to me; find the words that will convey the essence of my inner mind. It is impossible, of course, because by the time we have reached adulthood we have ceased to appreciate reality as it is and could be. We run in precut grooves. We must. To function as adults in a hectic, complex world, we cannot stop to inspect every blade of grass as though it contained multitudes.
But it does. Children understand that.
My son learns a new word; he has discovered a small new superpower. My daughter runs through the yard and it is infinity. The baby, mesmerized by a fork, utterly unselfconscious: how I wish I could look through his eyes.
To my kids, the world is at once unimaginably large and microscopically fine. From it they unearth joy and novelty without end. They make noise, lots of noise, and why not? Life is a party and the guests never stop showing up. If they forget to knock, it’s only because they have something they want to show me, need to show me, right now. I might never be able to fully inhabit their perspective, just as I know that my words are not new under the sun, not really. But the effort to do so is salutary. For a writer, that is a gift. They are a gift. They say to me: Daddy, can you please tell me a story? I say: For you, I can.
