Writing, With Children

This Week’s Bit of String: Eight thousand trombones and a dinosaur

When my son was in infant school, he had a dream about a circus act featuring eight thousand trombones and a dinosaur—a brachiosaurus or apatosaurus.

Naturally, I purloined this dream as a title for a short story.

Stealing dream titles is probably the least of my parental shortcomings. As a writer, I have always feared that being consumed in stories diminishes my ability to be genuinely present in my son’s life. I have wondered if writers are suited to be parents, easily distracted and somewhat moody as we can be.

Star Wars Halloween costumes
My Bear and me, using the Force and our imaginations a few Halloweens back.

I suppose, though, that those particular flaws aren’t exclusive to creative/ artistic types. And there must be ways in which our gifts actually help our children, right?

Have you ever been shaken by those concerns?

Irish Times Furor

Last autumn, seventy-year-old author John Banville, who sometimes wrote under the name Benjamin Black, confessed to being a terrible father in an interview with The Irish Times. He speculated that most writers are bad parents, due to an unquenchable thirst to be heard.

This created a storm of feedback from other writers, such as in this Irish Times follow up. It’s quite interesting to read their thoughts (I particularly enjoyed Joseph O’Connor’s hyperbolic script). Most of them disagree, on the whole, that writing and parenting are mutually exclusive endeavours.

I don’t  look at the dilemma between the two as a question of How does parenting affect my writing, but more as How does writing affect my parenting? Because my son has been the most important part of my world.

Potential Negative Effects
Frosty leaf
Inspecting a frost-guilded leaf together

I’ve pointed various times to writers being particularly empathetic. Surely the bits of string I’m constantly grabbing at might have led me to be a fun and supportive mother? But I worry I might have conflated his childhood experiences and expressions as fodder for anecdotes, new seedlings for my imagination.

Besides, I’m not sure empathy has an off switch. I’m fairly indiscriminate with it. As much as I adore my son and enjoy spending time with him, when I’ve reached a point where my characters are suffering particularly, I get wrapped up in them too. That’s why I particularly like The Walrus’s commentary on Banville’s controversy: literary critic Michael LaPointe countered the notion that ‘writers distinguish between art and reality, material and life, when very few do, or even desire to.’

Guilty as charged.

Lakeside thinking
Philosophizing by a New Hampshire lake

I also feel a degree of self-consciousness, of guilt even, if I write something that features children. Sometimes we let bad things happen to the children in our stories (it’s the way it goes, man) and I worry: does it make me an unfit parent that I can imagine this stuff happening? If he reads this when he grows up, what will he think of me? Will he see these stories as rivals?

Potential Positive Effects

So, I’m coming clean about my concerns as a writer-parent. It seems not a lot of other writers share these. In fact, it sounds as if quite a few people do a damn good job at both. I enjoyed Twitter discussions with other writer-mums, who shared happy stories about writing with their children, showing them that creating art takes hard work and practice (thanks to Melissa Graves). It hones our time management skills, forcing us to take advantage of what little free time we get (thanks, Erika F Rose). And getting to know our own children can reinvigorate us, putting more ‘spark and buzz’ into our work (thank you, Eleanor Nicolas).

Meanwhile, my son is fifteen now and pretty much likes to be left alone. He’s already composed an orchestra piece for sixty-four instruments. He studies Philosophy and Ethics and shares some very interesting thoughts, such as, ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who exists, and everyone else is just in my head. But then I think, everyone else must wonder the same thing too!’

Again, guilty as charged.

4 thoughts on “Writing, With Children”

  1. Great post. For me, parenting has taught me to squeeze writing into any spare minutes I might have and broadened the topics about which I can write from experience.

    1. I’m glad you liked it! I’m not sure I personally would be able to write realistically about parenting if I weren’t one, although some undoubtedly can. There are also all the funny little anecdotes we pick up from our kids!

  2. My children are still very young, and demand attention constantly – I do feel the guilts for focusing on writing projects, but I come back to the thinking that a happy mum = happy kids, I need to nurture my dreams as well as nurturing them.
    Lovely to read in depth thoughts on the parenting/ writing journey.
    And yes to everything in the comment above – my babies have opened up new and exciting avenues in my writing and taught me to grab every moment.

    1. It is quite an experience, isn’t it? Parents in my books tend to be very loving but flawed, sometimes preferring housework to childcare when their minds are particularly raging. (Can’t imagine where I got that idea…)

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