Almost twenty years after it was first uttered, my family repeats a phrase spoken by a three-year-old: “You go downstairs, drink coffee, write!” The meaning of this repetition is always the same; it means that Steve is going to step away from the family and get some creative work done.
No sweat, right? Happens all the time. But the reason this phrase has stuck around in my family is that it recalls a painful (though ultimately instructive) moment. My eldest son wanted to play with his dad—probably basketball, since he had one of those with him at virtually all times back then—and got mad when I said I needed to go write. Or was it when I wanted to go write?
“You go downstairs, drink coffee, write!” He said it pointing an angry finger at the basement door, and down the stairs I went.
I wasn’t sure about the difference between need and want in that moment, and I have no better grasp on it two decades later. The distinction doesn’t usually present itself to me anymore because I’m retired and my kids are grown up, so whether I need or want to write is immaterial. But nearly everybody who writes has other human beings in their lives, and they are the reason the distinction between those two words matters.
It doesn’t only matter for writers, though. What feels like need to us can feel like want to other people, like it did to my son when the infamous phrase was uttered. To my son, it felt like I chose my writing over him. To me, it felt like I had something internal driving me that couldn’t wait, and I could catch him for some basketball later. It wasn’t a no to me, just a not right now. I’m sure I offered an explanation at the time, and I’m equally sure it didn’t assuage the personal rejection my son felt.
Three-year-olds are not the only ones who struggle to navigate the writer’s need for quiet time away from people, and they’re not the only ones who feel hurt when we step away to work. Being a writer who belongs to a troop—whether that’s a family, a friend group, or a town—involves engaging in a continuous balancing act between our social needs and our creative ones. If we don’t pull away from people to write, we (a) won’t get our work done, and (b) will probably be no fun to hang around with. If we don’t pull away from our writing to hang out with people, then our connections with others weaken and we have nobody to support us when our writing isn’t going well—or to celebrate when we have success.
I learned my own method of walking this tightrope the hard way, as we all have to. But I do believe it’s possible to train ourselves to walk it less dangerously and more productively, and I hope my experience can give some perspective to those who are finding (or re-finding) their own balance.
To start, I’d like to go back before parenthood—and even before the marriage that resulted in parenthood for me. My first marriage ended in divorce, and one reason among many has stuck with me in the thirty-five years since then: my ex-wife neither respected nor understood my creative life. I can’t blame her too much in retrospect because I had nothing to show for my hours of toil except various pronouncements of potential from teachers. She referred to what I did at my desk every morning as my tippy tappy typing, which sounds so dismissive to me today that I can’t even remember what it was like to be someone who accepted that kind of condescension.
After this disaster, it was supremely important for me to make sure that if I ever married again, my future spouse would understand what living with a writer meant. The good parts of being with a writer are easy to spot: we’re damn witty, we can imagine absolutely anything, we know language like fish know water, and we have an insatiable curiosity for the world. Who wouldn’t want to hang around with such a person, right? Unfortunately we’re also prone to over-fixation, such as when we spend an entire party in a silent, abstract trance trying to fix a single line from the morning’s writing that we know is fatally flawed. Or when we’re thinking of what we’d ask our fictional characters if we met them on the street. Or when, after giving birth to a book idea in a burst of manic hope, we see a problem with the project and fall into a gloom.
It’s hard to get along with people when they don’t know what being a writer is like. I learned, in the difficult eight years between my divorce and the day I met my wife of a quarter century, a huge lesson: writers need to pick our people well and make sure they understand the way our creativity affects not only our internal lives, but our social lives too.
It helps to pick people who have been around other artists. My wife grew up around experimental filmmakers, so she knew the drill long before I met her. But her familiarity didn’t make my balancing act—which is also our balancing act—an easy, one-and-done affair. Instead it gave us the framework for a continuous renegotiation about how my need for creative time fits into our collective life. We plan our social calendar—including time we spend together—with a clear sense of how important each event is so that we know, as a unit, its relative importance to the collective.
This helps me know what the social cost of missing an event in order to write would be. Graduation party for a family friend’s child who I’ve only met a few times? That’s a gathering I can skip if I need to, though I try to give advance warning instead of bailing out the day it happens. Oldies band at the town square that I said I’d go to in hopes of meeting people in our new town? Easy to skip, and a low enough priority that I feel comfortable announcing it last minute. Dinner with friends driving through town who we won’t see for another year? You bet, I’m definitely going to that one.
In each case I assign a relative value to the social event—note that I’m not doing this for the actual human beings in question, only for the events themselves—and weigh it against the value of the creative work I could do in that time slot. Just as social events have relative levels of urgency, creative events have them too. Checking a poetry manuscript for typos one more time before sending it out? That won’t motivate me to skip many events, since it’s low-level work that can be done anytime. Starting a new story that has come to me in a rush and just won’t wait? A social event needs to be pretty important for me to miss that moment because I don’t know if it will ever come by again.
It’s easy to say that I’m cold and callous for thinking in this transactional way, but in truth it keeps me from making mistakes. I don’t go to social events when I know I should be writing, and I don’t try to write when I know I should be at a truly important social event. Assigning a relative value to the activities that we need to balance out can make our balancing act a less emotional and more transparent process, not only for ourselves but for the people close to us. The decisions involved are undoubtedly emotional ones, but that doesn’t mean they need to be blind as well. Without asking ourselves direct, simple questions about what we value in any given moment, how can we possibly communicate our emotions to the people around us?
Systematic thinking and clear communication keep surprise bail-outs—and the resentment they cause—at bay. Embracing these interpersonal habits also helps us to establish a precedent of trust about how sincerely we’re balancing writing needs and social needs. It’s easier for other people to accept that we sometimes need to prioritize our writing if we aren’t doing so constantly at their expense, and if we are consistent and open about our decision-making process. If we’re always pushing other people away without much explanation to write, we’re likely to spend even more time alone than we want to. That kind of inflexibility earns us very little sympathy from others, and in the worst-case scenario can lead us to feel enslaved by our own writing.
The balancing act between our writing needs and our social needs takes work and intention, but if we go about it blindly, both are likely to suffer. As we establish our own habits on this particular tightrope, we have a right to ask the people in our life to respect our writing and our creative identities. To have the degree of passion required to turn ourselves into writers in the first place is quite uncommon in the human species, and we need to make sure we honor that passion inside ourselves as we interact with people outside ourselves.
