The Parent Muse
by Heather Ivester

The Savvy Summertime Writer

If you've got kids, you know summertime can make it challenging to meet your writing deadlines. Having toddlers camped around the computer can increase your stress, and older kids may interrupt you or need rides at all hours of the day.

So what can you do to help maintain your productivity during the remainder of the summer?

If you write from home, you may need to adjust your hours so you're available while your children need you. This may involve getting up earlier—but you'll see an increase in the time you have to write since your kids can sleep in an extra hour or more.

It's also helpful to establish some type of flexible daily routine to help keep your sanity and remind your kids that you have a professional life outside of being personal chef, chauffer, and lost sock finder. You can post this schedule on your refrigerator or have a family meeting to announce the summer routine.

If your infants or toddlers are still taking naps, of course you can use those precious minutes to write. As soon as you put your child down for a nap, get busy on your article or book project! Don't waste any time surfing online or chatting with friends. You've got to take full advantage of the time by having a plan of attack—whether it be a desired word count or meeting a specific deadline. You can do it!

In her book, How I Came to Be a Writer, author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor says of the years her two boys were young, "The moment the children were in bed for naps, I started writing... I could always make beds while I listened to elephant jokes, but I couldn't rewrite the fourth paragraph on page seven." With over 125 books and 2,000 articles and short stories published, Reynolds Naylor seems to have found time to be a productive writing parent!

Summer may also allow you to open up your schedule to try out new experiences with your writing. Take your journal or laptop with you when you're outside with your kids and jot down your impressions. How could you turn what you're experiencing into an article or devotional? Use your five senses and write down what you see, smell, hear, taste, and feel. Could you take a reader back with you later?

If you find that you have less time at the computer than you'd like, use the extra hours away to let your imagination explore the "what ifs." What if those two kids in the pool playing together were hiding a secret? What if they got into a huge fight? What if one child was planning to do something that the other child knew was wrong? This may even help you break out of a writing rut.

Author and mom of four Tracey Bateman recently found a way to increase her writing time. She went off alone to a nearby bed and breakfast to work on her book. In her blog she writes, "In two days I have written more than I usually write in ten days of writing... It's amazing to write a westward expansion book in a log cabin (they call it a luxury cabin) and it is!!!!"

You can schedule a retreat like this too—just send yourself off to "writer camp," the same way you send your kids off to camp. Make the necessary childcare and home management arrangements and then go somewhere where you can be alone to write. This will also become a spiritual retreat for you, as you pray without interruption and ask God for direction on your current project or career.

If you've been writing only non-fiction, summer can be a time where you take a break and work on a short story or novel. Don't be afraid to say "no" to work you don't want to take on while your children are out of school.

This summer, I've taken a break from some of my usual non-fiction writing to be more available to my kids, who will be out of school until early this month. For example, I took my two oldest daughters to an Irish dancing camp.

For a solid week, they learned Gaelic, baked Irish soda bread and scones, painted glittery shamrocks on t-shirts, and learned a simple Irish step-dance routine. On the final day of camp, the kids performed on stage, dancing to the sweet melody of Irish music. From that day, my daughters have danced their routine everywhere—all over the house, the parking lot of grocery stores, on the playground, in the kitchen while I cook, and in their bedroom, long after I've said, "Lights out!"

They've simply fallen in love with Ireland, and as their quirky writing mom, so have I! My son discovered a used National Geographic magazine at the library that featured a huge spread of Irish photos and fold-out map of the country. We bought it for a quarter.

Now I'm planning how I can incorporate this new passion for all things Irish in my writing. This is already the third opportunity I've written about it—and I'm dreaming of some articles and maybe even a fiction character who's as crazy as I am about the land of fiddle and shamrocks.

As a writing parent, use these summer months to pause and recapture your sense of fun. Then you'll come back refreshed in the fall, with a well of ideas you can dip into throughout the year. Enjoy!

© 2007 Heather Ivester