This month’s guest post is from Moira Muldoon. She and I met in grad school when we were both seeking our MFA’s in Creative Writing. Then we had kids around the same time. I asked her recently how she’s managing to make time for writing now that she’s a mom. I think you’ll appreciate what she has to say as much as I do. Moira is a writer and test prep tutor who lives in Texas. She can be reached at moira@testpreptexas.com.

Collaborating

Oprah’s talked about it enough that I doubt I need to: some people (often parents) put other people (often children and household) ahead of themselves.

For me, as a parent and partner and self-employed person, that translates to the fact that I find it hard to spend time working on poetry. For me, there’s an inherent luxury in writing poetry:  it requires time outside work, which is time ordinarily spent with family. So, how to carve out that poetry time? From family or from work?  And where does it fall in terms of other things that also need time carved out  – working out, household needs (cooking, cleaning, putting flea meds on the dog, etc.), date nights, one-on-one kid time, downloading Top Chef episodes?

Again, I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here; a lot of people (the majority?) are faced with similar choices about using time well and find ways to do what they need to. I know that, for me, writing is necessary to my sanity. (It’s a little like getting enough sleep – amazing how much more I can get done when I’m not bone tired.) But identifying what I need most is not the same as making sure I get it.

At the moment, I’m trying something new to keep myself on track with writing – collaboration.  I’m working on a writing project with someone else.  We set deadlines and while I might blow off my own internal deadlines (‘I won’t be writing today since I spent the morning getting X-rays to make sure my toddler didn’t swallow a quarter’), if I have external deadlines, where I owe a piece to someone else, I somehow figure out how to get it all done: the X-rays and the writing. I will do for another person what I won’t do just for myself.

I hate letting other people down. I hate messing up my obligations to people I care about. So, if I’m collaborating with another writer, I get more done. I won’t let my collaborator down, though I might easily have blown off my commitment to myself. I don’t know if I’m not disciplined enough, or if I’m just plain lazy, but I do know that having a partner, that being responsible to someone else, works for me. It’s like having a gym buddy. For writing.

I’ve been collaborating for about seven months now and so far, this new system is working. Despite the fact that a writer is supposed to be alone, in a garret, at a retreat, scribbling away, I’m writing more now that I’m working with someone else. I am using whatever quiet time I have in better, more efficient ways because I have external deadlines. YAY!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’re going to have a second child in early February – I hope that this system will still work once chaos settles in for good.

Photo by Prosthetics 1.