A question that’s been bouncing around in my mind a lot lately is what will it be like raising a child and being a writer at the same time? I’ve heard many writers talk about how difficult it can be to find time to write when you have children to take care of and spend time with. This is especially difficult, I’m sure, when you’re not in a position where your spouse can earn all the money and you can just stay home and be a parent/writer.

For a long time—back when I didn’t want to have a kid—I felt very lucky to be living a life where there were never many obstacles standing in the way of my writing time. I had to work, sure, and sometimes work kept me busier than others, and I had to spend time with my husband (“had to” sounds bad—how about “wanted to, but also needed to if I wanted to keep the relationship a healthy one”?), but still, I could always scrounge at least an hour or two every day in which to write, if I really tried. Having a child, which wasn’t something I had any interest in doing for other reasons, seemed especially undesirable because it would further limit my writing time.

Somewhere along the line, though, I completely changed my mind. I knew being a parent and a writer would involve a difficult juggling act, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go for it anyway, and if that meant writing had to be pushed to the back burner, so be it.

As the end of my pregnancy draws near (I’m entering the home stretch—just beginning my third trimester), I am beginning to wonder more and more about the future. I don’t regret the decision to have a baby, and I’m not wondering in that woe-is-me, what-did-I-get-myself-in-to sort of way. Whether being a mom and a writer will be hard or not, it doesn’t change the fact that I desperately wanted to have a baby and am glad every day that my husband and I decided to get pregnant. I’m wondering, instead, in that need-to-be-prepared-for-what-lies-ahead sort of way, because maybe if I know what’s coming, I’ll better be able to keep these different juggling balls in the air.

I’ve heard different things from different moms who have been through it before. I’ve been told that writing will be impossible for the first few months and that I should just go with it, not worry because there’s no way I would have the energy for writing anyway. I’ve been told that finding time to write is easy enough—I just have to be willing to write for fifteen minutes here, twenty there; I just have to write when the baby is sleeping. I’ve heard, too, that I should follow a schedule—get up at 6:00 AM every morning and tell my husband, “This is when I write”; if the baby needs tending to, it’s his responsibility for that one or two hours a day.

So which is it? Will I have the time but not the energy? Will I have the energy but need to steal the time, a few minutes here, a few there? Will I have both, as long as I work it out with my husband (which would be, by the way, no problem. That’s one wonderful thing about being married to another writer—he definitely understands that gnawing need to write).

I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Of course, I’m hoping that I’ll turn out to be some sort of super mom, who has endless energy (and patience) and is able to tend to the baby’s every need when she’s awake, then write like there is no tomorrow when she’s asleep (and when I’m not working), but what’s more likely is that sometimes I’ll have the strength to do it all and sometimes I just won’t, and the thing that will always have to get cut is writing, because I have to take care of my baby and I have to work.

In the meantime, I’m trying to build up my momentum as a writer, and I’m hoping that momentum will carry me through those first few difficult and exhausting months after the baby is born. If I’m in the habit of writing for at least an hour a day when the baby is born, maybe it will be easier to keep it up, or at least keep writing at all, in the midst of all that chaos. Either way, I plan to put in a genuine effort, and if there are days where I just can't seem to manage it, I’m going to try not to get too down on myself. After all, some things in life are far, far, far more important than writing.

This new project I’ve been working on—writing letters to my unborn daughter in the style of an epistolary memoir—has, fortunately, fanned the embers of the dying fire that is my desire to write. Since starting this project, I’ve not only been devotedly working on these letters but have also recovered my interest in working on fiction—hurray!

But wait. Here’s where it starts to get tricky.

I’m still at least thirty-one flavors worth of excited about this letters to my daughter project—doing something so different like this is challenging and rewarding and exciting and . . . and . . .—but I also want to be working on a children’s book project, which I really, really, really want to finish (at least in draft form) by the time my baby is born. In addition, I’ve been starting to daydream again about that novel I was submerged in the second draft of a year ago when I got word my first book was being published, and I’ve been itching to get started on some new short stories on top of that.

And so this is about the point where I begin to feel overwhelmed.

When I was in my MFA program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I attended a craft talk by HarperTeen author J. T. Dutton. During the Q & A after her lecture, someone asked Dutton what advice she has for people struggling with writer’s block. She said that she believes often all writer’s block is is having too many ideas and not being able to settle on one and just get it done. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

I feel, right now, at risk for developing that sort of block if I’m not careful. For several months I was on again off again blocked in that more frustrating, I-don’t-have-anything-to-say way. This new nonfiction project has successfully jarred that block open, but now the ideas feel like they’re just flooding in, and I’m starting to feel at risk of drowning.

Which of these projects should I be working on? And if I make up my mind to divide my time between some specific projects, what if I just can’t get one of the others out of my head? I know if I try to spread myself too thin, the block will come on full force again, and I’m still too fragile, I’m afraid, to be able to handle another extended period of block. I need to avoid it now before it pulls me down.

So it’s a tricky path I’m treading right now, but I guess the good news is that I see the obstacle in my way and hopefully still have time to maneuver around it. I need, though, to put together a plan to keep the block at bay. I think the best thing to do right now is probably to limit myself to no more than two projects, but the difficult decision is which two? Obviously, I should keep working on my letters, since those are what opened up my block to begin with. But beyond that, what other project is the right project to keep me motivated and keep me writing?

Maybe I should be working on some new stories, since I currently only have two stories in circulation. The value of working on stories, too, is that I can complete a first draft of a single story in a few days. If, at that point, I realize that I really need to be working on something else, I can. Well, here goes.

A few weeks ago I posted about how I’ve been struggling trying to catch my stride as a writer for the past several months. I received some excellent advice in the comments, which not only made me feel better (thank you! I really needed that!)  but also gave me some thoughts on what I might do to try to keep writing, even if I don’t feel, for whatever reason, that I can produce anything publishable right now.

So since then, I’ve been writing letters to my unborn daughter. It’s amazing how quickly this project opened me up and pulled me out of my slump. Since I started these letters two weeks ago, I’ve written 34 pages and still have plenty more to say. To give myself more practice writing a book length work (and so that it will be engaging enough that my daughter will actually want to read it!), I’m writing it in the style of an epistolary memoir and plan to revise it extensively after I finish a full draft. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the time my daughter is born in September.

This project has made me feel like a writer again, brimming with words I just have to get onto the page. I’ve once again recaptured that fantastic feeling of having my head half in a writing project throughout the day. Even when I’m not writing—I’ll be washing the dishes or doing laundry or lathering my hair in the shower—and some idea will come to me that I simply have to include: I should tell her about the time . . . I should talk to her about . . . I should share with her my experiences with . . .

I think part of the reason I’m so excited about this project is because it feels important. Anything else that I’ve tried to work on lately has raised the question, “What’s the point?” Because publishing a book was so anticlimactic. Because the novel I poured five years of my life into still languishes, unpublished, in a file on my computer. Because even the things I’ve published, hardly anyone will ever read. Because, now that I’m pregnant, I realize there are other things in life that are way more important than my career as a writer.

But this project feels, to me, like it matters. Once I started working on it, I was overcome with the feeling that my daughter has a right to know these things, that she needs to know these things. I want her to know me not just as her mom but as a human being, and I want her to know that she is not alone, that if she inherits my depression, my social anxiety, if she struggles with her feelings about religion, if she finds herself wondering why she doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, I want her to know that I understand, that I’ve been through it too, that I will do my best to help her along the way.

And so this project feels more important and meaningful to me than anything I ever wrote with the end goal of publication. And because this isn’t something I’m writing to publish, it’s very low stakes, which is probably another reason why it so easily opened that blocked writing passage in my mind. Maybe part of it, too, is that I’m doing something completely different from any type of writing I’ve ever seriously done—outside of a few assignments I’ve been given over the years, I’ve never attempted to write creative nonfiction—and perhaps just switching gears so completely knocked something loose in my mind. Whatever the reason, I’m writing again without having to force it, and it feels good. It feels damn good.

In preparation for a presentation I’m doing this week at my local library, I’ve been thinking a lot about short fiction and what it has to offer that full length novels cannot. I always say that, in spite of the fact that I love reading novels as much as anyone, I believe that short fiction is innately superior. This probably seems a bit extreme, and it’s important that I make it clear that I do love novels and I think there are things that can be done with novels that can’t be done inside the boundaries of short fiction. However, in my opinion, fiction in its most perfect form is extremely focused and tight, and because of the length constraints, that’s exactly what you get with short fiction.

Novels, because they have hundreds of pages to take up, almost invariably meander around. They give lots of background information and provide ample details, and they’ll sometimes spend several pages on some aspect of the story or other that is not really important to the overall story arc. Because they have the space, because, in fact, they must fill in the space, novels spend a fair amount of time establishing characters, establishing setting, and so on. Which is to say, not every page is actively moving the story forward.

As a reader, I like novels because I like getting lost in another world for a period of several days—I like that I can live as if in two realities, one foot planted in my own world, the other in the world of whatever novel I’m in the middle of. This is something that short fiction almost by definition cannot offer, since you can read a short story in one sitting. No matter how much you loved being part of that world, once you put the story down you leave the story behind and wholly reenter the real world.

Yet at the same time, as a reader/writer, I almost always feel dissatisfied with novels after I finish them. I enjoy the ride, but find my mind wandering when a novel veers off into territory that doesn’t feel truly important to the overall story. Again, I feel I should reiterate that I do enjoy reading novels, but most of the time when I read a novel, I feel like it would have been better if certain parts of it had been trimmed. To be honest, it’s not even all that rare for me to finish a novel and feel that it should have been trimmed down to short story length. There was enough for about 30 good pages of story in here, I think to myself when I finish, but the rest of the book was just filler.

Not so with short fiction. Because the shorter forms—even novellas—don’t have room for filler, they remain tightly focused on the story at hand. There is very little room for exposition in short fiction, and the majority of the words must be used to actively move the story forward. While some people might argue that this means short fiction is less complex than the novel form, I completely disagree. In short fiction—good short fiction, anyway—the complexity is still there, but all the complicated nuances of these characters and their world must be layered on top of each other, using the same words that are being used to move from plot point to plot point. The writer must choose his or her words very carefully, and each word must carry as much weight and meaning as possible.

The shorter the story is, the more true this becomes, and by the time we get down to flash fiction, we end up with a story that has been so carefully crafted and with such close attention to language that we find ourselves almost at a crossroads between poetry and prose.

So, yes, based on my opinion (this is, of course, a very subjective matter) of what makes for good fiction, I believe that the short form is better than the novel. Does this mean I don’t read novels? Of course not. Does this mean I’m going to stop trying to write them? Never! But I do have a sincere appreciation for short fiction, especially when I come across a really, really, really good one. Though I’ll never stop wanting to immerse myself in another world for a longer amount of time than a piece of short fiction can offer me, I do see the novel as inherently flawed, and the writer side of me can’t help but praise the short form.

Here’s something I find really interesting: in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers, there’s an extensive article/interview on book contests. Included in the article are some pie charts representing some overall statistics on the winners of last year’s book contests (there were 129 total, or at least, those are the ones P & W announced in their Grants and Awards pages over the course of the year).

The statistics were fascinating for a number of reasons (I was not at all surprised but interested to find out that roughly 77% of the book length contests out there are for poetry books), but the most interesting of the pie charts, for me, was the one that showed that 111 of the 129 winners hold an MFA, MA, or PhD. Only 18 of the winners (roughly 14%) did not hold a graduate degree (presumably—at least for the majority of the 111—we’re talking about a graduate degree in creative writing. At least, that's an assumption I'm starting from, and I think it's very likely. I’m guessing a small number of the winners probably hold a degree in some other field, but I’m betting—and who knows, I could be wrong—that most of them studied creative writing. At any rate, there's no way to know for sure, so let's allow ourselves to speculate a bit here).

As someone who has always been (perhaps overly) fascinated by the difference between formally studying creative writing in a graduate program and practicing writing other ways, of course I found this news extremely thought-provoking. Is this definitive proof at last that writers who earn a graduate level education in creative writing are better than those who don’t? Well, not so fast. I can think of a couple of possibilities that might explain this statistic another way.

For one thing, I can’t help but wonder if writers who go through formal, graduate level creative writing programs are simply more aware of the variety of small presses and book contests out there. I think a lot of would-be writers who haven’t had any formal training just don’t know about certain paths that are available to them. In a graduate level program, you become very aware of these sorts of things—often your own instructors are past recipients of some of these awards.

Another possibility is that the sort of writer who studies in a graduate level program tends to be more the sort of writer whose work is very well suited for small presses. Now that sounds like a very sharp distinction, and certainly there are people who fall on one end or the other of the line. There are MFA students who mostly write science fiction/fantasy. There are non-MFA students who mostly write highly literary short fiction, and there are, of course, faculty members in graduate level programs who have agents and publish with major presses.

I am not suggesting that people who go to grad school don’t or can’t publish with major presses, but we all know that the major presses are primarily interested in the bottom line ($$$) and are far, far, far less willing to publish work that is of high literary merit but has little chance of selling many copies than small presses are. Publishing with a major press has a lot to do with who you know and luck. Publishing with a small press has a lot more to do with how good of a writer you are. So all I’m saying here is that in general, in general (I repeat it to hopefully avoid any misreading of what I’m trying to say here), graduate level creative writing programs accept and train literary writers, and small presses (and, thus, book contests, most of which are run by small presses) are seeking work from the very same type of writer.

Of course, there is always also the possibility that the statistic is a result of a number of factors, and included in those factors might well be that there are possibly more good writers who have studied creative writing in advanced programs than those who haven’t. This would certainly not mean that any writer who hasn’t earned a graduate level degree in creative writing is crap—14% of the winners had no graduate level education, after all. But maybe it’s true that of the writers out there who have really gotten good at writing, who have learned the value of revision and have found their own unique voices, maybe there are more who got there through the aid of a graduate level education than any other way.

I think the statistic probably results from a heavy mix of all these factors and more, but either way, it’s worth thinking about. The statistic is simply too striking not to raise some questions.

Lately I’ve been struggling with how much time I think a writer should spend actually writing and how much time I think it’s okay—necessary, even—to spend on other, writing related endeavors (like reading). Part of the reason I’ve been having such a hard time pinning down how I feel about the issue is because basically for the past year (almost), I’ve been having a very on-again/off-again relationship with my own writing. I’ve had a very eventful year; between the book and the baby news, I’ve been quite busy and distracted, and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into any sort of comfortable writing groove.

I’ve read that what I’ve been experiencing is not uncommon: you get word of your first book deal (or sometimes, you finish—really finish—a large project), and you find you have no choice but to take a break; for whatever reason, your mind simply will not let you embark on another project without a breather. That all seems fine, except for the fact that I got word that my first book was going to be published almost a year ago. Even if you consider that most of last summer I was revising and editing the manuscript, it’s still been a good nine months since I’ve had all that behind me, and nine months seems like an awfully long break, to me.

Maybe, then, it’s the baby, more than the book, that’s been keeping my mind so occupied. Thinking about and planning for my new baby has certainly taken up a lot of my time, but let’s be honest, I have a lot of time right now. I’m only teaching one class. I could spend hours a day thinking about the little being growing inside of me and still find an hour or two in which to write.

No. The truth is, all excuses aside, I just haven’t been as interested in writing this past year. Something strange clicked over in me when I signed that book contract, and I know part of it is the disappointment of realizing how little a book deal really matters, and part of it is disillusionment at the anti-climax of publishing a book, but there’s something more, too, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Part of it, I think, is that I just haven’t had as much to say. I’ve been, if you want to know the truth, much more interested in reading these past few months. I’ve always been a reader, certainly, but for the past few months I feel like I’d rather read than do just about anything, but I can never quite decide if it’s okay for me to indulge. Obviously, writers need to read, but they should also write. Lately, I’m always very quick to pick up a book, less so to turn on my computer and put words to paper myself. The result is that when I’m reading, I feel guilty about it—I should be writing.

So I’m torn, you see, because I don’t know where the balance lies. I think reading is essential to writing, and part of me thinks, maybe it’s not so bad if, for a few months, I just really want to read. But then part of me thinks that’s just self-justification. Yes, reading is important, but it’s not like I was ever at risk for not reading enough. The risk is not writing enough. The risk is not producing.

But I don’t really know what the right answer is. Should I be putting more pressure on myself right now, or less? Should I accept that I need a break—though it scares me, though I’m terrified I’ve lost my abilities and may never get them back—or should I be forcing myself to rebuild my momentum? I don’t know. I just really don’t know.

Last week I read Jennifer Egan’s strange book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer for fiction this year. I say Goon Squad is strange because it’s marketed as a novel, though it’s clearly more a collection of stories than a novel, but it really isn’t a collection of short stories, either. It’s an odd little book that seems to defy categorization.

Egan’s book is not the first collection of linked stories, and it’s not even the first to call itself a novel. I can’t help but compare it to Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which I’d read just a couple of weeks before I read Goon Squad. Rachman’s book felt, to me, like a collection of linked short stories that the author (or publisher, who knows?) tried to force into the mold of  a novel by providing some (very dull and predictable) interludes between each chapter that told the overall story of the newspaper that (most of) these characters worked for. The stories themselves were incredibly good, but I thought the book would have been much better if Rachman had cut the interludes and published the book as a short story collection (but, of course, if he had done that, it never would have gotten published by a major press like it did; it never would have made the New York Times Bestseller List).

Goon Squad is different, though. While there is no overall story arc, and each chapter of the novel has a different main character and zooms in on a different part of the novel’s timeline—which, like in Rachman’s case, would normally scream story collection to me—each individual chapter doesn’t necessarily have a story arc, either. Some of them do. Some of the chapters definitely feel like self-contained short stories, with the beginning, middle, end, conflict, resolution, and character change that the term “story” usually implies. But most of the chapters feel more like snapshots of specific times in the characters’ lives (from teenage to early adulthood to middle age to old age). String them all together, the way Egan did, and you still don’t have an overall story, but look at them separately, and you don’t really seem to have individual stories, either (with some exceptions).

So how do we categorize A Visit from the Goon Squad then? Egan (or her publishers) chose to sell it as a novel, and maybe that was partially because most readers aren’t interested in short story collections and partially because something is possibly gained, some slow building of understanding of the book’s underlying themes, if you read the “stories” in the exact order they appear in the book. Call it a story collection, and people might skip around or not read certain stories at all, and ultimately, those people might miss out on the whole point of the book, which I’d guess can only really be discovered by reading every chapter and then thinking back on the connections between them.

Because that’s the thing about the book: there are very interesting themes at work here, which begin to reveal themselves the further you get into it. In the most obvious way, Goon Squad is about the passage of time, about growing up and growing older and becoming, in spite of yourself, all the things you never thought you would: a middle ager who is suddenly very concerned with her status at the country club and finds herself hanging out with republicans; an aging punk-rocker turned corporate, sell-out music producer; an eczematic failed novelist who becomes a celebrity journalist and, in the novel’s most disturbing chapter, attempts to rape (and contemplates murdering) a beautiful nineteen-year-old starlet during an interview.  

These characters are raw and, most of them, despicable, but they’re despicable in that way that all people are despicable when you really hold a microscope to them. They are, in other words, very real—vivid and well-developed, everything well-written characters should be. And ultimately the book is not meant to be a “story” or even “stories” about these characters; instead, the book shows us snippets of their lives at key moments and then pulls back and lets you see how they grew up, sold out, became fat and greedy and jaded, became bad people: thieves and would-be rapists and bad parents.

“Time,” as two different characters point out in two different chapters, “is a goon,” and it comes for us all in the end.

This book, then, is something entirely different: not a novel, not a short story collection, not exactly compelling as you’re reading it but extremely interesting once you finish and step back to ponder it all as a whole. That’s right, I found Goon Squad boring as I was slogging through it—it took me almost a full week to read this one, 275 page book—but once I read it, I was glad I did. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and while a little more plot, a little tension, would have made the experience of reading the book more enjoyable, overall, Goon Squad was definitely an excellent work of literature, and I can understand why it won the Pulitzer.