Lesson for the day: Ask and you shall RECEIVE!


The Rule to Break: "You can't focus on your writing career when you have young children."

4. The Rule to Break: "You can't focus on your writing career when you have young children."
From The Renegade Writer by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell

One of the most amazing "truths" Diana found out after having her son was that becoming a parent actually made her a more efficient -- thus more productive -- writer. When she didn't have children, she felt free to take her time querying for assignments or to procrastinate by buying stuff on eBay or amazon.com. When Diana came back from her maternity leave in the summer of 2003, she hired a babysitter to watch her son for fifteen hours a week. Those fifteen hours were the only time she had to finish her work, and finish her work she did. (Besides, she had to earn the money to pay the babysitter. That was motivating in itself.) By the end of the summer, Diana found that she'd earned more that summer than she had in previous years!

In 2004, Diana went back to writing full-time. She and her husband decided to host an au pair from Germany for the year to help with childcare. Melanie watched Oliver forty hours a week, and again, Diana had a record-breaking year in billings.

Okay, you're muttering, isn't that nice. You have babysitters and live-in childcare to watch your kid – I don't. And therein is the truth: if you're a parent and have young children, the odds are not in your favor that you'll be able to maintain a full-time freelance career without any support. You can put your writing career on hold for a couple years. You can decide to work part-time and squeeze assignments in when you can. But if you really want to write full-time, you're probably going to have to make some serious accommodations. No one says it's easy, but you can work full-time and raise children – even if you're a freelancer.

If you want to continue building your career and you have no idea how to work around your children, here are some options to consider:

* Ask a family member or trusted neighbor to watch your child. Some lucky freelancers have a parent or in-law nearby who can watch children for free or cheap. Or you could work out an arrangement with your neighbor -- she watches your child for three hours on Monday morning and you watch her child for three hours Friday afternoon.

* Put your child in daycare. Millions of working parents do it. There are some excellent daycares and early childhood education programs; research shows young children reap benefits in a dynamic environment. The bad news: good daycare is pricey.

* Hire babysitters or a nanny. If you're nervous about leaving your child with a sitter, take solace in the fact that you'll probably be working in another room, rather than in a cubicle twenty miles away.

* Mine downtime ruthlessly. Kids take naps. They zone out in front of Barney. They play with other children at the playground. This is all time you can use to work on your career. One education writer Diana knows gets up at 5:00 a.m. and works three hours until her two sons awaken. Her husband takes over in the evening, and she squeezes in another few hours of work. She schedules interviews during naptimes or when she has a babysitter over. That's roughly 30 hours a week, and she's supporting her family on her income while her husband builds a new business. Pretty impressive!

You can absolutely build a freelance career with limited childcare. In the beginning, freelance writer Lynne Ticknor had no childcare. "For the first year or more," she says, "my work hours were 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. before the kids woke up and 1:30 p.m. to 3:30p.m. while the baby, whose sleep habits were extremely predictable, napped and the older kids were in school. That gave me 20 hours a week to work, excluding weekends and evenings. And, I was able to break into national consumer magazines working those hours." Sometimes she was able to hire a sitter while she conducted phone interviews or had meetings with editors, but she tried to schedule those appointments during evening hours. In fact, she found many sources who preferred to be interviewed during the evening -- allowing her husband to watch the kids. Says Ticknor, "It sure wasn't easy getting up at the crack of dawn every day, but it allowed me to build my writing career part-time without putting my children in daycare." Building her freelancing business has taken a lot of sacrifice: she doesn't get to spend as much time as she would like with her husband, and cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry get short shrift (aw, shucks). As she says, "In order to find the time to work, something has to give!" So out with scrubbing tubs and in with polishing prose.

Look. Whether it's kids, a sick spouse, or an aging parent, everyone has personal obstacles that makes building and maintaining a writing career seem impossible. If you're committed to building a career and you have these kinds of responsibilities and constrictions on your shoulders, you simply have to be more ruthless and creative about your time than other writers. In fact, by developing your hidden resources, you'll probably become a better, more successful writer than those people whose biggest life problem is deciding between ABC or CBS on a Thursday night.

Order The Renegade Writer, A Totally Unconventional Guide to Writing Success
By Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell
25 percent off at the website during the month of December: http://www.marionstreetpress.com

Posted: Fri - December 2, 2005 at 08:34 AM          

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