Parents Don’t Have Time For Writer’s Block

But the cure for writer’s block helps me anyway

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

When I tell you that I’ve spent the last sixteen months with my children, day in, day out (if you are a parent, you likely understand exactly what this means for my, you know life as human person, not to mention as a novelist), you might not be surprised to hear I’m out of touch with my writer’s block. Not because I haven’t been kept from my work — ha! nope! I don’t have that problem! — but because even it’s nearly impossible to imagine the luxurious, decadant fantasy world in which I might sit down, by myself, in a quiet place, long enough to be alone with my thoughts… only to find myself unable to put words to paper. The truth is, I literally can’t imagine it.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t hit plenty of road blocks in this pandemic year, in which my family left our home of twenty years, we lost our children’s school and childcare, my husband had to close his small business, and I found myself with four months to write two hundred-plus pages of my new novel, Fierce Little Thing (out from Flatiron Books on July 27th). The financial realities of what it would mean if I didn’t finish the book made it clear I had no choice.

But I’d like to repeat: I had two children and no childcare. My family didn’t have a home anymore, which meant, most…