by Beth Blevins

Created on: July 14, 2008   Last Updated: May 15, 2012

I am saying Yes to be provocative, but I don't think this is really a question that can be answered with a simple Yes or No. There are different kinds of writing and different stages of motherhood.

Can you write a well-researched biography eight hours a day while nursing a one-week-old baby (without help from a nanny or babysitter)? Of course not.

Can you manage to write a short blog posting while your three-year-old is taking a nap? Probably.

There are mothers who write for a living (newspaper reporters, magazine writers, college professors churning out academic articles in order to obtain tenure), and mothers who write creatively on the side while also working outside the home. Then there are the lucky few who have managed to eke out a living from writing fiction and creative nonfiction. I think this is what the question hints at, and why I am answering Yes.

Very few of our successful women writers of fiction and literary nonfiction have managed to start their careers head-on after they are mothers, unless their children are grown or otherwise independent. Too many successful women writers, at least until the middle of the last century, were childless. Think Jane Austen, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor.

To be a successful creative writer these days usually means engaging in writing seminars to produce polished text, submitting pieces endlessly to literary magazines and editors, and having an uninterrupted chunk of time to write. Since creative writing doesn't pay unless one is able to publish a successful book (usually after years and years of submissions accepted by literary and other magazines), most creative writers have to hold down other jobs, as well.

On a typical weekday, if you work 8.5 hours a day, commute 2 hours, get yourself and kids ready in the morning for 1 hour, and make dinner and cleanup at night 1.5 hours, you've already used up 13-14 hours of your 16-17-hour allotment of awake time-and you still need to spend time with your kids. After all that, you're probably not going to have loads of energy to sit down and start writing, and that doesn't take into account other pressing needs like laundry, paying bills, or spending time with your partner.

I know there are exceptions — J.K. Rowling is the poster-child of the successful single mother-writer (with the initial Harry Potter books), but for every J.K. Rowling there are moms who have set their novels and poems aside so they can go pick up their kids from camp or get in the car to go to work. I hope they will get back to them when the kids get older but, in the meantime, manage to write something, whether an entry in their notebook or a posting on an Internet blog site.

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