Three Lessons Learned From Three Years of Writing While Holding A Baby

(at least 70% of the time)

in case you’re curious as to what this looks like (and watch me try to get more comfortable with sharing sketches online yayyyy)

Hello, and welcome to Under the Pine Tree! My name is Jess. I’m a Catholic wife and mother in my late twenties currently in the process of writing the second draft of my first book of a series of fantasy novels ever so dear to my heart that I hope you will be able to enjoy someday. Until that day comes, however, here on Substack, I primarily document the ups and downs of that journey, hopefully offering encouragement and in-the-trenches kinds of advice to anyone out there who may benefit from it it. Especially if they’re crazy enough to attempt writing novels with a young child in the house like me. Thanks for stopping by, subscribe if you like this post, and God bless you now and always!

Hello all!

We’re midway through July, would you look at that. I would certainly do well to come up with better openers to my newsletters than simply observing the time of year, but hey, we’ve got to start somewhere. And besides, the time of year is actually somewhat relevant today.

Storytime!

This summer is the third summer since I seriously picked up the pen again (or rather, the keyboard) after the birth of my son. He, henceforth to be known as Sunshine Child, was born in the spring of 2022, and naturally, I was not doing all that much writing with a three week old in the house.

With a three month old, however… it was looking more feasible.

Heh.

Not easy, but feasible, and the ideas were starting to percolate again. So I went with it.

Not with great goals in mind, not with a plan or a schedule — that would have to wait for November — but there was one scene from later on in the series that I just really wanted to write. I kept thinking about it, and it seemed better to write while Sunshine Child slept than to scroll on Twitter.¹

Soooo… whenever the little guy went down for a nap, I would lay down with him, let him rest in my arms, and take out my laptop to write until he needed my more active attention again. Because he was and to this day is a cuddly and clingy little thing. He slept better and longer with me there, which meant both that he was better rested and that I’d get more time to write. It was a win all around, and while there is a bit more variation in my writing routine nowadays, I still do this a lot, and it has truly become one of the defining images of my life.²

I’ve learned a lot from it, and I’m here to share some of that today. And yes, of course, I remain very new both to this motherhood thing and to this consistently writing thing, so I’m going to keep my advice brief and limited to my own experience — one lesson for each year I’ve been doing this.

1. Time is Precious.

Motherhood and writing are deeply, deeply intertwined for me. I’ve been writing for much longer than I’ve been a mother, but I never truly took writing seriously until I was one. I figured I had my whole life ahead of me to write, and there were so many things I wanted to do alongside it!

But as they say, work always expands to fill the time allotted to it. If I had forever to write, I would take forever to write.

Motherhood, however, strips you of the illusion that you have an endless amount of time to do what you want. Very, very quickly. Suddenly, the great majority of your day and night are in constant service to another.

Now, of course, this is a good thing.

But with respect to writing or other personal goals of any kind, it makes you look at every ten minutes to yourself, let alone a nice two or three hour nap, very, very differently than you once would have.

It is a precious opportunity, and you want to embrace it with all you are.

Now. I’m not going to say that I always use my son’s naptimes well. Or that I even should use every naptime for writing. Sometimes there’s other work,³ and sometimes there’s need for rest.

But for the most part… when you know these are probably the only two hours you’ll have today to write, and that your current state of limited time will likely be your state for many years to come if you hope to have more children like I do… well, then you write. You write.

The time isn’t infinite. And so it becomes precious.

Also, on a more practical motherhood note, resting with my son at the midpoint of the day, or when he was younger, at a few break points during the day, has proven to be a great mental reset for me. Cuddling a sleeping baby and getting to write? Both of those are very enjoyable activities. And when I get to do both at the same time? I feel very refreshed at the end of it.

The mild neck-and-shoulder tension one might get from continuing to hold a baby or a toddler for an entire nap aside. And then there’s the part when you try to slip away to go to the bathroom like a ninja so he’s still asleep when you get back. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Ya know.

It’s not perfect. It’s very much one of those lean into your season of life things, and I feel a lot better as both a writer and a mother when I do it. I have no idea what it’s going to look like if God blesses us with more children in the future, or even when Sunshine Child stops napping. But, hey, all I have is today, and this is what’s working right now.

2. When the Way You Look at the World Changes, What You Write Does Too.

Around ten years or so ago, I remember profoundly admiring writers who were older when they began writing. The amount of life that must have informed their work!

In light of that admiration, I concluded that I simply did not want to write or publish my book when I was young, thinking it would not be as good as it could be if I did. I would brainstorm and then let the book come to life when it was ready.

There was both a touch of wisdom and a touch of needless perfectionism in that.

I’m still taking it slow on the publishing front, but as per my first point, time is limited, time is precious, and I did really need to get to the actual writing before I was fully ready, because I never will be. And I don’t know how many years God will give me, so… yeah, couldn’t just wait forever.

That being said, there has been a lot of value of writing in earnest in my late twenties rather than in my late teens. I wrote about that in greater detail this past December while reflecting on the long-awaited (by me alone lol) completion of my first draft of this thing.

But let’s get a little more specific now.

What have I learned? What has changed?

Well, a lot, but with reference to this topic of lessons learned of writing while holding a baby… motherhood profoundly changes the way you view the world in a way that can only probably be understood fully with first hand experience.

I’ve only realized this more with time,⁴ but it became apparent even when I had only just begun writing again the summer after my son was born.

Because I was writing a scene featuring a character who was a mother.

I had carried the premise of the scene in my mind for at least five years, quite probably more, but the girl who had yet to date, let alone have a child, could not truly conceive of the weight of what this woman was going through. The visceral experience of motherhood both physically and mentally, painfully and joyfully, gave a power and impact to the scene that never would have existed otherwise.

And that is something for which I am profoundly grateful.

3. Writing Carries With It Responsibility

The funny thing about the child sleeping next to me right now⁵ is that he’s going to be an adult someday. I don’t know exactly what he’s going to be like or who he’s going to become, but he is going to grow up alongside my writing of this story and he might actually read the books someday.

That’s something that makes you think very carefully about what you want to say in your writing.

It’s not that it makes me want to preach, because the one of the very reasons I enjoy fiction as a medium, particularly for harder topics, is the fact that it lends itself more to nuance and interpretation. But even when subtlety and subjectivity are taken into consideration, every story says something. Every story shapes the mind of a reader, whether in acceptance, rejection, or something in between of the ideas within it. It’s one of the coolest things about fiction actually, one of the primary determining factors in how I appreciate other people’s stories. Ideas are powerful, and fiction is full of them. They are both entertainment and more than entertainment and-

Ahem. I could go into a long speech here, and I’m going to pull myself back.

Long story short, you want to speak carefully and thoughtfully when you realize the child beside you might someday pick up your story and be shaped by it.

It doesn’t mean you want to make your story easy to grapple with. In fact, you might want to let it be harder to let your precious possible reader suffer with the characters well so as to endure life better. Your work becomes more than simple self-expression when you realize that every person who might pick up the story is someone you have a responsibility to speak truthfully and respectfully to. The whims of the market that might be so tempting to try to win the approval of seem so meaningless in comparison to the effect you might have, for good or for ill, on the child beside you.⁶ I’ve found especially in this Internet age when readers and authors have such access to one another, the felt pressure to write things that will leave you in the good graces of people who speak often online is a very real one.

But there’s a weight to the child sleeping on your shoulder. It grounds you before that faceless crowd. And you decide nothing matters more than writing something good, true, and beautiful. Perhaps the popular might sometimes overlap with that, but where it doesn’t (and there are always places where it doesn’t), you feel much more confident in the need to set that aside.

Of course, there are ways other than motherhood to learn integrity as an author and as a human person… but for my part, this has been one of the best.

Thank you all so much for reading!

I’m adjusting my posting routine slightly, so just writer thoughts and no book recs today, but those will come again soon. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and found something valuable in it, whether you are a parent or not!

And for a closing question today…

Have there been any other everyday, home-y experiences you’ve had as of late that have informed your creative life? What have you learned from them?

Let me know down in the comments — I’d love to hear, and I’m sure other readers would too. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the mundane, but there’s a real beauty to it that I’m hesitant to push aside.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thanks again, God bless you all as always, I’m praying for you, and I’ll see you next Friday!

Peace.

Jess.

1. Always a mistake.

2. Thus. My little sketch up there.

3. Chores, heh — but if he wants to cuddle, I can’t do those anyway soooo…

4. I cannot even begin to express the degree to which this story now explores the relationships of parents and children, both children children and adult children. It’s everywhere!

5. Though he’s actually on the opposite couch cushion and I’m sitting up because he’s getting bigger and that’s getting to be the better option sometimes.

6. Along with the realization that every reader also once was a sleeping child.