From The Literary Hub:
Written into our culture is the idea of the writer as adventurer, or the writer as rake. It isn’t enough that a person should strive to write interesting things. They ought also, we feel, to have an interesting life.
. . . .
I am—insofar as I am anything at all—a writer of fiction: a maker-up of things, someone who repurposes, taking elements of reality and twisting them out of shape. I also have two small children. A garden. I do a lot of washing, and go to bed at half past nine. Where creative transports ought to go, there are only 500 solid words on the page each morning and the nursery run. I am ashamed.
Of course, if we expect our writers of fiction to be as interesting as their work, and if we suspect, somewhere deep down, that people with ordinary lives will only ever be ordinary writers, then we will be given what we deserve: books by a small minority, mostly male, mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly without families, who can afford to spend their lives doing nothing else. The rest of us—the majority who have to fit writing around whatever it is that lets us eat, or for whom writing is a route to eating and must therefore be done regardless of the presence of that dilettante, desire—will only ever, perhaps, be second rate.
. . . .
There are as many ways of writing as there are people who write, but this is my way: by routine, because I have to, because it’s my job, because things are worse if I don’t. I am awake by 6:30, tipped into the morning by the enthusiastic rousing of my children, who come to each day as if it were the only one they had, and by 7am I am at work, still in my pyjamas, in whatever corner of the house is quiet. My partner brings me coffee. At 9.30 he needs to be at his desk and so at 9.27 I stop work, take over the children; and then there is the laundry and the cooking, the picking up of items from the floor, and all the other small battles in the war against grot which children entail. Often, during my two and a half morning hours, I feel that I am trying to wrestle with my conscious mind, to hold it to task when it would prefer to wander, but I can’t wait for inspiration and must rely on the incremental growth of words ground out across a page.
. . . .
Without set hours, without external demands on my time, while I might seem more free, I think it would be at the expense of everything, because I would get nothing done at all. I would drift, and wait, and time would pass, and I would feel, increasingly, as though I had failed. Besides, I love the pattern days have, the way they turn. At the moment my days have the rhythm of nursery runs and naptimes, lost shoes and park trips, and it is not only that the things are necessary in and of themselves, but that I find them, or some version of them, necessary to my work; and, more, at times they are a joy.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub