A Bit of Inheritance
It sounds like this.
When I was six, I fell asleep every night to the sound of my mom typing her manuscript on a typewriter in the next room. She would work all day, spend time with my brother and my dad and me, make dinner, and get us ready for bed. Once we were in bed, she wrote until the early morning hours, and then woke up at seven to get us ready for school. When my dad dropped us off at school, she got ready for work. In such a manner, between them, my parents managed to write five books of non-fiction when I was between the ages of four and eighteen, all the while having full-time jobs, friends, and lives, and keeping my brother and me well attended to and out of trouble (well, sort of).
At this moment, that kind of schedule seems undoable. Maybe it’s just the end of the quarter, when suddenly my students have placed an absurdly high stake on their final 201 paper, and I’m beginning to feel like upon graduating I’ll do anything to avoid any responsibility to anyone except myself and my writing. So I asked my parents:
What makes you write?
Peter: It seemed that some things needed to be said, and nobody else was saying them in quite the way I wished for.
Virginia: I love to write and I love my work. I have a passion for feminine psychology, ancient ritual and studying archaeology that reveals the archetypes underlying culture.
Did you ever try to be a full-time writer?
P: No, but I’m still dreamin’ of it. [Thank God you'll get there first!]
V: No. I really love the clinical aspect of my psychoanalytic work—it provides the raw material for investigations in my writing.
What did you sacrifice for it?
P: Nothing, really. I gained from it.
V: I sacrificed picking you up from school every day. I also stopped all social engagements when I had a deadline.
How did you get the work done with two children and a job?
P: What, I had two children and a job? No, seriously, on weekends I put in intense family time earlier in the day, and Sat-Sun nights I just crash wrote as best I could (my prime biorhythmically determined writing time –for creating new words and sentences on a blank sheet — is 6 – 10 pm). I rarely wrote mid-week unless working on time-deadline revisions.
V: Well, first of all, I could make my own hours at work. I had a babysitter pick you up from school three times a week. I wrote from 3 to 6 those three days. After you went to bed I wrote from 10 at night to 2 in the morning. The way I saw that was, if I got started in my office between 3 and 6, I could start again at 10 without having to overcome any resistance. Then I wrote in every spare moment I had. The writing just goes along underneath everything else I do. My unconscious is working on it all the time.
It helped that I had a partner who also had an income so that I wasn’t solely responsible for supporting two children and myself. Peter was supportive of my writing.
And last, once I had children, I didn’t procrastinate anymore.
Why were typewriters better?
P: They weren’t, for me. I don’t actually think I could have done it without my old Sanyo PC, circa 1984, running MS-DOS 2.1 and Wordstar 3.3.
V: I was very attached to my portable Hermés typewriter, and I resisted for a long time learning how to use the computer because there’s an intimacy about it, a sort of visceral intimacy with the typewriter. But once I learned the ease of being able to move blocks of text around and edit, that superseded the value of the previous connection to the typewriter for me.
What will you write next?
P: My collected responses to MelinaCR’s wonderfully sonorous barks.
V: Right now I’m working on a chapter for a book called Ancient Greece/Modern Psyche. The piece is called “First Fruit Offerings at Blood Sacrifice: Initiation in the Bronze Age.”
Quite appropriately, my brother and I each have a typewriter from our parents: he has my mom’s 1960s Hermés, and I have my dad’s 1950s Olympia. Both machines sat in storage for years. Now they have new ribbons and purposes—letters and screenplays and poems. And I like to think someone in my building is listening to the keys as I type, wondering what words come out of all that noise.
Fantastic interview, Melina! How nice to have two parents who have written books. I, come to think of it, do too! My mom writes detective fiction, and my dad wrote a book on some computer language that’s dead now. The book was really popular in the early ’90′s, I think and had something like seven editions. I should follow your lead and ask them about their writing practices when I see them over spring break. I’ll let you know if I come back with anything interesting. Great post!
Thanks, Jaime. I love how different their responses are, too. It seems strange now that I never thought to ask them about this before. Let me know what yours say!
What fun to sit in on a family conversation about writing. I love this, Melina. Your parents are inspiring.
They definitely are. And I’m happy to share their amazingness.
This is an awesome post/interview. I wonder if Peter and Virginia would have written as much had they not been so busy raising you and your brother (I’m blanking on his name – sorry!) and working full time. I think we talked about this the other day, how the more tasks one has to juggle, the more one writes (with obvious exceptions, of course, this week probably being one of them).
Naftali is his name! I, um, suddenly remembered!
very cool. I like this a lot and don’t really have anything to add, except nice job.
And Sam, I think you’re right about busyness versus writing time. In my own experience, i have gradually written more and more, though i’ve actually had less time in an average day to do it than I did just a few years ago.
when i was younger, though, I did not feel as much pressure that i was losing time, that my finite allotment would expire and all i would have done was watch TV and eat Doritos. Now I’m trying for the three-fer: when I die, I will have written some things, watched TV and eaten Doritos.