J. K. Rowling would have us believe she plotted and penned the Harry Potter stories sitting in a cafe where they allowed her to stay all day for the price of one cup of coffee. She said this with a straight face during a TV interview. I think she also said her baby was in its pram by her feet while she scribbled in longhand on legal tablets. Oh, sure. I’ll bet she said that to make the rest of us feel like a bunch of tech-dependent geeks.
I am typing this on my power book in my lovely sunny kitchen with no distractions whatever, no caffeine freaks ordering lattes, no espresso machines sputtering, no chitchat at the next table. Nothing to blow my concentration. Nothing except my 2-month-old granddaughter dozing by my feet in her vibrating swing seat. A little bit of techno wizardry from this century.
Amy, bless her heart, will sway peacefully like this for maybe five minutes. Long enough for me to craft a sentence or two. Then her face contorts, her knees draw up, her fists flail. Waaaaa!
Okay. Up we go. Pat the back. Waltz around the kitchen. After half a dozen laps, she emits an outrageous burp, whimpers once, closes her eyes and nods off. Back in the swing; turn up the tunes, type a line or two. Waaaaa!
Amy, there’s a good girl. Calm down. Grammy’s on deadline. All the technology in America will not help me file my copy on time if you keep this up. Okay, Okay, Okay. Up again, over the shoulder. Pat, pat, pat. Burrrrp! Very good, Amy. Now back we go to the swing. Please.
In one hour, I have written two paragraphs. Badly. I cannot reach the keyboard with a writhing baby clinging to my chest. As soon as she has expelled all the air she swallowed with her breakfast, she expels the waste product of her digestion, creating what we call, the diaper situation. When the situation is remedied it’s, you guessed it, time for the next bottle.
Ms. Rowling did not say how she solved the nappy situation in the middle of a coffee shop without offending other patrons trying to enjoy their tea and crumpets or whatever. Amy has created diaper situations that would offend someone in another zip code. Her pediatrician says she has a spastic colon. She will outgrow it. But not by next week’s deadline.
I am reminded of my failed attempts to write regularly when my own children were young. I once signed up for the Famous Writers Course, a correspondence class in fiction writing that had assignments but no deadlines. Even so, I just couldn’t keep up with it.
I read all the tips from prolific authors about keeping to a schedule, writing the same number of pages, in the same place, at the same time every day.
One said he got up at dawn, fixed a cup of tea and sat down to write until noon. Another said he tried to begin writing “as soon after first light as possible.” A married couple-both writers but not collaborators-said they had breakfast together, went for a walk in the garden, then retired to their separate studies to work until afternoon.
Who took the kids to school? Who answered the phone when Internet tech support calls back? Who let the plumber in? Who took the cranky computers to the PC doctor? Ah, well. Those were simpler times, I guess. Not much went wrong with manual typewriters, fountain pens and legal tablets.
Amy has been quietly napping for half an hour. Ohmigod. Is she still breathing? I leap from my chair, just in time to hear the mother of all gas expulsions. Whew! She smiles, enormously pleased with herself. I laugh hysterically.
I return to my power book, which is displaying the bomb and dire warnings of a system error! I shut it down before it can explode. It won’t reboot. I see a trip to MacUniverse in my future. But not today.
I fix a cup of tea. I find a legal tablet and my favorite mechanical pencil. I think I could even do this with a baby on my lap. Perhaps Ms. Rowling really did create all those wizard stories in a coffee shop. Of course, she didn’t have to e-mail them to her publisher.