Dear Huma: how do you balance your writing life with your domestic life?

Dear Huma,

I'd really like to know what a writing day looks like for you and how you manage to balance your writing life with your family and having such a beautiful home?

I did a writing workshop called 'Doing the Dishes'. We discussed the gendered nature of domestic life and how having a clean perfect home might have to be sacrificed for a busy writing life. I couldn't help thinking about your lovely homes (the one you had before and the one to which you have just moved and had renovations) and wondered how you manage.

I hope that isn't too nosy!

Terri

Dear Terri,

Not too nosy at all. Someone else might say: Ah, but would we ask a male writer this? But as it happens, we are among friends here, and also I don’t actually mind answering this question, because I too am curious about the way other people live and work and go about their days.

It makes me chuckle though, that you thought of me in a discussion on domestic life (finally, my niche!). Honestly, your letter made me mildly scared about the impression people might have of me through the photos of our home I might have shared on Instagram. Like, do you think I’m… kind of obsessed about tidying? (My husband would say you’re not wrong). But anyway, I’d love to know what you talked about in that discussion, and yes, I’ve been on a panel with Gemma, she’s wonderful and her stories are great.

To answer the first part of your question: you ask what my writing days look like, and you ask how I balance them with my family life. The thing is, my writing days look different, depending on what I’m working on. I’ve recently been working on line edits for my fourth book and this is quite calm, satisfying, productive work. This kind of writing work allows me to sit, to be methodical, and I can end my day before my children come home from school and start their dinner and know that I’ve made steady, tick-box progress. Or perhaps I’m doing this kind of writing, newsletter writing (it takes a few days to put these together!) or article writing or working on a course I’m about to teach or an essay for an anthology; this is work I can pace without it overwhelming me.

But when I’m writing something new, when I’m drafting or figuring out a story, when I’m engrossed in a messy paragraph, then my days are more intense, longer, fraught. It’s harder for me to draw a line. So, the way my work impacts on, say everyday/ family life, is different too, depending on where I’m at.

It’s lovely of you to compliment my home, but for what it’s worth, I don’t see it as perfect, and wouldn’t want it to be. I much rather consider it loved and lived in. There are scratches on the walls, one of the doors is chipped, there’s sellotape I can’t get off where one of my children stuck a Halloween spider up. These are things I can’t really do anything about, and truthfully I also don’t mind so much. It’s life! But yes I am by nature a tidy person, and I can’t really explain why other than by telling you that, er, my mother is even tidier. (I’m writing this laughing, because it brings to mind a line from Mistress America, when Greta Gerwig’s character says repeatedly, ‘I just wasn’t brought up that way.’ It’s very funny, you have to see it).

But honestly? I really don’t think that my predilection for tidiness or simply liking things to look nice around me impacts on my writing in a negative way. It’s not like I’m doing a deep clean or styling my shelves every single day. I would say the things we do daily, like making sure the beds are made and the breakfast things are put away or that the counters are wiped down after mealtimes, don’t take up that much time. And really, these are the things we mostly all keep on top of regardless, right?

Plus, I do share the load. We used to have a cleaner, we don’t anymore, and haven’t for about eighteen months and though sometimes I would love the extra help, my husband and I manage between us. It’s not as if it’s always been smooth sailing working this out, but we’ve reached a point where we’re doing okay.

Our cleaning routine is very boring and I’m sure no one really wants to read about it, but he’ll do the things I hate, like cleaning the bathrooms (and other stuff), and I’ll do other things. And, by the way, I’m not mentioning this in some kind of lovey-dovey way; I don’t think the fact that he cleans bathrooms makes him any more amazing than I am for doing the dusting (obviously, I’m not amazing for doing the dusting, you see the point I’m trying to make). I’ll tell you what really is amazing though: the iRobot. Worth every pound (bought ours off eBay!).

But look, I grew up in a household where my brothers did very little and my mother made me do a lot, so yes, I bang on about ‘women not doing everything’ in front of my kids (all boys), and yes, I make them join in from time to time. Do my children always do as I say? No. But will they listen if I say I’m going to lock their tablets? Yes. And so, they will wipe the dining table and chairs down, they will bring their plates to the dishwasher if they know what’s good for them. But also, they’re kids! I’m pretty relaxed about how the house is at weekends and in the holidays. After school, there’s hardly anytime between clubs and dinners and bedtimes for all that Lego to be tipped out anyway. My whole intention when designing our house was for it to be somewhere happy, lived in, comfortable, playful. Sure, I’ll expect them to, say, hang their clothes up (doesn’t mean they always do it though). But it’s not like I’m following them around with a duster.

Also, my kids are not that young anymore which surprises people who might have read How We Met more recently. But it’s been three and a half years since I wrote it, and wrote about the struggle I felt between motherhood and writing. I’m not saying that struggle has disappeared completely, but now all my children are at school. I’m no longer writing in three hour windows a handful of times a week while my youngest is in nursery. I’m no longer trying to get someone to nap in a pushchair. Those days are over. Writing is instead once again my full-time job, as it was before I had children (I include teaching creative writing in that too). So, if you or anyone else is at the stage of life that I was at when I wrote How We Met, know that time will come back to you. It really does. (Apart from school holidays, which is a whole other story.)

The thing is, I don’t keep the house tidy for the sake of, you know, Instagram. I do it for me, my family, my sanity. Maybe my tolerance threshold for mess is possibly a little lower than, say, my husband’s or some other people I know. But if that’s the case, it is what it is. I know I feel more open to creativity when things are calm around me. I know I feel more open to creativity when my immediate surroundings inspire me or please me. I feel more productive. So if something needs to be done, I’ll make time for it.

It’s also worth pointing out that it’s incredibly rare that I might sit for nine uninterrupted hours at my desk (are there writers who do?), day after day, so lost in my writing that I can’t stop to rinse a glass or put a spoon away . Honestly, even a good writing stint for me is just a couple of hours! When I do my share of the housework, I don’t see that I’m sacrificing precious writing time if it’s when I wouldn’t be writing anyway. And really it’s not that much time, not the way we spread it out. Writing this, it occurs to me that perhaps cleaning the house is better for my mental health than walking is.

One more thing: I write about women, mostly, and about what some people might call their ‘domestic’ and interior lives. It may sound silly to people who write about so-called bigger themes but paying attention to the tiny details of my house enables me on some level to pay attention to the tiny details of some imaginary character’s house. I think about how they might put the blinds up, what might be lying on the couch, the colour of the walls and whether their floors are wooden or carpeted. These details matter to me, and not just for the sake of it but because it tells me something about the person who made those choices (or didn’t, as may well be). ‘The best things a novel can do are through its minuteness, its parochialism’ wrote Tessa Hadley. Equally it also makes sense to me that I need my own home in some kind of quiet order when I write (most of the time), so that it might retreat into the background and allow me to bring some other domestic world to life, so that it can take over my thoughts for a while.

Anyway, I hope that sheds some light on one of those other writer myths, like how our lives are only about writing and nothing else, when really, someone has to empty the dishwasher from time to time, and life isn’t always either/ or. As one of my favourite authors Alice Munro once wrote, ‘There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house.’ There may well be writers who fully embrace a kind of creative chaos but I am not one of them. Sometimes what others call a sacrifice might simply just be to someone else a choice or a difference in priorities. What I mean to say is, there’s no one way to ‘be’ a writer, as there is no one way to live. But we all know that anyway.