After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be to stay home with a baby? As far as I was concerned, full-time mothers who couldn’t manage a creative side career with all the time they had at home must be disorganized, lazy, or just not interested in anything but TV talk shows. I was none of these things, so I thought writing at home and bringing up baby at the same time would be a simple matter of getting organized.
Obviously I was unprepared for motherhood. After giving birth it took me several months to regain my emotional balance, orient what was left of my brain, and figure out how to get words down on paper again. I knew it could be done. I had only to look at the newspaper and the library bookshelves to see all the material written by mothers. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Erma Bombeck became my heroines.
I learned a few things during those difficult months that have allowed me to carve out time to pursue my writing. It is a simple matter of getting organized, if you consider continuous minute-by-minute re-organization to be simple.
These tips, incidentally, also apply to the many stay-at-home fathers who are also pursuing free-lance writing careers from home (except the parts about hormones, nursing, and giving birth).
1. Expect to write nothing for at least six months.
Along with the incredible hormonal changes you experience after having a baby comes household and financial disarray that I can never hope to describe. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry wrote when trying to explain what it was like to fly a small plane through a cyclone: "I do not know how to convey its violence except by piling one adjective on another, so that in the end I should convey no impression at all——unless perhaps that of an embarrassing taste for exaggeration." In other words, you have to be there.
Infants sleep a lot, eat a lot, cry a lot, fill a lot of diapers, and require a lot of collateral equipment especially in the first few months. So, give yourself and the baby time to adjust——what’s six months over a lifetime? During that time, though, try to fit in little snippets of writing. For example, if you can type at a computer keyboard with a large piranha attached to your chest, then you can write while you are nursing a baby, and more power to you.
2. Expect to write nothing thereafter.
If you wake up with plans for the time you are going to write, but the expectation that it probably won’t happen, then whatever you do manage to write that day will be a joyous gift. This sounds irrational, but you get that way after you give birth.
Children have a way of disrupting the best laid plans of mice and moms. Just when you settle into the outline for a new essay, your child will snag some ancient dropped pill from the teeny tiny crack under the kitchen cabinet and swallow it before you can tackle him. Now is the time to call the poison control center, but not the time to work on your outline. In all likelihood you will have to give the child a vomit-inducing substance and he will choose to let fly on, guess what, your outline. Give up the outline for the time being, fall back, and reorganize your day.
3. Get some sleep.
One of the great goals of motherhood is to get the baby to sleep through the night. Infants are more skilled at manipulation through sleep deprivation than cult leaders and motivational seminar gurus. The first night you go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and the baby doesn’t wake you until 6:00 a.m. you will leap from your bed singing like Maria Von Trapp.
The baby will continue to sleep through the night after this for approximately two blissful weeks——just enough time to get you addicted to sleep again. Then he or she will start getting teeth and wake up several times again at night. Then come the colds, the nightmares, the loud music, the late dates. Face it, you’ll be tired for eighteen years.
So, if you sit down to write and find that you have, once again, nodded off and made a greasy forehead print on your paper or computer screen, go take a nap. This is most easily accomplished while the child is also taking a nap (see tip 4).
I forced myself to write while exhausted once but only managed to fall asleep at the keyboard. Strangely enough, my fingers kept typing though my brain was asleep (no, it wasn’t while writing this article). The result looked like an ancient dialect of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. Or perhaps it was my sub-conscious speaking baby talk through my fingers; I read the result to my then-infant son and he seemed to understand it.
If you do take a nap, be sure to set a timer to ring in half an hour. A half-hour nap is long enough for you to refresh yourself, but not so long that you get too groggy to think. It will also leave a last smidgen of time while your child is still napping for you to get some writing done.
4. Make sure your children get some sleep.
DO NOT clean the toilet while your child is napping. This is your time to write, unless it is dirty work day (see tip 5). At about six months of age your child should settle in to taking two naps a day. At about twelve to sixteen months you will reach the dreaded one-nap threshold. Guard nap time jealously. Do not let the child "drop" nap time even after he or she ceases to sleep during the day (at about age three or four). Children can learn to have quiet time for one to two hours every afternoon while Mommy writes, or so I’ve been told. We’ll see.
5. Set aside one day a week to do the dirty work.
You cannot spend all of your time either writing or with baby. You do eventually have to take the time to kill those things that are wriggling around in the bathroom. This is better known as "housework."
I have found that trying to maintain order by doing a little bit of housework every day is distracting and takes away time I could be spending with my son or writing. I have also found that I cannot write if I have visual clutter in my surroundings or if something smells bad under the sink. So one day a week I blitz through the house, scrubbing, dusting, laundering and vacuuming everything that gets in my way.
While I clean my son watches videos, which he doesn’t get to do other times. Unless he decides to "help" me, he stays out of my way. This way my house gets very clean and stays clean—except for the things that need to be picked up daily—for most of the week so my obsessive little cleanliness gene will leave me free to write.
6. Hold that last thought.
One essential element of motherhood is the ability to accept interruptions with grace. You cannot expect to write whenever you want to, but you can always expect to be interrupted when you do find time to write. There is nothing you can do about interruptions other than to react positively. Cultivate your remaining memory so you can fit right back into the slot you were filling when you were last interrupted.
And remember this, if you were writing brilliantly yesterday when you were interrupted, you are also able to write brilliantly today. Maybe you will write something different today than you would have written yesterday, but that isn’t necessarily bad. This attitude will keep you from becoming a shrieking banshee if your child wakes up early from his a nap and interrupts your train of thought. Let’s put it another way: If Coleridge had been a mother, he would have finished Kubla Khan, the whiner.
All the same, you can’t rely totally on your offspring-challenged memory to get you through interruptions. If you are changing a diaper and you suddenly have a brilliant thought to add to an essay or book, then for heaven’s sake write it down immediately before you lose it. Write it in, um, crayon on a diaper wipe if you have to.
7. Keep a sense of perspective and a sense of humor.
Whatever you’re writing now will most likely not be the last thing you will ever write. Take a look at your children and see what they are——walking research. There is nothing that will give you more to write about than having life happening all over you as it often does with children.
My favorite poet, William Cowper, didn’t start writing seriously until he was 50. There are many other examples of people who started their artistic careers late in life or after their children were grown: Grandma Moses and Laura Ingalls Wilder to name two. You do not have to write your magnum opus today, but it does help to practice as much as possible. Raising children at the same time as you try to write is one way to develop the persistence and calm in the face of adversity that you will need when trying to meet a publisher’s deadline.
At the same time, enjoy your children and yourself. If the first draft of your novel is used by "someone" to start a campfire, go ahead and have a tantrum. Then have a good laugh. That novel is still in your brain somewhere and you’d probably have to rewrite it anyway. Then kiss your children, tell a few jokes, have a tickle fight, go out for ice cream, read a few books to them, and write a few of your own. Your family and their laughter will out-last even the written word.
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Where to get started
Where you get started in freelance writing depends a lot upon what kind of writing you want to do--fiction or non-fiction, magazine writing or book writing.. Whatever field you choose, the following books and magazine will help you get started.
"Bird By Bird" by Anne Lamott. A thoroughly realistic view of a writer's life with a lot of good information about how to get your thoughts down on paper.
"2001 Writers Market" A listing of markets and how to sell what you write. This is updated and published every year. If you want to buy it, all book stores have it. Also, libraries have it but usually only for in-library use.
There is also a "2001 Writer's Market, Internet Edition available
"The Writer" magazine. Lots of good advice on how to write, how to get published, and where to sell things. You can find this magazine in good book stores or you can write for subscription information: 120 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116-2615. Rates are $28 per year (US), $8.00 extra for Canadian and foreign. Introductory rate of $10 for five issues.
"From Book Idea to Bestseller: What You Absolutely, Positively MUST Know to Make Your Book a Success,"
by Michael Snell, Kim Baker, and Sunny Baker. 
This is an excellent book. If you want to write a non-fiction book, follow this advice.
Final warning. Do not quit your day job with dreams of making big bucks as a freelance writer right off the bat. The average SUCCESSFUL freelance writer makes about $7000 per year. It usually takes several years to make a big enough name to become successful. However, if this is a dream, it's worth pursuing.