When I had my first child, 14 years ago, I thought my life was over. When I had my second child, two years later, I knew for certain that it was.

How was I ever to get anything done again? I couldn’t even eat lunch, most days panic-gobbling a bowl of Crunchy Nuts at around 3pm, let alone be creative. Writing anything other than shopping lists or notes about feeding-and-nap times felt like the height of self-indulgent luxury.

The days were so long and so hard, time became baggy and elastic. The space between my youngest’s 0500 wake-up and lunchtime lasted approximately 9,000 years. When my children did eventually start at nursery, I thought gloomily, I’d be so old as to be no use for anything.

But then they went to nursery, my youngest following his sister through the doors in 2015. A trickle of time came back to me and boy, did I rinse the hell out of it. Before children, I had all the time in the world, and I squandered it. After children, I was able to take three clear hours by the scruff of the neck and not let a minute go.

And this new gift of time triggered a creativity in me I didn’t even know was there.

I was never one of those journalists who secretly wanted to be a novelist, I only ever wanted to write newspaper features. I never seriously thought, until I was about 35, that I could have the patience or imagination to write fiction.

But once my youngest was at nursery I became obsessed with the idea and worked for the next ten years to make it happen. Having constraints on my time actually made the work feel more urgent and, in fact, borderline naughty – it was a great motivator.

These days my children are out for most of the day, leaving at 8.30am and back at teatime. My working days are longer, sure, but it was having small children that trained me to make the most of any child-free hours I have.

And this really matters, because while writing fiction is about ideas and inspiration, it’s also about time and pressure. A lot of being an author is about a relentless daily commitment to getting words down and a stubborn refusal to quit.

When you have raised two children from helpless babies to kids who can get their own breakfast, (a task that, at the beginning, feels totally impossible), you understand that daunting projects – like writing novel – can often be overcome with little more than time and pressure. Children don’t give you the option to quit and for a bit of a quitter like me, that was another new lesson.

So thanks, kids! You gave me nits and threadworm, norovirus and countless colds – but you also gave me an unstoppable will to create and the drive to keep going. I’d say the puking and the itching was a small price to pay.

The Three Lessons Every Aspiring Novelist Needs to Hear

Novels have rules. You need to know what they are (even if you plan to break them). Self-help books are all you need. There’s even a Writing Fiction For Dummies! It’s actually pretty good.
Give yourself permission to write badly. Feeling like every sentence has to be immediately perfect will stop you from getting a first draft completed. But you must pair this with the courage and humility to delete or change work later that you know isn’t good.
Be really careful about who you show your writing to. I didn’t show mine to any friends or family, only to my agent. Fiction is very subjective: if a friend or relative doesn’t give you rave feedback, that might kill your energy stone dead - but they are very unlikely to be the best judge of what editors are looking for.

How Motherhood Made Me More Creative By Esther Walker

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