Writing when you don't live in Paris.

Debunking intellectual stereotypes & lauding the blue collar worker

Today, let’s challenge the academized notion of writing. Today, let’s laud the blue collar worker—by which I mean, anyone who works with her hands. Janitors, truckers, plumbers, and caterers as well as moms. Busy hands allow for idle minds. An idle mind is a dangerous thing. It can get into all sorts of trouble. It may even make you into—

A writer.

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When you think “writer,” you might think this:

Or this:

You probably don’t think this:

Photo by Amílcar Vanden-Bouch on Unsplash

Must I wear a Wildean Hat? And Other Questions of Writerly Qualifications

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resistance of an unglamorous “day job” tends to improve one’s writing.

A writer is a denizen of either Paris or NYC (no other place will do). She "flaneurs" all day at cafes with a Moleskine & fountain pen (no other pen will do). She writes novels all night when the muse inspires (no other time will do). She dresses in a distinctive way (no other way will do).

Gentlemen, select a Wildean hat and cape. Ladies, perhaps a DonnaTartt-esque smoking jacket with accompanying smoke (only don’t actually smoke the cigarette outside of the photo shoot or you’ll get esophageal cancer).

Alas, those writer days are over for me, if ever they did exist.

I remember being incredibly efficient with my time in high school in order to fit in creative writing. Now, I credit that almost entirely to sports. Running cross-country and track taught me discipline and ambition, motivated me to fuel with good sleep and nutrition—and took up a lot of time. This meant my day was necessarily highly regimented: wake up at 7, drive to school by 8, schoolwork until 3:15, sports practice until 5. Dinner. Homework. Youth group (on Wednesdays). In bed by 10. It wasn’t very writerly.

To make up for my Spartan high school experience, I spent my underclassman years socializing and drinking, writing bad poetry, and instigating shenanigans like Existentialist Tuesday in true writerly fashion. I also penned some banger philosophy papers. (Incidentally, my liberal arts education was sponsored by a trust fund, so when I make fun of trust fund babies, know it’s a bit tongue in cheek.)

Then, in my junior year, I married a man of astonishing integrity and drive and, largely due to his good example, began to get serious again—working landscaping, learning to cook, and serving my church. Following college, I worked as a maid at a ski resort, then as a German teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Paradise Valley. I got a desk job as a university admin and, having secured good health insurance, promptly conceived. I spent the next nine months puking in my trashcan, and now, I’m a mom.

I had a taste of the real writer’s life during my shenanigan years. I was known to visit Europe, to flaneur in cafes, to write with fountain pens, to stay up all night with the muse, and to wear Wildean hats. Most of what I wrote was self-indulgent, pretentious, and stupid.

Since then, I’ve had to squeeze writing in through the cracks in my life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resistance of an unglamorous “day job” has been helpful. Only when I became a mom did I imbue the ambition and discipline of my teen years with a sense of direction and perspective. This has allowed me to create a sustainable writing practice. I credit the existence of both this blog and my fledgling freelancing business to the peculiar maturity brought on by motherhood. Somehow, once I had a baby, ego and fears of failure didn’t matter any more. It just mattered that I did what I was made to do. With a departure from the “writerly” lifestyle and a return to the Spartan discipline I once found in high school sports, I find that slowly but steadily, my writing is beginning to improve.

Alice Munro famously wrote her Nobel-winning short stories while her baby napped. That worked for me for about ten months. When the baby napped twice a day for a total of three hours, I managed to shower, wash the dishes, and write a bit in that time. But now she’s down to one nap of half that length, and I can just about fit in the shower and the dishes. Where, then, does writing fit in?

A mama doesn’t have much time to stare at a screen and type (or sip in a cafe wearing sophisticated shoes). Most of her work is physically mediated: washing dishes, cooking food, carrying baby, wiping up messes, running around playgrounds, cuddling. These things are the embodied manifestations of her spiritual work of strengthening new souls. But with youngsters, the work skews heavily physical. Babies feel love through bodies, smiles, sweet tones, not through words.

This means mama can multitask.

As my baby learned to walk, I began to write essays in my head.¹ I remember hearing somewhere that Justice Scalia would mull over his opinions for weeks before first setting pen to paper. I liked the idea of marinating, maturing, mulling images and ideas, letting them take on new significances, or, following the methodological syntax of my poet friend Caitlin, “layering.” But some of the best stuff I’ve ever written came as a lightning strike, and my memory, especially postpartum, is atrocious. I realized more recently that A.I. technology makes it much easier to mentally draft the early stages of an essay without losing those diaphanous, half-formed inklings to the winds of daily life.

The Blue Collar Art of Tech-Assisted Dictation

Incorporate the life of the mind into the sublunary life of the body whether you’re in Paris or Perryville, Kentucky

Step 1: to be employed during playtime or while cooking dinner.

Help baby stack blocks, or chop some onions, and while you’re doing that, ease the boredom by…

1. listening to podcasts and having online articles read to you by the Substack app or NaturalReader’s Chrome Extension.

This extension offers paid options, if you want a more realistic sounding voice to read to you. (Note that it doesn’t work on PDF’s.)

Steps 2 & 3: to be employed during stroller walks to the park.

Maybe the sunlight and the brisk exercise sparks a thought and so, to catch it before it flies, you…

2. Dictate your ideas to Google Docs’ Voice-to-Text Option (or Notes voice-typing).

When you get home, Ctrl-C the messy transcript and paste it into…

3. Your new formatting buddy, Chat-GPT.

Ask it to add punctuation, fix run-on sentences and typos, and divide the text chunk into readable paragraphs.

And voila! You have a first draft. It’ll still take manual typing time to edit, rewrite, incorporate quotes, and format, but it allows you to incorporate the life of the mind into the sublunary life of the body whether you’re in Paris or Perryville, Kentucky.

If I develop expertise in using these tools, I might continue to use them even when I don’t need to. In developing impromptu dictation skills, one becomes not only a better writer but a better thinker, speaker, and conversationalist. Who doesn’t want that?

After all, our ultimate goal in all of this is not simply to become better writers, but to be fully human. And sometimes technology can help us do just that.

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To all ye humans blue of collar, pray tell me—do you write essays in your heads while you work? How do your mental and physical processes interact?

Also, what are your favorite writerly stereotypes? There are so many, and all of them make me laugh out loud.

1. I realize that this period of a mobile but still primarily physical child will soon come to an end. When she starts talking, much of my “writing” might involve taking down her dictation—already, I’m collecting lists of her first words, which involve “cheese,” “baby,” and “woof woof.” The stages of my child’s development (and the probable advents of more children) will certainly impact my writing practice here, but while my writing may change, I don’t see myself stopping it until I also stop, you know, breathing. And at that point, I’m sure I’ll become some sort of literary poltergeist who rearranges laundromat letterboards and messes up games of Scrabble. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!