Writing While Parenting (Letters from the Trenches)
By K.R. Blair
I do a closing shift, now. I’ve seen a lot of moms talk about it on TikTok – you do the dishes and wipe down the counter and fluff the pillows so that when you wake up with your littles in the AM, it doesn’t feel like a bomb went off inside your house.
I have a different motivator – I’ve started writing in the early morning, again – a habit I’ve been meaning to reestablish since my youngest son was born…
… in July 2021.
But something about having four kids (ages 11, almost 8, almost 6, and 3) has waylaid me in starting this writing habit again for… *calculates how many days it’s been since Ben was born, gives up*.
Anyway. I’m a consummate Night Owl, and I always have been. In college, I’d make a game of pushing my papers until the last minute. I’d stay up late, watching movies and drinking the shitty coffee from the machines in the student center and wait for the muse to show up. The muse usually didn’t end up showing up, but the Ghost of Future Scholarships Revoked often did, and that tended to get my ass in gear.
(I graduated by the skin of my teeth, by the way, so. If you’re a younger writer reading this – that part isn’t advice.)
After I got married, I’d stay up and write after my husband went to bed. He was in a PhD Program and needed rest, which was fine with me. I’d crank my headphones and get a few thousand words of my WIP in.
Then… two pink lines on a pregnancy test in 2013. Aryn, my oldest daughter.
Staying up in survival mode is so much different than staying up with your characters, and the magic of late nights was pretty quickly diminished once she was born. She was cute, but she was loud, and my writing time quickly got shoved into weird corners of the day when she was napping or when my mom or mother-in-law could take over for a bit.
A lot of people talk about the glory days before they have kids, and I’ll be honest, I have never really resonated with that. I’m an introvert. I married my college sweetheart, and our idea of fun has always been eating breakfast burritos in bed while watching The Two Towers. I didn’t have “wild days”, so I didn’t think I’d look over my shoulder at my pre-mom days and see anything I missed.
Writing time, I realized after Aryn was born.
Writing time was my Four Lokos in a club ‘til 3am — the thing that suddenly felt impossible now that I was a “responsible adult”.
Eventually, I found a way to write. Found a flow. It wasn’t like before:
You’re deep in the flow. Your two hot immortals are about to kiss (finally! You’ve been writing this tension for a hundred pages), and then your mom opens the squeaky door behind you with your fussy daughter tucked against her shoulder: don’t mind me, just grabbing another onesie, we had a little blowout…
The Hans Zimmer score blasts from the headphones you’ve moved to your shoulders.
They’re over there, you point toward a drawer of the dresser.
Here? Your mom asks, whispering unnecessarily because she’s the best person alive and really believes in you.
Yeah, you say.
The music swells on your headphones, and the choir sounds distorted and out of place echoing out into the bedroom.
Your mom apologizes for interrupting, and you tell her not to be silly, you’re grateful for writing time and her help.
On screen, your characters are frozen, looking into each other’s eyes.
The green one? Your mother asks, and you tell her nah, the green one makes her itchy, and she’s growing out of three-month ones, anyway. And while you’re there, you ask how many ounces she was able to take. You want to have this conversation face to face, and –darn it—you want to hold your daughter because she’s so cute.
Somewhere in there, the laptop closes.
(END SCENE)
Somehow, even with things like this, I was able to piece together my first novel. It didn’t go anywhere, as you probably could have imagined when I talked about the two immortals who were about to make out.
But I kept writing. And kept having kids. Two pink lines in 2016: Liam. 2018: River Grace. 2021: Benjamin Isaac (bonus points for him having a rare birth defect that necessitated two surgeries and multiple castings!).
Over the years, nights turned into the time when I was in Mom Mode. Bad dreams, “I need to frow up”, “I’m hungry again”… writing at night wasn’t in the cards. Not to mention that after a long day, it was important to have time to just… be.
So somewhere between Aryn and Liam, I started doing something College Me could never have fathomed… I started waking up early. Five am.
I used to think only cool people with their lives together got up at five am. My little sister is one of those people. She lives in Santa Monica and runs marathons. Mornings make sense for her, she’s a badass.
But it turns out I wasn’t not a morning person… I was just using the wrong motivator to wake up. 5 AM Spin Class? I’m hitting snooze. Aspirational Katie flew too close to the sun.
5am became the only time I could spend with my characters, and therein lay the secret sauce. The thing that got me sleepily stumbling to the bathroom.
That is how, in 2015, I wrote The Hushed, my book that just came out from Blackstone Publishing on October 2nd. Early morning writing. Cinnamon Raisin toast, coffee with creamer and whipped cream. Babies all asleep, no emails needing me, yet. I didn’t have a whole day, anymore. Didn’t have dusk-til-dawn writing time. But I had two hours. Two hours to put in the small chunk of words that would eventually become the book that changed my life.
I’ve missed that habit. It was easy to fall out of it as the kids got a little older and I was able to find other writing hours in the day. I’m a full-time writer, now, so it’s easier to do than when I was juggling kids, a part-time job, and writing.
So, I knew it was time to restart the habit. Lock in. Hence the closing shift. Now, in the morning, I go downstairs to a prepped French Press and clean writing desk. I light a pumpkin candle and say my prayers and find the perfect song on Spotify. They’re rarely perfect, but they are enough to write a book. They’re enough to remind me throughout the day that while I’m a mom, I’m also a writer, too. Both crucial parts of my identity, both worthy of protecting.
Ferris Bueller Post-Credits Scene:
Me, standing at my Nespresso Machine in the pre-dawn hours, waiting for the coffee to brew as I ponder the scene I’m going to tackle….
A noise makes me jump. I spin around. My daughter, now eleven and taller than me, stands behind me, incredulous.
“What are you doing? It’s five in the morning!” I demand.
“What are you doing? It’s five in the morning!” she shoots back.
“I’m writing.”
“You write in the morning?” she asks, confused.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“That’s exactly the point. None of you know that. You’re asleep. Hence, the magic of this childless writing time. Go back to bed.”
She turns, and then looks back over her shoulder. “I’m not tired. Can I read in bed, instead?”
My kid. Full circle.
END SCENE.
K.R. Blair’s novel, The Hushed, is out now with Blackstone Publishing. Order your copy here.
K.R. is a minister’s daughter raised in the church, is now a screenwriter and novelist who specializes in dark, female-driven genre fiction that she’s certain will eventually get her excommunicated (though she’s glad it hasn’t happened yet). She is the author of two novels, The Beckoning Shadow and Unchosen. She is also a writer and executive story editor for Marvel’s Loki on Disney+, as well as the writer of the upcoming TVA series from Marvel Comics. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, four children, two dogs, four cats, and a handful of daddy longlegs with whom she’s reached a truce.
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