what writing looks like when you’re building a creative life around the edges of a real one

on fragments, stolen minutes, and the essay that arrives before you have time to write it

People occasionally ask me how I write my essays.

The honest answer is that I don’t have a beautiful routine. I don’t wake up at 5am to journal by candlelight. I don’t disappear to a quiet café with uninterrupted hours stretching ahead of me.

Most of my essays begin somewhere between a work meeting, a pile of laundry, and two one-year-old twins who have no interest in my creative ambitions.

The irony is that I write about the gap between expectation and reality, and my writing process is perhaps the clearest example of that gap in my own life.

For a long time, I thought being a writer would look different. I imagined spaciousness. Long afternoons with notebooks. Ideas arriving on schedule. A version of myself with enough time to think before life interrupted.

Instead, writing has become something I do in fragments.

A sentence typed into my phone while waiting for the kettle to boil. A thought captured in the Notes app before it disappears. An idea scribbled down after everyone else has gone to sleep.

The essays often arrive long before I have the time to write them. They appear while driving, folding tiny clothes, answering emails, or walking through a supermarket. I have learned that writing is less about finding time and more about paying attention. The real work happens long before I open a blank page.

The essay on the women in my family who never got to want things started as a feeling I could not name while washing up after dinner. Not a sentence. Not even a clear thought. Just a particular quality of grief that arrived unexpectedly while doing something entirely ordinary.

I did not sit down to write it that night. I carried it for three days, adding to it in small increments, a line in the Notes app on my commute, a paragraph typed one-handed while a baby slept on my shoulder, a conclusion that came to me fully formed at two in the morning and that I typed into my phone in the dark so I would not lose it by morning.

By the time I sat down to actually write the essay, most of it already existed. Not on the page, in my head, in fragments, assembled over days of ordinary life. The sitting down was almost the easy part.

This is not the romantic image of a writer. I know that.

The romantic image involves solitude and intention and the particular atmosphere of a life organised around the work. My life is organised around two children who wake at six and a full-time job that starts shortly after and a marriage that deserves more of my attention than it always gets and a home that requires maintenance and a creative practice that I have decided, despite all of the above, I am not willing to abandon.

The creative practice fits in the gaps. It always has.

I used to feel ashamed of this. Used to compare the reality of my writing life, the stolen minutes, the phone notes, the essays assembled in fragments over days, to the version of a writing life I had absorbed from everywhere that writing lives are described. The dedicated morning hours. The uninterrupted afternoons. The life arranged in service of the work.

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I do not have that life. I have a full-time job in tech and one-year-old twins and a house and a marriage and a community and a faith and all the ordinary, accumulating, non-negotiable demands of a life being fully lived. And for a long time I used the absence of the ideal conditions as a reason to wait. To defer. To tell myself I would write properly when the children were older, when work was calmer, when I had the space the work deserved.

The space did not arrive. It never does, in my experience. You do not get given the space. You build it, badly, in the margins of everything else, with whatever is available.

What changed was not my circumstances. What changed was my relationship with the fragment. I stopped treating the note in my phone as something lesser than the finished essay and started treating it as the first draft of the finished essay. I stopped waiting for the uninterrupted afternoon and started using the twenty minutes between the twins going down and dinner needing to be made. I stopped needing the conditions to be right and started trusting that the conditions I had, imperfect, interrupted, always slightly insufficient, were the conditions in which the work would be made. Because they were the only conditions available.

The essays you read on this Substack were written in those conditions. In the margins of a life that does not pause for creative ambition. In the fragments that accumulated into something whole.

There is something I have come to believe about creativity that I could not have believed before this particular season of my life: constraints are not the opposite of good work. They are, sometimes, the condition of it.

The pressure of the limited window concentrates the thinking. When you have twenty minutes, you do not spend fifteen of them avoiding the page. The forced economy of the fragment teaches you which words are necessary and which ones are the luxury of having too much time.

The essay that arrives in pieces, built over days in the margins of ordinary life, contains, I think, something that the essay written in a single uninterrupted sitting does not. It contains the accumulation of living. The way a thought changes shape when you carry it for three days before committing it to paper. The way the real argument reveals itself not in the ideal conditions of the writer’s dream but in the ordinary conditions of the writer’s actual life.

I write about the gap between expectation and reality. It turns out I am most honest about that gap when I am living inside it.

So when people ask me how I write my essays, this is the real answer.

I write them in the time that other things leave behind. In the Notes app and in the margins of meetings and at the kitchen counter and after everyone else has gone to sleep. I write them in pieces that do not look like an essay until they do. I write them in the life I have rather than the life I imagined I would need to do the work.

The beautiful routine would be nice. The quiet café and the uninterrupted hours and the spacious life arranged around the work, I will not pretend I have stopped wanting those things. Some mornings I want them very much.

But they are not what the work requires. What the work requires is attention and the willingness to capture what the attention finds, in whatever form is available, in whatever window the day offers.

The rest, it turns out, takes care of itself.

xo,

musingsofacitygirl — still spiraling, still observing, still surviving beautifully

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This kind of writing is slow, unoptimized, and made with care. If this resonated, you’re welcome to support it.

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