Putting Pen To Paper :: YummyMummyClub.ca

It seems the best ideas come to me in the playground. That’s where, pushing my one-year-old on the swings, I met another new mother with whom I started a conversation that inspired me to publish my first book, Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Within just ten minutes, we’d talked about our post-baby identity crisis, our shockingly diminished ambition and our diminished and distressed sex life.

If you’d told me in my pre-baby days the playground would become not only my main networking site, but also a source of inspiration, I would have laughed in your face.

But I’ve had so many great ideas and friends evolve from conversations in the park. And it was there that my idea for writing classes for mothers took shape.

It was last fall and I’d recently published the anthology and was getting dozens of emails a day from mothers who wanted to write their own stories, mothers who wanted to know if there would be a sequel to which they could contribute, or a magazine that I might be starting. I had always resisted teaching, focusing instead on my own writing career. But watching my kids dangle precariously from the monkey bars, I realized that getting a group of moms together to talk about motherhood and writing, my two passions, might just be a great idea.

In my first class, held at a
Vancouver coffee shop, eight women showed up, all relatively new moms, all raw and emotional. That first night, each woman talked about her major struggle with motherhood and why it was important to her to turn those struggles into words. We talked about our marital stress, the transformation in our ambition, our identities, our friendships. It was like therapy, with some writing thrown in. There were tears and laughter and I couldn’t believe the quality of writing that came out of spontaneous assignments, asking the women to sit quietly and write on a set topic such as The First Time, or The Things We Carry.

If you, too, are up for a new challenge and want to start writing, here are my Top Five Tips to get started:

Read. There’s a ton of fantastic (and trashy) literature on motherhood out there. Pick up a book by Anne Lamott, Rachel Cusk, Catherine Newman or any of the numerous anthologies on motherhood published over the years (especially mine!). They will inspire you, or at the very least, make you laugh, and probably cry.
Buy a notebook and take it with you wherever you go. You never know when you might get five minutes—at the park, in a coffee shop while your child takes an unexpected nap.
Start writing. If you can’t think of what to write, you can use what I call a Writing Spark and just riff on a particular topic like Saying No, Faith, The First Time. You’ll be surprised what comes out.
Keep writing. Writing, like sex (and like motherhood itself), gets better with practice. Try to find some time to write on a regular basis, even if it’s only for a few minutes and it’s only one or two sentences. Use your notebook to vent, weigh major life decisions, set new goals. You don’t have to write a whole story every day.
Take a class. If you really want to learn the art of great writing and how to turn your experiences with motherhood into words, come to one of my classes. There will be an online session starting this fall for those who can’t make it to a class in-person. In the classes, you’ll be surrounded by other moms for support and encouragement and constructive criticism, and you’ll learn all the rules of good writing, and how to break them.