How to Find Time To Write: The Battle With Distractions - Part 2
JULY 15TH, 2026
This week, I’ve been watching Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, when I should have been writing this blog. This addictive show deals with motherhood and the sacrifices women make. The amazing cast includes Michelle Pfeiffer and Elle Fanning in the lead roles as mother and daughter. Pfeiffer’s character Shayanne, a single mother and former Hooters hostess, struggles to accept her daughter Margo’s decision to go ahead with her unexpected pregnancy. Especially as the baby daddy is her English Literature professor, who promptly dumps Margo.
Margo drops out of her first-year college course. We see how Margo’s and Shayanne’s lives are both affected by the new baby. It shows that parenting never stops, whether the child is a baby or an adult. As I watched the TV show, I knew it had been a book first and looked up the author, Rufi Thorpe.
Rufi Thorpe’s essay in Vela Magazine, “Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid”, really resonated with me. She argues that motherhood is incompatible with writing and demands self-sacrifice, while creativity demands selfishness. She quotes Kim Brooks’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mom” from The Cut magazine. Brooks describes how, even when she had a couple of hours to spare to write, it was difficult to get into the right headspace because she kept thinking about her children instead of writing. Was Rufi living rent-free in my brain? How did she know exactly what my struggles with my writing life are?
So instead of this being about my first feeble attempts to write short stories, I feel I’ve got to the heart of my biggest challenge in writing. That feeling of being submerged by your family’s needs and putting them first, leaving no time to write. And how many times have I sat down, too distracted by family stuff, to settle my brain into anything meaningful?
My first short stories were an attempt to emulate literary masters like Ursula K. Le Guin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson.
Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is one of my favourites, with her use of allegory (a literary device where characters, settings, or events have hidden meanings), where she creates a utopian society more sinister than many dystopian ones.
The happiness of the Omelas society is dependent on the horrible suffering of one child. This child is an allegory for exploited, unpaid workers in capitalist society and makes the reader question our own society’s structural inequalities.
By trying to copy Le Guin, I was attempting the literary equivalent of a triple axel jump when I could barely ice-skate. Inevitably, I ended up with lots of unfinished stories, a battered self-esteem and a hard drive cluttered with half-finished stories.
Now, my mantra is to keep it simple and focus on finishing things.
One happy outcome is that the more I let my imagination run wild without trying to impress, the better the writing becomes and the more people respond to it.
I still aspire to finish some of those stories, but in time… when my technical craft matches my aspirations!
- Chris
Fiction Rebellion Heroine