Writing Between the Lessons: Homeschooling and the Creative Life

Most mornings in our house, the school day and the writing day start at roughly the same time. But this isn't as harmonious as it sounds.

I've been homeschooling my teenagers for years now, which means that the person responsible for their education and the person trying to finish a novel are the same person, working in the same house, often at the same hours, with competing demands that don't particularly care about each other's schedules. It's a balancing act I chose deliberately and would choose again. It's also, on certain days, genuinely exhausting.

One of the things I've committed to on this blog is telling the truth about what the writing life actually looks like. And the truth is that mine looks like this.

What Homeschooling Takes From the Writing

The most obvious cost is time. Hours that might otherwise go to a manuscript go to lesson planning, teaching, and the general orchestration of another human being's educational life. Writing sessions get interrupted. Creative momentum, which is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances, gets broken by the real and legitimate needs of real people who are more important than any manuscript.

I've had to make peace with a slower pace of production than I might otherwise maintain. Books take longer. The gaps between projects stretch out. There are days when I sit down to write with whatever is left after everything else has been handled, and what's left is not always much.

I've had to learn to write in smaller windows than I'd like, to pick up a scene in the middle and find my way back into it quickly, to treat fifteen good minutes as worth having even when I'd prefer three uninterrupted hours.

What Homeschooling Gives Back

However, homeschooling has made me a better observer.

Teaching requires you to explain things you've understood for so long that you stopped noticing how they work. It requires patience with the process of learning, attention to how understanding actually develops, and a willingness to meet someone exactly where they are rather than where you wish they were. Those are good skills for a novelist to practice.

I've also found that the conversations that happen naturally in a homeschool environment (all the tangents and the questions and the moments when a history lesson turns into a two-hour discussion about human nature and the way things change) feed the part of me that writes.

My teenagers are interesting people with sharp minds and genuine opinions, and spending serious time with them has given me more insight into how people actually think and talk and process the world than I could have gotten any other way.

What Holds It Together

Honestly? Faith and flexibility, in roughly equal measure.

The faith piece is straightforward. I firmly believe this is the right choice for our family in this season, and that conviction steadies me on the days when the balance feels impossible. The flexibility piece is harder won. It means releasing the idea of a perfect writing day and finding genuine gratitude for the imperfect one. It means accepting that this chapter of life will eventually look different, and that the constraints of right now are not permanent.

In the meantime, I write between the lessons. Sometimes in the twenty minutes before the next subject starts, in the hour after everyone has gone to their own work for the afternoon, or the wee hours of the late night after everyone's in bed.

It's not the writing life I imagined when I started, but it might be better, actually, for being so thoroughly rooted in the real one.

How do you manage the creative work alongside everything else life requires of you? I'd love to hear what your balance looks like in the comments.