What Nora Ephron Can Teach Us about Writing
(How to Be a Parent and Write Books)
Listen to this episode of The First Draft Club:
The Juggle Is Real: Why Writing Feels Impossible When You’re a Parent
In The Book Incubator, the program that I run for novelists and memoirists, I have one-on-one calls with people where we troubleshoot their process. Everyone is working on a book—either a novel or memoir—and a recurring theme I’ve noticed lately is how we’re all struggling to find time to write while having kids.
Most writers in the program are women—there are a lot of moms—and many of these moms have jobs and children, so it's tough to carve out writing time.
I recently came across a quote from the late Nora Ephron about how she managed it all. It’s the best advice I’ve ever heard about juggling priorities, and I’ve been thinking about it all the time, and so it’s what I want to talk about today.
If you don’t remember Nora Ephron, she wrote some of the greatest romcoms of all time: When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, which she also directed.
She also wrote books, including the novel Heartburn and the memoir I Feel Bad About My Neck. She also had two kids and was a journalist. Point is, she was a busy lady.
Finding Time to Write—and Justifying It
I often talk about how you don't need to overhaul your life to write a novel or memoir. You can knock out a draft in about a season by writing about 45 minutes a day, five days a week. Or two hours a week in one sitting. Or any variation on the theme that gets you a few thousand words per week, on average.
But you still have to find that time. Plus, once you do find it, how do you justify taking time to write in your own mind? For many of women in particular, the mindset game is half the battle. I know it is for me. I have published three novels and one memoir, and I wrote all but my first book as a parent with a full-time job. The time-struggle is no joke.
Nora Ephron’s Glass and Plastic Ball Analogy
Which brings me back to Nora.
I'm going to paraphrase here, so forgive any creative liberties I'm taking if you've actually read the same quote. The point is the idea, not the direct citation.
When someone once asked her on a panel how she did it all, a question I know many of us relate to, her answer was this: on any given day, she juggled many balls. Some of these balls were plastic, and some were glass. Balls were going to fall. She just tried to make sure that she caught the glass ones and let the plastic ones go.
Let’s unpack this. From the outset, from the idea alone of there being balls that simply don’t get caught, I feel seen.
A feeling that I suspect many moms, including moms who are not writers, harbor is a sense of low-grade failure, a constant sensation of not doing anything well. In my case, most of the time I understand intellectually that this feeling is not accurate, and that's what's so interesting about it. It seems to spring from a sort of elusive ideal of womanhood that doesn't exist, which is that one should be able to do everything we care about to our personal optimal standards: play with the kids; prepare healthy food for them; make sure they're reading at home and wearing enough sunscreen and learning to clean up after themselves so they don't turn into entitled jerks. And also: showing up for ourselves creatively, working on that book that we’ve been dreaming about for 20 years, logging words every week if not every day, especially if we’ve decided to invest in a program like The Book Incubator or another writing class.
And then, on top of it all, if you have a job, you have professional responsibilities to which you're also trying to bring your A-game…and we haven't even talked about who is maintaining the household, doing laundry and dishes and changing the sheets and calling for help when the HVAC breaks in the middle of the summer. For the love of God, It's absolutely impossible to do all of this and to do it well with a 24-hour day.
So Nora acknowledging from the get-go that balls are dropped every day makes me feel better—it’s a recalibration of reality. It’s lowering the bar to acknowledge the reality that I am a human. No more, no less.
Let the plastic balls FALL, and don’t feel bad about it, she says.
Cool.
Choosing Your Glass Balls—and Letting the Rest Go
Now here is where it gets interesting: Ephron would make sure that the balls she did try to catch were the glass ones. According to someone who was at the live event where she shared this anecdote, Nora clarified that she did not mean the glass balls were her children and the plastic balls were her writing. The glass is the stuff that's super important regardless of what category it's in. The plastic balls are stuff that just doesn't matter as much.
I love this. I think I do the same thing intuitively—it's the only way that I can write books and run a business and be a parent.
What this looks like for me may not be how it would look for you; we get to decide what our own glass balls are. But in my case, it means that there are seasons where I am making compromises that I would not make for longer periods. There are weeks or months where I will work on my novel and neglect my business. During a phase like this, I am not optimizing my ads or planning a webinar or doing a detailed analysis of my tax return. But I am logging words on my latest book project.
Similarly, I might take a solid three or four hour chunk out of the weekend to write. I might skip a birthday party or a trip to the zoo with my family.
Do I want to make a lifetime of those choices? No. I love weekends with my kid. But I also know that my creativity is important to me. And I’m not going to fall for the martyrdom trap here and say it’s important because it “makes me a better parent” (though it probably does?). Even if it didn’t, valuing my writing time would be important, because it’s important to me as a person. (It’s okay to have things that matter to you without having to come up with why they’re also good for someone else. If you’re a woman, I am talking to you!)
So creativity matters to me, and as a writer, I am what Cheryl Strayed has described as a “binge writer”—when I'm working on a project, I'm all in it, and then when I finish a draft, I can go months without writing. That’s why I say I might prioritize my writing for a season, then go back to prioritizing other parts of my life.
On the other hand, a glass ball for me as a parent is snuggle time + books before bed. This is time for my son and me to connect, and I cherish it.
But a parenting plastic ball for me? Screen time.
Feel free to gasp and scream—my name is Mary, and I let my kid watch screens. I DO. I let him watch screens because sometimes I'm writing, and sometimes I just need a minute to do something I want to do. [You click away and stop reading, having lost all respect!]
Making Peace with the Plastic Balls (And Why That Matters)
I think one simple way to distinguish between glass balls and plastic balls is that glass balls feel like too much of a compromise to you on a soul level, while with plastic balls, you just have a gut sense they aren't going to have severe long-term consequences.
They just feel like in the end, they aren't going to matter that much. There's a lot of household stuff that falls into this plastic-ball category for me, including putting clean laundry back in the drawers, which essentially never gets done. So be it. Would it be ideal if it did? Of course. But every day, some balls are going to fall, and my underwear is one of them. A lot of the time, so are emails.
During the pandemic, I attended a virtual creativity retreat led by Elizabeth Gilbert and Rob Bell—two people I’ve long admired. They did not talk about this plastic and glass balls analogy, but Elizabeth Gilbert said something that relates: she shared that if you email her, you should not expect to hear back. Unless you’re already her friend, she just won't open your email.
She doesn't feel guilty about this, because she has decided to spend her one wild and precious life on people who are already in it. You will not receive an auto-reply apologizing either; your email will go unanswered. WILD! BOLD! FEROCIOUS! We all stared, wide-eyed, at her face in its little Zoom box.
For Liz Gilbert, emails are essentially her plastic balls. And you know what? I'm thrilled about it. I am happy for her that she has this boundary, and I am happy for us that she has this boundary, because I love her books—City of Girls was so good—and, selfishly, I want her to have the time and energy to write more of them.
I also think that, as a woman, she is modeling behavior that most of us could deploy more, which is not assuming that we have to make ourselves available to everyone on earth and their freaking brother and uncle who want us to read the novel they wrote. Or to "pick our brains" over coffee. Or to do XYZ, whatever XYZ is.
So use this analogy if it's helpful to you in balancing the various priorities in your life, and just remember that creativity gets to have glass balls too.
On next week’s episode, I’ll be continuing this conversation to talk about how in the fall I started to use dictation—yes, dictation—to write fiction. So tune in for a new way of getting words on paper!
If you liked this advice from Nora Ephron (and Elizabeth Gilbert) and you want more advice from writers, check out my blog post, Top 10 Tips for Writers: Advice from Bestselling Authors.
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