What Nora Ephron Can Teach Us about Writing, a.k.a. 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.
Well, I recently heard a quote from Nora Ephron about how she managed it all. It’s the best advice I’ve ever heard about juggling priorities, and I think about it all the time, and so it’s what I want to talk about today.
If you don’t remember who Nora Ephron is, she’s 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 wrote books, including the novel Heartburn and the memoir I Feel Bad About My Neck. She also had 2 kids and was a journalist.
I’ll stop there. But the point is, she was a busy lady.
And someone once asked her on a panel how she did it all, and it was a question I know many of us relate to.
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 just by writing about 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Or two hours a week in one sitting. Or any variation on the theme that gets you a few thousand words a week.
But you still have to FIND that time—and that itself can be tough.
And then, when 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 while being a parent and holding a job. The struggle is real.
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.
She talked about how on any given day, she's juggling many balls. Some of these balls are plastic, and some are glass.
Some balls are going to fall. There are balls that she will not catch, and so she doesn't try to catch all of them.
She just tries to make sure that she catches the glass ones and lets 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.
Redefining Success: Doing Less, but Doing What Matters
I talk with my friend Rufi about this fairly regularly, and I think it’s a feeling that perhaps many moms, including moms who are not writers, harbor...a sense of low-grade failure, a constant sensation of not doing anything well.
(This is not a cry for help; I don't need you to email me and tell me that I am doing a good job at life.)
Most of the time, I understand intellectually that that is true, and that's what's so interesting about the vague feeling of failure—it's this sort of elusive ideal of womanhood that doesn't exist, which is that one should be able to do absolutely everything important and do it to our personal highest standards.
Play with your 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 out to be entitled jerks.
But also that you are showing up for yourself creatively, working on the book that you've been dreaming about for 20 years, logging words every week if not every day, especially if you have decided to invest in yourself and join a program like the Book Incubator or another writing class.
And then, on top of all this, 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 ch
anging the sheets and handling it when the HVAC breaks in the middle of the summer.
It's absolutely impossible to do all of this and to do it well with a 24-hour day.
And so Nora acknowledging from the get-go that balls are dropped every single day makes me feel better—it’s like recalibrating reality.
Lowering the bar of expectation to acknowledge the limitations of being a human.
Drop the plastic balls, and don’t feel bad about that.
Choosing Your Glass Balls—And Letting the Rest Go
Now here is where it gets interesting: she just makes sure that the balls she does try to catch are 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 are her children and the plastic balls are 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.
And I love this, because I realize that I do the same thing intuitively—it's the only way that I can write books and run a business and be a parent who doesn’t feel like she’s ruining her child.
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 that kind of phase, 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? Personally, no. I love weekends with my kid.
But I also know that my creativity is important to me.
And I’m not even going to fall for the martyrdom trap here and say it’s important because it makes me a better parent.
Even if it didn’t, it would be important, because it’s important to me as a person, not me as a parent.
It’s okay to have things that matter to you without having to come up with why they’re also good for someone else. Okay? 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.
To continue sharing what my personal glass and plastic balls are, one glass ball for me as a parent is snuggle time and books before bed. It’s time for my son and me to connect.
But a parenting plastic ball for me is screen time.
Feel free to gasp and scream—my name is Mary, and I let my kid watch screens. I let him watch screens because sometimes I'm writing, and sometimes I just need a minute to do something I want to do.
Making Peace with the Plastic Balls (And Why That Matters)
To step back and discuss this concept more broadly, 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 whom I really look up to and have for a long time.
And they did not talk about this plastic and glass balls analogy, but Elizabeth Gilbert said something that relates, which I also think about it all the time. She said 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 is one person with limited time on this earth, and she has decided to spend that time on people who are already in her life. You will not receive an autoreply apologizing; you just won't hear back.
It's a perfectly acceptable choice even if it is one that in our digital age we may view as rude; it's like knocking on someone's door and they choose not to answer.
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 to write my novel, 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.
How much money can you really earn as an author?
I gathered data from more than 1,400 published authors to dig into the realities of book advances, self-publishing income, and the key factors that affect them, like genre, debut status, agent representation, and publisher type.
Dig into all this information with me in a free workshop filled with real-world insights, practical strategies, and visual tools to help you navigate your publishing journey with confidence.
If you’re determined to understand your earning potential and make informed decisions for your writing career, this workshop is exactly what you need.
