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"It takes great patience to live with a writer. It takes much more than patience to live with a writer who is trying to complete a book. It takes something superhuman to do so when there are two young children in the house and the writer's involvement in their entertainment, hygience, transportation, schooling, and feeding is limited at best."

Despite having a family, a dayjob writing for Details magazine and a hundred other commitments, journalist Jeff Gordinier managed to write an entire book--and that quote explains how much he depended on his wife. 

It's called X Saves the World, taking a funny, careful look at the much-maligned Generation X. Today, Gordinier explains how he made the time to write this intense little book in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your acknowledgments section has a great description of the joys of struggling to write a book with a full-time job and young children running around the house. Obviously, you coped with these issues and wrote your book. How did you do it? Any practical advice about stress management and writing hints for fledgling writers with family obligations?

Jeff Gordinier:
Well, if you’re interested in writing a book, and you don’t happen to have kids yet, then write your book now, dude, while your brain cells are more or less intact. Continue reading...

Having kids in the house complicates the process in hundreds of lunatic ways. It’s not just that the kids seem to get a kick out of shrieking and running around the house when you’re trying to concentrate.

It’s that children tend to wake up in the middle of the night, plus they have a knack for getting sick, and there is some cosmic law in place that dictates that they will get sick and wake up in the middle of the night precisely when you are on deadline. It’s…uncanny. Also, they’re children, so you can’t really kick them out of the house.    

At some point when I was writing X Saves the World, I panicked. I just didn’t see how I was going to be able to find the time or the focus to finish it with my family and my job at Details pulling me in 800 different directions.

A few minutes before I succumbed to an old-fashioned Fifties Businessman Nervous Breakdown (“McLean, here I come…”), I got an email with some very sound advice from author Jon Wertheim, who writes for Sports Illustrated.

His advice was obvious, although I hadn’t figured it out yet: write anywhere. I have a nice attic office at home, and I guess I felt as though I was supposed to use it, but Wertheim’s email snapped me out of that rut.

Suddenly I found myself scribbling sections of the book in longhand, on legal pads, during morning and evening rides on the Metro North commuter trains. I just wrote wherever I could, whenever I could — at night in suburban diners, during lunch breaks at the Caffe Latte coffeehouse in Dobbs Ferry, in a fleabag hotel in Las Vegas when I was reporting the “Beatles for Sale” section of the book.

My friend Emily White, an author and editor in Seattle, subscribes to the Muse of Motel 6 Principle of Manuscript Management: When all else fails, check into a cheap motel. It works.

I would love to keep discussing this, but my two kids are downstairs and they just started howling like caged capuchin monkeys. I’m not kidding.