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"Zane. Whenever I hear the name of Patricia's boyfriend of six months, I imagine some woman in a lonely rural town stuck with dusty old videos of 'Shane' and 'Zorro' to get her through her pregnancy, then in the delirium of her labor, naming her child Zane in deference to them. In reality, he was probably named Jim."

That’s a witty moment from DeLauné Michel’s new novel, The Safety of Secrets. The book focuses on the life-long friendship (and secrets) of two women, a plot that dives deep into anxieties about growing older.

While her characters tip-toe into motherhood, Michel wrote her book with a toddler wandering in and out of her writing room. Today, she shares writing secrets that will help all writers with a day-job or children.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog: 
You wrote this novel with kids running around the house. What is your advice to the over-worked writer with a day-job or family? How did you cope with the stress of balancing so many different parts of your life and still finding time to write?

DeLauné Michel:
Life is never going to be perfect for me to write. And I think it is better that it isn’t. One of my acting teachers used to say that one’s work can’t be precious; it has to live in the real-world. Continue reading...

What he meant was that you can never be sure what type of environment you will be in, so you’d better be able to do your work no matter what is going on. That has been the best advice I’ve been given for my writing, even though it was meant for actors.

I’m glad I have to balance writing with the rest of my life. I think it feeds my work. I have a four year old, and a seventeen month old. I’m not able to work in the morning hours that so many writers swear by. I can’t get to my desk until after lunch.

But as my cousin André says, “The sentences don’t know what time of day it is.” I love that. They don’t. They also don’t know if my 4 year old comes into my office while I am working, and wants to sit on the day-bed for five minutes and pretend to write.

I made a decision when my first son was born that when I die, if I have written one or two or three fewer novels because I let my sons come in my office to say hello, then I would rather that.

I have also become adept at squeezing as much as I can out of time – I have to be. My life is counted in minutes. There are some days when because of everything – my sons, running Spoken Interludes, my husband, all of it - I only get half an hour or even twenty minutes, but I take them anyway.

I write. And if I get one sentence that works, that was more than I had before and I have kept the dialogue going between me and the characters in my book. They need my time, too.

I create the time to write. I don’t get lots of manicures or have lunch with friends often, but I’ve done all that for years. Not that I don’t have great friendships (or presentable nails!), but right now, when I have help during the day (I’m too tired after they go to bed at night to write), if I’m not with my sons, I want to be with my next novel.

The other thing that has helped me is accepting the realities of my life. I’m not in the woods in Maine. I can’t work the same set hours each day. But the most important thing for me is being realistic about what I can do (and doing it), about what my process is, and not comparing it to other people’s or an idea in my head of what a writer’s life is supposed to look like – whatever that is.

And that was hard for me in the beginning because of all the writers in my family – there were so many examples my whole life. But when I began writing my first novel, I realized that this was my journey as a writer, no one else’s. And what mattered was for it to work for me, so that I could fail again and fail better, to paraphrase Beckett. And that’s what I try to do.