Shirley Jackson and All of Life Is the Writing Life

Of course, the ideas promoted by All of Life Is the Writing Life™ are not new. Writers have been acknowledging the value of the mundane things of life and how all the things of life contribute to the creative process ever since writers have had thoughts on writing.

Here’s a quote from the book Daily Rituals: Women at Work on Shirley Jackson’s writing practice:

[Shirley Jackson] said in a 1949 interview, “50 per cent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to—well, to create concrete things again.”

Though Jackson sometimes complained about the difficulty of reconciling the two roles [of being a mother and a writer], she also—as Ruth Franklin argues in her biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life—“seems to have derived imaginative energy from the constraints.” Franklin continues:

Writing in the interstices—the hours between morning kindergarten and lunch, while a baby napped, or after the children had gone to bed—demanded a discipline that suited her. She was constantly thinking of stories while cooking, cleaning, or doing just about anything else. “All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories,” she said in one of her lectures. Even later, when the children were older and she had more time, Jackson would never be the kind of writer who sat at the typewriter all day. Her writing did not begin when she sat down at her desk, any more than it ended when she got up: “A writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.”

I love that peek into Jackson’s creativity and how sitting down at her desk didn’t mark the beginning of her writing sessions, how getting up didn’t mark the end.

I wish we didn’t need to be reminded that everything matters, but we do.

Jackson helps us remember that our writerly instincts and imaginations can still be engaged while doing other work and activities.

I’d add that even when we aren’t actively thinking about the writing we want to do when it’s time to sit down and write—even when writing is the furthest thing from our minds—we are being formed to be who we will be when we sit down to write.

So, cheers to remembering All of Life Is the Writing Life. And cheers to good words from other writers that help us remember.