Writing At Home with Kids: Tips and Tales From Quarantine Dashboard Dashboard

Written by Paul Brownfield

For many writers who are parents, particularly of young children, the COVID-19 pandemic really hit home on Monday, March 16, when the Los Angeles Unified School District closed classrooms indefinitely.

Three weeks later, pitch meetings and story conferences are best taken in bathrooms. Or parked cars. Or closets. The creative process, in all its fickle, trial-and-error glory, has become a bygone luxury. In an industry not kind to parental hours under ordinary circumstances, writers are now camp counselors, teachers’ aides—if not teachers themselves—and school-issue Chromebook troubleshooters.

Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, co-creators of the Netflix series GLOW, were shooting the second episode of their fourth and final season when the pandemic shut down the industry. With four scripts written, Flahive and Mensch have re-assembled the writers remotely. “We've just started doing the writers’ room on Zoom, which isn't terrible,” Mensch says. “Good, productive conversations are happening. We'll see how long it lasts. Most of us are balancing the room with childcare, so it’s more start-stoppy.”

Mensch has a 2-and-a-half-year-old and Flahive a 6- and 10-year-old. Mensch described their re-adapted work lives thusly: “For me, it's more about the physical exhaustion of needing to watch a toddler 24/7. For Liz it seems to be a combination of helping her kids through their daily Zoom class schedules and also providing tons of emotional support as they go through this really intense thing. Because they're old enough to process what's happening and miss their friends and have big feelings about their lives being blown up.”

Another writer, in TV movies, requested anonymity to freely discuss the pressures she’s facing while at home with two small children. This week, the toddler started preschool on Zoom. It did not go well.

Back in February, eight to ten weeks seemed a perfectly manageable time frame to turn around her draft. When the coronavirus changed daily life, her bosses were initially supportive. This week, when the writer asked for an extension to finish and polish her draft, they gave her four extra days. “These movies aren’t in production yet, but they have a slot for this TV movie that they’re going to fill,” the writer says of the push to stick to the network’s time frame. She is grateful to have work lined up, but “nothing is really shut down when you’re on script assignment.”

To that end, she noted that her husband, also working from home, has more recourse under the circumstances. The writer’s fear: “If I don’t find a way around [childcare] and do it, they will give my writing assignments to people that don’t have children.”

“My writing has gone from six hours a day, five days a week, to two hours every other day,” says screenwriter John Gary, whose kids are 10 and 6. The soundtrack of his day goes something like this: “Dad, the page keeps turning before I’m finished reading it. Dad, the Internet’s down.”

“It’s this constant IT,” Gary says. “And then you gotta make lunch, and then you gotta push them to get out of the house.” As for the injunction that he could be, or should be, working, Gary says, “I have to just completely Zen it out. Thank God my therapist can do TeleHelp so I can talk through some of this stuff, because otherwise I would be a total wreck.”

Gary recently closed a screenplay deal (with a 16-month option instead of 12). His wife is a full-time social worker for hospice. “All of her work is over the phone and over her computer,” he says. “She can’t slack off. Those people all need her. As much as my job is important, it’s not that.”

His advice to writers juggling full-contact parenthood in these upside-down times? Forgive yourself. “You just have to breathe a lot and make sure that the time you can find is the time you can find.”

For Mensch and Flahive, it has been three weeks since GLOW shut down. What’s working: “Blocking out large chunks of time for work is better than grabbing smaller windows here and there,” Mensch feels. That means a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday schedule, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., “with time for random phone calls outside those windows.”

They trade off childcare with husbands also working from home. “The joke is, no matter how structured you get, kids still find a way of wandering into the room while you're trying to work. Or throwing a tantrum the moment you're supposed to jump on a big call. We've done so many work calls from inside bathrooms.”