Writing and baby

I'm expecting my first child. And I wondered what it meant for writing. There are plenty of views out there that have frightened me. Helen Garner, who just won the Melbourne Prize, which is like the Melbourne version of the Nobel Prize for literature, has said she thinks she had only one child because she wasn't sure how two or more would encrouch on her writing. Carmel Bird, another Melbourne writer, has said something more extreme -- something along the lines that you can't have a family or children or other creative pursuits if you want to really write. (Having now committed this to paper, maybe their views have changed in the meantime, so I'll just take it all with a grain of salt. Both very interesting writers and worth checking out.)

I don't know, because I don't have a child yet. But all I can imagine is that different approaches work for different people.

On the other hand, there are more optomistic stories! Let me share with you the passage in Kate Grenville's "Searching for the Secret River" that made me dog-ear the page and stride over the the cash register: [p.145]

In the years after Lillian's Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don't wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me--one of my favorite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.
I wrote four more novels using that makeshift method.