Katharine: in celebration of Father's Day 2014

 Editor:  the following article is written by two writers who are also fathers.

Happy Father's Day

How Has Parenthood Informed Your Writing Life?

By JAMES PARKER and MOHSIN HAMIDJUNE 10, 2014

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, James Parker and Mohsin Hamid discuss how fatherhood has influenced their work.
By James Parker
Quite possibly I’m a narrower, nastier and less morally responsible writer now than I was the day before my son was born.
Well, this is a deep one — a complex pancake, a snorter, as Sergeant Pluck in Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman” might classify it. Clearly the proper thing would be to declare without hesitation that fatherhood has enlarged my sympathies and grounded my libido, and thereby in the natural way — organically — expanded and improved my writing. But I don’t know. Quite possibly I’m a narrower, nastier and less morally responsible writer now than I was the day before my son was born. I certainly hope so.
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James Parker Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson We’ll get to all that in a minute, however. First let me recall some of the literary revelations and disclosures that attended the early years of bedtime reading-aloud. In that situation — book, bed, child — the air itself gives its verdict on the text, weighing and testing the words as they become sound. I learned very quickly, for example, the value of repetition — its mysterious penetration, its steady increase of power. Byron Barton’s “Trucks” was a liturgy to us: “On the road — here come the trucks. They come through tunnels — they go over the bridge.” Those ageless granitic words, night after night, unforgettably. Later I learned that there are a couple of really slow stretches in “The Hobbit”; that Richard Adams, the author of “Watership Down,” was very good at fight scenes but not that good at dialogue; that books by Roald Dahl have a tremendous amount of shouting in them; that “White Fang” was not as exciting as I remembered; that Robert Service and Alfred Noyes are great poets, thumpingly great and unjustly neglected; that Joan Aiken uses some high-level syntax; that the death of Little Blackie in “True Grit” is overwhelming; and that Rudyard Kipling’s habit, in “Just So Stories,” of addressing his reader as “Best Beloved” is something of a deal breaker for a 21st-century child.
These things I learned by reading books aloud, into the pricked and critical ear of my son, and they are writing lessons too. Keep it crisp; tell a good story; don’t muck about; don’t be afraid to say the same thing twice, if it’s important; respect the reader; have some loyalty to your characters; and when you feel the urge to get descriptive, sit on it. (Much of this comes under Elmore Leonard’s 10th rule of writing: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”) They strike me as solid tips for narrative fiction, even though I’ve never published any. My own little stock-in-trade — the 1,200-word pop-cultural think piece — did not feature largely, for some reason, in our evening sessions.
But to return to my earlier point, I think it has to be faced: There’s something in writing, in being a writer, that is inimical to family life. Or vice versa. P. G. Wodehouse made the point with his usual helium levity and grace by dedicating “The Heart of a Goof” to “my daughter Leonora, without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.” A priest friend of mine pointed out to me just today that all the great works of mysticism were written by celibates: “If they’d had kids, they’d have been too tired to pray.” The writer is a muddy-eyed solitary, immersed in ungraspable moods. The defect, the brain splinter that makes her a writer is anti-domestic. She waits, yearning, for the moment when the imagination goes rogue and love and duty go out the window. Not easy to live with. And children need, require, deserve, must have attention. So what’s the answer? If you happen to find out, do me a favor and let me know.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
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By Mohsin Hamid
The banging on my door with which my daughter announces her return from school marks the end of my writing day.
It wasn’t until I became a father that I could imagine giving up being a writer. Just to be clear, I haven’t given up writing, and I have no plans to do so. But until my daughter, Dina, was born, writing stood at the apex of my value system. I believed that to it, above all, I must be true. No longer. I have a daughter, and I have a son, Vali, and somehow they have barged their way into the center of my moral universe. I may or may not be a good father, but I recognize good-father-ness is the standard I’m most likely to measure my worth in this life by.
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Mohsin Hamid Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson In very practical ways, parenthood is at odds with writing. I, never an efficient novelist (averaging seven years a book), have become even less efficient. The hug with which my infant son greets me in the morning, koala-like in its intensity, provokes the gentlest but most lingering of procrastinations. The banging on my door with which my daughter announces her return from school marks, more often than not, the end of my writing day. Nine to 1: That’s all I can count on. Four hours, if I’m lucky.
But there’s a saying in Pakistan: “Children bring their own sustenance.” In other words, a child can snuggle into extra space you didn’t know existed. If there seemed to be no money for a child, spending gets reprioritized. If there seemed to be no time for a child, schedules get reorganized.
And so, it turns out, parenthood and writing can wind up being unexpectedly complementary. Here are two recent real-life interactions with my daughter, and the lessons they taught me.
No. 1: Dina comes home from school.
Dina: Open the door.
Mohsin: Who is it?
Dina: Dina Hamid.
She enters.
Dina: Who are you?
Mohsin: What do you mean? I’m your father.
Dina: No, I’m a little fish. Are you a jellyfish?
Mohsin: Um, yes. Bloobooboob, bloobooboob. . . .
He begins to ooze and flutter, jellyfish-like, as he pursues her about the room.
(His daughter has just reminded him that storytelling is participatory.)
No. 2: Dina specifies her nightly bedtime-story-on-demand.
Dina: Tonight I want you to tell me a story about . . . a story.
Mohsin: A story about . . . a story?
Dina: Yes.
Mohsin: There was a story. And it was very lonely. Because there was no one to hear it. So it went for a walk in the forest. . . .
(His daughter has just reminded him that all fiction is metafiction, that humans are born with the instinct to experiment with form.)
Parenthood has granted me permission as a writer. Before becoming a father, I tended to write about characters whose backgrounds were like mine or like those of people I knew, people I could imagine having something in common with. But as a parent, I recognize I have something in common with everyone. Everyone is someone’s child. So I have given myself permission to write more widely, to range more freely in my selection of characters, to imagine being people I previously steered clear of imagining, entering them via our shared someone’s-child-ness.
In this way, parenthood has expanded my sense of being human. It has made me more porous. To be a parent is to be utterly dependent on the mercy of strangers, to depend on humanity to do your children no grievous harm. Which is good training for writers. Because we rely on readers. We put our words out into the world, and hope our words find a connection. We know we can’t count on it. Rejection letters will come, bad reviews if we’re lucky, disappointing nights at prize ceremonies if we’re luckier still.
But to be a parent is to know that even one passionate reader can sometimes be enough. One person who devours our stories, and smiles, and perhaps says in a sleepy voice: “Tell it to me again. Tell it to me again.”
Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.”