Writers pour so much energy into their craft that sometimes we forget that creative pursuits other than writing can fill us up in other important ways. Here, we’ll look at what writers do when they aren’t writing, and how those pursuits affect the return to the page. This month, we hear from two writers—Catharine H. Murray and Sarah Boon—one who takes time off from writing to spend more time living, and the other who finds inspiration in the woods.
What fills you up creatively when you’re not writing? If you’d like to contribute an essay to the Writers on Not Writing series, email jen@mastersreview.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!
“How’s your writing going?” It’s the question my friends often ask, a generous invitation to talk about what they know is my passion, what fills me up, and in the past, what felt like my lifeline to sanity. But these days hearing that question makes me want to look away, stuff my hands in my pockets and shrug. Instead, I smile brightly and say my current memoir is coming along “very slowly.” This is code for I’m not doing much creative writing at all these days.
Instead, I’m spending a lot of my time editing other people’s writing. I love the work. I love the relationships that develop between my clients and me. I love the sense of accomplishment when I see their writing improve over time. I love the satisfaction I get from sharing what I know and gaining more confidence in my expertise as the years go by.
When I was young and felt like a bit of a failure in the career department of my life, I used to watch people reading packets on airplanes and wonder if they were editors. I used to think, “I could do that.” I knew I compulsively critiqued in my mind everything I read. I knew I was good at grammar and organization. Now, decades later, I still have to pinch myself sometimes when I tell people I’m an editor. It sounds so adult, so professional.
For decades, I couldn’t not write. Desperate to hold onto the experiences that I suspected would disappear with time, to process the emotional challenges I lived with, I produced thousands of pages of raw material. But I was terrible about revision and publishing, almost never finishing and sending any pieces out into the world. When I felt bad about this, I told myself someday I’d be in an editing mindset, that at the time I needed to just write, just process, and eventually I would shape the writing into something for others.
Nowadays that need to hold onto life, to record the moments of poignant beauty has receded. Perhaps now I rest assured that every day will reveal some treasure. And it seems I have reached the point I imagined I would: I just want to edit. I know that reading and commenting on other people’s writing has strengthened my ability to revise my own work. How many times have I written these margin notes in others’ manuscripts: “This summary would be great as a short scene… I would love to see this rendered in dialogue… I can’t see this character. More description please.” Observing what’s so often missing in early versions of others’ work has made it easy to see the same in my own drafts. The hard part, of course, is sitting down to do the work required to fix it.
Which brings me back to not doing much of my own writing. Writing is hard. It requires looking at who we were in the past with all our flaws. I stalled out in my memoir a while back when I got to the part about my crumbling marriage. I don’t want to go back there. I’d rather play pickleball, clean my house, go for a walk in the winter sunshine. Is it okay to let what happened go and simply enjoy where I am now? Am I abandoning my creative spirit? I don’t know, but just as I did when I was hard on myself for not editing, I tell myself now that I might be doing the right thing right now. I tell myself that editing is creative, that revision is writing. And that it’s okay to go slow, to allow my writing to be something else right now.
Catharine H. Murray
What I do when I’m not writing is hike in the forest. Instead of just trying to get miles in, I notice things along the trail. Living in the Pacific Northwest, the forest is teeming with moss, lichen, and ferns, and fallen logs being colonized by various fungi. I often take photos of interesting mushrooms and trees, which I post on Instagram when I get home. I love the scent of decay in the air, and the smell of the soil. I step over slugs, their slimy paths criss-crossing the trail.
Due to a recent injury, I don’t walk nearly as far as I want to and I find that the shorter hikes don’t drop me into a meditative state like the longer ones do. I focus instead on my trouble breathing and not tripping on the trail. Longer hikes, however, help me work through some of the issues in my writing. The steady rhythm of these hikes synchronizes my brain to my footfalls and lets the worry about tripping and breathing fall away. It stirs a flurry of insights focused on my current writing project.
The last time I went for a longer hike, it occurred to me that I could write the first chapter of my next book as an essay for publication, instead of just agonizing over it as a first chapter for my book proposal. It would be good to work with an editor to polish it so it shines, and a great way to introduce myself to agents once I’m ready to shop my proposal around. Thanks to my hiking, I’ve realized that writing this chapter as a publishable essay gives me a goal to aim for, and also helps me test the waters with my new writing voice.
So even when I’m not writing but hiking, I’m still writing in my head. I don’t think we ever stop writing, or at least we don’t stop having ideas for writing.
Sarah Boon
Catharine H. Murray, author, book coach and editor, is passionate about teaching people to use the art of writing as a tool for healing. Murray earned her BA from Harvard University and her MFA in creative writing at University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program where she served as Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Stonecoast Review. Her memoir, Now You See the Sky (Akashic Books, 2018), the story of a mother’s love for a dying child, has been described as an essential recommendation for those living with loss.
Sarah Boon has been published in Hippocampus, The Rumpus, Longreads, the LA Review of Books, and other outlets. Her first book, Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist, was published in June of 2025 by University of Alberta Press. She lives on southern Vancouver Island with her husband and dog.