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—Robert Miner and Howard Maximus Meh-Buh—who relish the pleasures of a drink or deep observations of daily life.
What fills you up creatively when you’re not writing? If you’d like to contribute to the Writers on Not Writing series, email jen@mastersreview.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Instead of writing about museums or exercise or spending time with the people I love, I’ve decided to write about drinking. I like a drink. Sometimes I like several. A martini before dinner, a glass of calvados after, a bottle of wine during. I like it all.
When I was younger, I drank for effect and, frankly, I still find some benefit in that so long as I do it in moderation. What’s wrong with softening the edges of your experience at the end of the day? I don’t always have time to deep-breathe the rage away after I inadvertently open my New York Times app before bed, and there is actually something meditative to the ritual of selecting, pouring, and enjoying a drink or two. My writer brain is almost always spinning around something. The dizziness of it often keeps me up, and nothing mutes the following day’s productivity like lack of sleep.
The benefits of a social lubricant aren’t lost on me, either. Writing is a solitary pursuit, it has to be, but the irony is that losing touch with people drains me as much as not working. Still, sometimes I need a little push over the hump, a way to shift focus away from my own ego and onto the outside world. Enter a pilsner, a Manhattan, a Last Word. And often the drink itself is a good conversational bridge. Oh, you’ve never heard of green Chartreuse? Well, I’ve got a fascinating story to tell you…
But there’s something else about alcohol that fills my cup (pun obviously intended), and this is the most important bit. You can enjoy the good stuff in the same way you can appreciate a painting or a good book.
Most booze is made by people—artisans, really—who care deeply about their craft, and engaging with it in a meaningful way requires intention, focus, and knowledge. The more you experience, the more profoundly you can enjoy. It’s work, but like most hard things, the effort is worth it. In my family, I’m the dunce when it comes to alcohol knowledge, but it’s still fun to fight for my life while trying to identify tasting notes and terroir, or to listen to my brother wax simultaneously poetic and scientific about some esoteric bottle of old world whatever. In fact, it gives me hope that my own art can be appreciated that way.
When I’m not writing I drink because I want to engage with something that has been made with the intention to be enjoyed. Too much of the modern world is shaped by people who don’t have the capacity to love things like booze. Politicians, tech oligarchs, rent-seeking financiers, whoever—they don’t consider what it means to live in a world that has been stripped of nuance and beauty because they don’t consider it a tragedy to lose them.
But a writer can’t abide a world like that. I certainly refuse to.
Robert Miner
I am reading Crotty and Freire and Mbembe. I am researching Transdisciplinarity—the transgression and transcension of disciplinary boundaries (Russell et al., 2008). A melding of science and arts and culture.
In my room is a whiteboard where colored Post-its have grown into a character tree with broken branches, cut out trunks, barely fruitful. All rooted in a plot not quite developed yet. Below it is a list of -isms and -ivists and I try to decide which one I am most of. Interpretivist, post-positivist, constructivist. And then I look at the characters above and try to decipher, too, which of the -ivists they are.
To me, the thing about not writing is its proximity to writing. A bulb switch mostly a flick away. How in the trio that is our relationship, I am not in the middle, the not-writing is, buffer, more present, falling off every not so often so I can touch the writing.
On my breaks I visit galleries, spend time at artist residencies where painters and poets, sculptors and filmmakers blow my mind, interrogating similar themes as me through mediums I can only marvel at. I buy baggy pants from thrift stores and customize talking caps. I lift weights. Doomscroll. Burn myself in the sauna three days a week. I try pickleball, lose at tennis, fall on skating rinks; I draw up elaborate diet plans that I never stick to.
I relish this. Not writing is living when it doesn’t feel like dying.
Lately, I have started re-seeing everything in culture –gym culture, club culture, hustle culture, which reminds me of a time when everything converged to bacteria culture. To slides under a microscope.
During this time, a literal decade ago, working as a graduate student in the life sciences, so much of life was about scrutiny. Fixing living organisms under a microscope and peering through in search of what it is, really, that they are made of; why they work the way they do. Cilia or flagella? Clusters or chain? Solo? What exactly are the problems in their system?
But isn’t so much of writing the same? Of scrutinizing life and its systems. Of observing its cultures. Fixing everything under peculiar gazes.
What used to be panic has become to me a blatant satisfaction; the understanding of the relatedness in almost everything, presents to me not-writing not as the downright absence of writing, but as writing simply on its marks.
Howard Maximus Meh-Buh
Robert Miner is an award-winning writer and graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was a soldier once, after which he worked in healthcare, sales, construction, real estate, and fitness. His debut novel, Thoughts and Prayers, is forthcoming from Simon Six/Simon & Schuster. He lives in Kansas City with his wife, two kids, and dog.
Howard Maximus Meh-Buh is a Cameroonian writer and life scientist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Catapult, The Africa Report, The Masters Review, Porter House Review, Bakwa Magazine, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He teaches at Texas State University.