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—Shantell Powell and Sasha Brown—discuss two ways to recharge: slowing down in nature and the rather less-nature-centric spending time on Discord.
Until I developed long COVID and became disabled, I busied myself with a wide variety of creative outlets. I was an athlete, world traveler, jeweler, singer, gardener, costume designer, artist, actor, aerialist, LARPer, martial artist, club/radio DJ, fashion model, professional dancer, and more. Can you tell I have ADHD?
These days, I often experience pain or exhaustion so debilitating that even writing is too taxing, let alone my more physical pursuits. When I’m too ill to write, I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. The summer I was too sick to sit up for long, I spent hours lying down in my garden while carefully observing nature. I learned a lot that summer, and it inflects my eco-writing.
Though I’m far less physically active now, I still need to care for my creativity and my meatsuit. I lift weights a couple of times a week, and I try to walk or bike daily. I recently attended a horror-writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Banff is a jewel of the Rocky Mountains, and my energy levels were great while I was there. My daily writing stints were punctuated by hikes along the Bow River or up Sacred Guardian Buffalo Mountain. Hiking is an excellent opportunity to puzzle out problems in my stories. I came up with a few scenes to write for my novella-in-progress while huffing and puffing my way up a mountain.
I feel most alive when I am creating things, or when I am moving about or observing. As a longtime performer, it is incredibly satisfying to elicit a strong response from an audience, whether it is laughter, tears, righteous anger, or an overwhelming need to dance.
When I was a university student in the early 1990s, one of my summer jobs was the creation of the botanic garden in Fredericton, NB. I spent a couple of summers illustrating pamphlets, planting trees, and designing nature trails. I was mentored by an incredible botanist named Hal Hinds who showed me how to use an herbarium and carefully observe the plants I illustrated. Last year, I went back to the garden and looked for the meadow where I’d planted so many trees. I couldn’t find it anywhere, because the trees I planted had become a thriving forest. This fills me with an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment.
If it wasn’t for all my non-writing pursuits, I’d have much less to write about. Experience has made me a much better writer. I am a member of the Southern Ontario Nature and Science Illustrators, and careful observation of the world around me has let me observe things few people ever notice. Studying the way the natural world works allows me to share those experiences with other people, whether through writing, performance, or visual art.
Listening to audiobooks and speeches given by great speakers enriches my own narration and storytelling. Silence and cadence are vital for the spoken word, just as stillness and speed of movement are important in dance. Cadence and stillness build tension and anticipation in one’s audience. They also allow the audience room to ponder.
Shantell Powell
I was gonna write about gardening but it turns out everyone in this series writes about gardening, and besides it would be a lie. I wish I thought about writing while I garden, but mostly I just make up fake awards acceptance speeches. Here’s what really creatively charges me: fucking off on Discord.
I’m in a writing group on Discord. I tried one in real life once but it was full of people who couldn’t quite get started on their memoirs, so when I was like, “Oh no SmokeLong rejected my flash piece about autoerotic asphyxiation,” they seemed confused about every part of that sentence. On Discord, though, I found my people: writers currently in the trenches, submitting short stories to the same sorts of places I do. Their successes inspire me, and their rejections remind me that I’m not alone in the struggle. There’s sort of a permanent conversation going, and I can dip in whenever I want. We feed off each other’s creativity. I can’t tell you how many of my stories started as dumb jokes with my dumb writer friends. (Actually, I can tell you: it’s 80%. What are you gonna do, check?)
It’s about who you surround yourself with, right? If you hang out with stoners, you’re gonna end up high. If you hang out with suburban dads, eventually you’re gonna be like well, what am I doing about my lawn? And if you hang out with writers, sooner or later you’re gonna write. The thing with the internet is you can surround yourself with people who share your exact interests, not just broadly like “writing” but specifically like “what would you do in a whale?” You beta read each other’s pieces: that’s cross-pollination. Someone links to a story they hated and you talk about why you hated it too: that’s inoculation. We did a thing where we wrote down the themes we obsess over, and then we had to write stories using each other’s themes: I don’t know what that is but the pieces came out great. My writing friends have such cool ideas, and such interesting thoughts about what makes a story! At this very moment, I have one tab writing this thing and in the other we’re talking about how character arcs are stupid.
People treat being online like it’s always bad, but there are good and bad ways to be online. Doomscrolling is bad. Fighting with strangers about politics is bad. Internet friends, though, count as human connections. Somebody did a study or whatever (I don’t have to cite things, I’m an artist) and they found that one of the ways you can be happy is interacting with people, and here’s the kicker: online friends are just as good as meatspace friends. Not that you shouldn’t have real friends, go for it, but they’re less likely to have an opinion about whether second person POV is played out.
If you’re asking for my advice, which you’re not—you’re here because you’re bored at work, right? Me too—but if I were to give you unsolicited advice, which I’m also not because I’m too busy fucking off on Discord, it would be to fuck off on Discord. Hang out with writers and make dumb jokes about writing. Go ahead and garden, too! Gardening is awesome! But I do that for the flowers. Where I get artistic inspiration is from other artists. All I ever got from gardening is a garden.
Sasha Brown
Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid all over Canada. A graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, the LET(s) Lead programme at Yale, and the LGBTQ+ Novel Immersive at GrubStreet, she is an Aurora Award finalist and Pushcart nominee. Her writing appears in Strange Horizons, Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, SolarPunk Magazine, and more. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.
Sasha Brown is a Boston writer, gardener and dad. His surreal fiction is here or coming in lit mags like X-R-A-Y and Prime Number, and in genre mags like Bourbon Penn and F&SF. He’s on twitter @dantonsix and online at sashabrownwriter.com.