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—Stephanie Loleng and Rylan Hynes—one who pursues running while the other begins life as a parent.
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!
When I’m not writing, I’m running. I’ve run ten marathons in multiple states and in different countries. I’m a running coach and I work for a running organization, which keeps me motivated. I didn’t start running regularly until my mid-thirties when a friend asked me if I wanted to train with his sister for a half-marathon. I was going through a lot at the time. My father had died a year before and a year before that, I’d been experiencing frequent, unexpected panic attacks caused by an anxiety disorder. Fortunately, through therapy, medication, and regular exercise I was able to treat the panic attacks.
Running helped ease the anxiety. So, when my friend asked me to train with his sister, I jumped at the opportunity and decided to take on the challenge. Instead of doing the half-marathon I decided to take on a full marathon. What I thought would be a “one-and-done” marathon challenge turned into over fifteen years of finding a passion I could have never predicted.
I’ve been a writer since I was a child. I wasn’t a sporty kid, but I was athletic. I didn’t join any organized sports because I was incredibly shy. I had a great group of friends, some of whom participated in sports, but I preferred reading over running, jumping, swimming, and the like. Fast forward to being middle aged and running as a huge part of my life.
Alongside my passion for running is my devotion to writing. What I discovered is that training for marathons is similar to working on my many writing projects, specifically a collection of short stories that I started during my MFA program at Stonecoast from 2018 to 2020. Training for a marathon takes a lot of time and discipline as does writing. I do different types of workouts during training to strengthen certain parts of my body to take on the challenge of running 26.2 miles.
Speed workouts help me build my fast-twitch muscles for quick, fast movements like sprinting to the finish line. Tempo workouts help build strength and stamina to keep my body strong from start to finish. Last but certainly not least are weekend long runs starting at ten miles in the beginning of my training to twenty miles at the end of my training.
Thinking about my writing sessions as training workouts to complete a book-length project helps motivate me. When I sit down to write in the mornings, I might do a twenty-minute freewriting sprint to help jumpstart my day. Sometimes, I’ll go to a library or coffee shop for a two-hour tempo session of writing to revise a story or work on something new. Maybe I’ll devote an entire day or weekend to writing, a sort of DIY retreat to get a lot of work done in a relatively short amount of time. All this to finish the marathon of the book I hope to complete in 2026!
Running also helps to inform my writing because as I put one foot in front of another and focus literally on the road ahead of me, my mind begins to wander. I might think about a character’s motivation for traveling thousands of miles away from home or a story set on Mars that I’ve rewritten over and over again. Running at its core is the act of moving through space and time, which is essentially what I’m doing as I’m creating stories on the page, so it feels appropriate that one informs the other.
I like to think of running as a creative act because it allows me to free my mind and find ways to dig deeper into my subconscious to get to the heart of the stories I’m working on. To me, writing isn’t just about typing words on a screen or jotting down lines in a notebook, it’s about dreaming up new worlds and new tales that, although fiction, hopefully get to the truth of the human experience. Running helps me do that. I believe that I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without the devotion I have to running.
Stephanie Loleng
A white noise machine rumbles. Our bedroom humidifier sighs. The lights are out. The baby is fed, swaddled, softly breathing and dreaming away in the crib. At last, my husband and I close our eyes, drifting off to sleep when…
Ah. The babe wiggles.
WAH. The babe is awake.
WAAAAHHHH! The babe wails as if abandoned in the nearest dumpster.
While pregnant, I had visions of scribbling away on various writing projects as the baby snoozed during my parental leave. I see now that perhaps those visions would best be classified as delusions.
Just like strollers, bassinettes, tubs, and car seats include dire warning labels of infant suffocation, drowning, and other flavors of untimely demise, to many writers, babies come with their own words of caution: Bring one home and your craft will suffer. In the early months, it’s hard to escape that narrative.
Our two-month-old is a healthy, cheerful, and good-natured child, but an infant nonetheless. The needs are many and frequent. As such, sleep now oscillates between endangered and extinct; thinking in complete sentences is a rarity. Writing usually means typing one-handed with the laptop perched on the arm of a chair, or crookedly scrawling in my notebook, desperately hoping my sleep-deprived brain can decipher it later on. Indeed, it’s been a challenge to even find fifteen minutes to hammer out marketing copy for my debut novel, Grafting, forthcoming in June from Islandport Press.
The child and the book have felt like siblings in many ways. I received both my offer of publication and the positive pregnancy test on the same day. Though each was welcome, long-awaited news, to some this might have felt like the beginnings of a fatal story where one twin devours the other in the womb. Much of the editorial process was slated to take place during my pregnancy, in between bouts of nausea and Sisyphean trips to the bathroom. I wondered if I’d be able to balance it all, to do justice to both my book and the babe. But some words from my editor Lewis Robinson reassured me as I undertook the challenge of publishing while parenting:
The worst piece of writing advice he had ever received? Don’t have kids.
And now, I begin to see where he was coming from.
I’ve never read so many books in a day. Many of them feature light plots, thick or crinkly pages; the old standbys of rhythm, repetition, and rhyme—our kid adores them. Seeing that curious face light up when a book is opened? Magic. And while the baby naps in my lap, I’ve torn through my own TBR pile, thanks to several strategically placed books stashed within arms reach.
One might say that there is very little writing going on in our home, and in a sense, yes, that is true. But in another way, a very profound kind of composition is taking place, one where I have the chance to join in the days that are shaping our child, a young mind in a constant flux of definition and revision. Each day I listen in wonder as small lips and a tiny tongue grasp at first-time phonetics, gulp through glottal stops, and coo out new syllables. How could I not set my notebook down and help build this vocabulary—a lexicon built on the word love that our child will reference for the rest of their life? So for now, I am bearing witness to someone finding their voice, sounding out their own story—one that we are both reading as it is being written.
Rylan Hynes
Stephanie Loleng is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing low-residency program and was a recipient of the PAWA/Manuel and Penelope Flores Scholarship for the VONA 2023 Summer Residency. Her flash fiction has appeared in Gastropoda and shortlisted for a fractured lit anthology. Her nonfiction has appeared in Instant Noodles and the travel anthology Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad. She’s working on a collection of short stories inspired by Filipino American culture and folklore. Stephanie lives in New York City with her husband, Eric and their pug, Diego.
Rylan Hynes (they/them) is a trans author and artist. An alum of the Tin House Writers Workshop, their work has been supported by the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and Monson Arts. Rylan’s writing has been a finalist for Proximity’s 2024 Essay Contest, the 2024 Maine Chapbook Series, longlisted for The Masters Review’s 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest, published in Rustica, Edible MAINE, and elsewhere. Their debut novel, Grafting, is forthcoming in June 2026 from Islandport Press. Rylan lives with their husband and child in central Maine with far too many heritage apple trees.