Bringing the Fun - Hobbies

Everyone on earth should have something they do just because they like doing it. Y'know. Within the bounds of legality and not harming others. I suspect most writers started out writing simply because they liked doing it. We write for ourselves first, then one day, it crosses our minds to write for an audience and on that day, something fundamentally shifts. No matter how much we talk about writing books or stories of our hearts, once we've committed to the thought of showing our work to someone else, we're no longer strictly writing to please ourselves. Even if we want to. Every whisper or overheard conversation about The Market is looking over our shoulders. It isn't to say that writing can't still be fun - it can. Fun, edifying, and engaging. But. There's also a weight that's been added to it, a pressure to perform, to be good enough. That weight, pressure, and subtle (or not) fear take a little extra helping of cognitive and emotional energy to sustain.

That's why is so vital to have other outlets that don't carry that charge of weight or pressure or fear. We still need to pursue some creative thing that isn't for anyone else. We need the freedom to be bad at something - not because it's fun to be bad at something but because there's space and joy and light around doing something that no one else cares about, where we aren't being badgered to turn fun into a side hustle of some kind. There's grace in getting to just enjoy something without succumbing to the drive of constant improvement. Hey. This is for fun. If I learn something and enjoy what I'm doing? Great. If I just have fun with what I'm doing and never learn another thing? That's great, too. Though, to be fair, it's legit to *try* turning a hobby into a side hustle and then noping out. Been there. Did that with cooking. Catered two big events, got rave reviews, took a look around and went 'oh, hell no' and went straight back to being a cooking hobbyist because yeesh. 

These days, I make random things from cardboard. Cat forts. A spirit house in very early stages. There's a massive stack of huge cardboard boxes on the back lanai waiting for me to build a kitty castle. When my box knife comes out of hiding, that project will get underway. At this point, I may have to go buy a box knife cause it's been a minute since I've seen the last one. 

I still cook. I like finding new recipes and trying dishes I haven't had before. It's taken a turn since I went whole food plant based vegan a few years ago. I had to learn a whole new set of cooking skills that upended a bunch of the conventional wisdom I'd been taught about cooking. It's a good time getting to try a new technique and new flavors. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I have to throw stuff away - not often, mind, but it does happen when I totally misjudge a recipe.

There's also gardening. I do enjoy getting out into the yard to work in the soil and create an oasis for my pollinators. It's a hobby both Mom and I enjoy, so it's a communal activity and the bonus is getting to work in cooperation with someone I value. And hey. Flowers. What's not to like?

A Hobby That Counts As Writing Therapy

Writing can be all consuming. It can dominate your every thought, keep you up at night, and make you worry about the smallest details. Which means we all need an outlet, a hobby, a secret skills, something to take the pressure off of writing. 

I’d say my hobby is gardening. You’re all familiar with the rabbit holes that is research. Well, the same goes for me when I start researching plants and planting techniques. Hours disappear! Hours that my mind isn’t stuck on my current WIP. So that’s a win.

Getting my hands in the dirt is also relaxing. It sounds strange because a lot of gardening time is weed pulling. But research says getting dirty means we expose ourselves to Mycobacterium vaccae, a natural soil bacteria, which increases our happy juice! Happy juice is serotonin. If your serotonin is low, in comes depression. Another win for gardening! 

I’ve already given you a win-win reason to garden. But I’ve got one more. The absolute best part of gardening is seeing your plant grow and produce because it will fill you with a strong sense of accomplishment that’s wrapped in sunshine. A patch of feathery, canary zinnias is impossible not to smile at. Vegetable vines and bushes bursting with produce beg you to pick and sample, right where you stand. And you know you can’t stop yourself from giving those red tomatoes a little squeeze. 

Gardening is mentally rewarding. Seeing flowers bloom, ones that you grew from seed or planted as fragile seedlings, does something inside of you. Harvesting vegetables that went from itty bitty seed, or seedling, to near unruly plants brings so much satisfaction. 

No matter how frustrating the writing is, or how many roadblocks you hit, or how many fails you have, gardening will lift you out of your wallow and remind you that you succeeded, that you’re capable of something nigh magical.

Seriously, have you ever seen a carrot seed or lettuce seed? Tiny is too big of a word. The fact that you can stick a carrot seed into the ground and end up with a bushy plant with thick, colorful roots is undeniably magical. 

So, are you going to give gardening a try? If you haven’t yet, I highly suggest it as writing therapy. 

The Secret of Hobbies in Keeping Us Sane

 This week at the SFF Seven we're talking about those hobbies that take the pressure off writing.

This is relevant for more than curiosity because hobbies are key for creatives to fend off burnout. It's interesting, because it seems like when we talk about "hobbies," we're already assigning whatever project it is a lesser status. A hobby is something you do on the side, for pleasure and no other reason. I'm going to add that a hobby usually doesn't generate income (until it does). You might not even be that good at it, because if you were good at it, people would pay you, right?

We talk about hobbies in a slightly indulgent, somewhat disparaging way:

"Oh, my spouse's hobby is woodworking, but mostly they just putter in the garage."

or

"My spouse reads countless books. It's a cute hobby, but an expensive one!"

See what I mean?

The thing about hobbies, though, is that they are critical to our wellbeing. They keep us sane. For creatives, hobbies refill the well, which is what we need to avoid burnout.

What happens for a lot of us making a living from our creative work - I'll stick with writing as my example - is that what started as a hobby becomes a job. The thing we did for fun, for pressure release, simply out of love, becomes the thing we must do to pay the mortgage and keep the lights on. We lost our hobby and frequently don't replace it. Because we're doing what we love for work! That should be enough, right?

Spoiler: it's not enough.

One of the most important things any creative can do is have a non-monetized creative outlet or two. AKA, hobbies. The non-monetized aspect is important, because it allows us to be creative without that feeling of needing to pay the bills or track sales or make business decisions. I met a US Poet Laureate who also painted - and very well - but had a solid rule never to sell his work. He only gave his paintings as gifts. I've remembered that lesson ever since.

What do I do? I confess that, in the eight years since I became a full-time, career author - as in supporting my family with my writing - I have not been super great at keeping up hobbies. I've burned out once, too, and come close to it a couple of other times. I'm trying to do better. What do I do?

1. Gardening
2. Reading
3. Interior Decorating
4. Hiking
5. Yoga

It was instructive to make this list coming at it from the lens of a "hobby" rather than "non-monetized creativity." I've been trying to implement creative things I can do, but I'm just now realizing that these other activities - even something as prosaic painting my living room (I decided to include an in-process photo), as I'm doing this weekend - also count as leisure-time, restorative activities. Theoretically, everything on my list could be monetized.

(Maybe not. Can you be paid to hike? And I will never, ever be that good at yoga! Trust me: a yoga teacher I will never be.)

Anyway, celebrate those hobbies! They aren't silly or pointless. They're what feeds us as human beings.

 

Many. Many Hobbies

 

People often ask me what I do when I’m not writing. The short answer is, a lot! I have a hundred-plus year old house to maintain, the Wonder Twins to feed, clothe, and educate, and a lovable rescue pup who wants all the attention. Oh, and I have a husband, but he’s self-sufficient these days. Mostly.

However, a life of only drudgery and writing would lead to drudgery in my writing, which is exactly what I try to avoid. For me, writing has always been a joy, and even though I earn an income from it I don’t ever want to see writing as work. Is that they best way to approach my writing business? Maybe not, but it’s worked for the past fifteen years.

Therefore, I have hobbies. Many, many hobbies. Some of them, like jewelry making, predate my writing career (although not my actual writing, since I’ve been recording my make believe adventures since grade school). Other hobbies are relatively new. For instance, last year’s birthday present to myself was a Cricut machine, and I haven’t looked back. Go ahead. Google all the things you can do with one of those babies.

Add to jewelry making and Cricut-ing all of my other diversions—baking, gardening, painting; you get the picture—and I have one packed hobby room. Okay, the art and craft supplies long ago escaped the confines of one room, and are in danger of creeping up to the second floor. But what does any of this have to do with writing?

Both everything, and nothing.

When I make a set of keychains, or a shadowbox, or a custom birthday card, those items don’t affect my stories one bit… Except that they do. Over the years I’ve learned that one of the best ways to recharge my brain for writing—some call this refilling the well—is to do something creative with my hands. Therefore, kneading dough, wire-wrapping baubles, and planting petunias all become part of my writing process. Although, I haven’t written any stories about baubles or petunias… yet.

Diving into a new non-writing project never fails to stimulate story ideas. A few years ago, I redid my raised vegetable beds, and came out of the project with a character whose father runs a farm-to-table restaurant, where all the vegetables are grown on their family’s ancestral land. A few months later I made dozens of custom holiday cards for my kids’ schools, and began writing a trilogy about the Scottish queen of winter. And after a month long trial and error bake fest, during which I tried to create the ultimate homemade brownie recipe, I realized that my stressed out, ghost hunting character probably relieves stress with chocolate. I know I do!

As you can see, these hobbies don’t just feed my soul. They feed my writing, by forcing me to be creative in a different, sometimes unconventional manner. I can’t wait to see which hobby I pick up next.

Jennifer Allis Provost writes books about faeries, orcs and elves. Zombies, too. She grew up in the wilds of Western Massachusetts and had read every book in the local library by age twelve. (It was a small library.) An early love of mythology and folklore led to her epic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Parthalan, and her day job as a cubicle monkey helped shape her urban fantasy, Copper Girl. When she’s not writing about things that go bump in the night (and sometimes during the day) she’s working on her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Get to know Jenn at https://authorjenniferallisprovost.com

Jenn’s latest release, Oleander, is available here: https://books2read.com/poisongarden-oleander

Just for the Fun of It

 Creativity is rarely sticks to a single track. Writing may be my major means of processing the world and my experiences of it, but once you start getting paid for a creative endeavor, it's vital to have other creative outlets. It's especially vital to have have creative outlets that have zero pressure on them. We all need space to for Beginner's Mind. We all need space to experiment and try things without any expectations around the outcome. It's necessary to do things where you've given yourself permission to do them simply because you enjoy them - even and especially if you do them badly. I think it's super important to do things where enjoyment and outcome are divorced from one another. Most of us who write started writing simply because we enjoyed it. We enjoyed the process of telling a story, even if the story we told was riddled with errors or lacked conflict or a character arc. We just wrote because it was fun.

Then one day, someone sat up and said, hey, I'll pay you for that story! Also, I want to pay you to write it again! Exactly like this one, only different! But I need  you to do it three days! GO!

The pressure to Get It Right (TM) is real and it's heavy. So yes. Having other creative places to go for rest and fun matter. When it comes to creative activity other than writing, I'm a bit of a dilettante.

Most of the time, I cook or bake. This morning, it was a thrown-together, totally made up vegan buckwheat pancake batter. Hit out of the park, too. Usually, preference is given to recipes I haven't tried before, and I like the complicated ones with a reasonable chance of failure. Yeah, I don't know why. I like the experimental nature of it, I guess. I like going into the process knowing there's a chance it will be inedible at the end - or I'm going to end up with something tasty. Either way, it weirdly takes a lot of pressure off. I cop to having a tic about NEW. I crave new. Given a choice between something I've done or eaten before and something new, I will almost always go with the new thing just for the dopamine hit of new experience.

I'm not entirely sure this is a creative pursuit, but I garden. I like painting with flowers and getting my

hands in the dirt. I'm trying to build something aesthetically pleasing (to me) and that feeds to pollinators. Failure is definitely a thing here because Florida's planting and growing season is reversed from just about every place else in the US. Summer is when everything dies. Or rots because of the combination of heat and humidity. I'm still learning the vagaries. But at the moment, the front yard looks pretty good. 

I paint. Pictures. Rooms. Rescued furniture. Unicorn Spit is my friend. Yes, it's a paint brand. I'm also fond of Dixie Belle paints. Also let me note that while I'm pretty darned good at painting a room, all other painting is done poorly. There's a reason I only rehab rescued furniture. I need cheap canvases so I can try things and make mistakes and learn without destroying something that cost actual money. I've tried paint pours and while I love the results, it's expensive from a paint standpoint. It's a resource intensive method and I'm not to the point where I can justify that kind of outgo for experiments and learning curve.

On low spoon days, I might take pictures. They won't be anything special usually and if they are something special it's a complete accident. Yes, I look for perspectives and shots that intrigue me, but I utterly lack the gene that could make me care about F-stops and Apertures.

When I need something more active, I dance. Badly. But the point of dancing isn't to be good. Or beautiful. It's not ballet. Modern, maybe. Anything I feel like, definitely. It's good therapy. I find it particularly useful for handling anger. It's cleansing in a way other activities might not always be. I have to be in a spiteful mental space for dance though, because I have to not care at all what anyone else thinks or says. And I have to not care that my music might not be to everyone's taste. There are days that the Too bad, so sad energy is a nice, healthy reset. (I mean, obviously not when someone is ill or trying to sleep - this is why the gods created noise cancelling headphones.)

All of these creative pursuits feed my main creative drive to write. They keep me from going too crazy when writing isn't going the way I want. Occasionally, I'll be in the middle of one of them and unbidden, some story tidbit will poke its head up and volunteer a story snippet. But whether that happens or not, each of these activities are worth spending time on in their own right. Just don't ask me to sew. I really, really suck at that.

Making Things Grow

Jeffe had a great post yesterday, check it out. She talked about the need to have a creative outlet not connected to the job of writing—and I completely agree with that! 

Writing started out as my creative outlet, but when it morphed into a job I began gardening. 

In a way, gardening is a lot like writing. I love starting plants from seeds. Itty bitty ones, curvy pods, large seeds, sharp seeds, and everything in between! Much like the first story idea transforms into a full grown novel, the seeds look nothing like the plants they make. 

Gardening has become quite the obsession actually. I pour over seed catalogues and want to try all of the new varieties and plants I see. I’ll never have enough plants and am happily noting what I like and what I’ll pass on growing again…at least for now. And as I’m gardening, hands deep in the soil, my brain meanders and explores new worlds. I can’t tell you how many plot hole epiphanies I’ve had in the middle of my garden! 

So when I can’t make words, I go check on my plants. When my brain is fried from stringing together too many words, I watch the bees buzz around my flowers. And when an idea strikes me, I reach into my garden bag and grab my notebook. 

A match made in heaven. 

What do you make when you’re not making words?