Hey everyone! It’s Clara Kensie, back with a new Question of the Week! Pretty much the only thing writers love as much as writing is talking about writing. So each week here at Adventures in YA Publishing, I post a question for you to answer. The questions cover all topics important to writers: craft, career, writers’ life, reading and books. Together we’ll become better writers by sharing tips and discussing our habits and practices.
Question of the week for March 24, 2013:
Other than writing, what creative pursuits do you regularly enjoy?
Crafts, watercolors, photography, pottery. Sewing, music, dancing, design. What are your other creative outlets?
My answer: I’ve always been a creative person. Along with creative writing, art was my favorite subject in school, and my favorite student activities were choir and poms. As an adult I was a huge scrapbooker for a few years—I shudder when I think of how much money I spent on scrapbooking supplies! I also painted, a hobby I was able to turn into a job. Yep, people, actual, real live human beings, paid me to paint murals on their walls, a fact that astounded me because I didn’t think I was very talented.
I’ve enjoyed writing since I was a kid, but when I started writing my first novel a few years ago, it sucked up all my creativity for anything else. I discovered a joy in writing that I’d never experienced before in any other creative pursuit: an obsessive, addictive joy. Today, writing is my main creative outlet. It’s all I need. Every so often I’ll set a canvas on my easel and take a paintbrush to it, but usually it’s to open a new way of thinking about my current manuscript—to capture a mood in paint that I then describe in words.
YOUR TURN: Other than writing, what creative pursuits do you regularly enjoy? Did you give up any of them in favor of writing, or are you able to find a balance? Do you think your other creative outlets help you with your writing? In what way?
