It’s the final day of October and so ends my residency at Necessary Fiction. For the past 31 days I’ve posted essays by fiction writers exploring the Other Things We Do to keep ourselves whole as writers.

What I learned is that the creative process is a tricky thing. We need to leave it to find it. Sometimes we leave it on the shore (Valerie Laken) and other times we set it aside on a mountain (Josh Barkan). We need the natural world to amaze us (BK Loren, Randall Brown, Stefanie Freele) and we need hobbies to socialize and feed us (Geeta Kothari, Pamela Painter, Michael Kimball). Nurturing through food helps us focus (Andrew Scott, Kathleen Rooney), and often other disciplines fuel us forward (Steven Sherrill, Ladette Randolph, Molly Gaudry). And sometimes we like to watch in order to see the world anew (Elise Levine, Holly Goddard Jones, Kathleen George).

It’s clear to me that all of these Other things are actually part of the writing process itself—the holistic intricate incomprehensible ways writers create. They are the ways we devise “distractions” that connect us to people beyond the isolated, lonely writing room. And that is important.

I hope you enjoyed the series. Please feel free to contribute other Other Things You Do in the comments.

Thanks for inviting me Steve Himmer! It was fun.