How do your hobbies support your creativity? Famous creatives throughout history have used hobbies to support their creativity and well-being. Here are 10 hobbies of famous creative minds to inspire and support creative living.
Even if your creative field is also your hobby, having other hobbies that support creativity can help you avoid burnout, find inspiration, and improve your main creative passion. When choosing new hobbies to support your creative life, look to famous creative minds of the past that inspire you. Try different hobbies to see what sparks flow states and greater well-being. Consider outside skills to learn that you could bring into your creativity. Some of the biggest leaps in creative innovation have come from famous minds bringing skills and ideas from other areas into their creative field.
How to Find a Creative Hobby
- Start trying new things and see what sticks.
- Rediscover childhood interests and hobbies.
- Join friends and family to try their hobbies.
- Find a hobby that’s different than your creative field to build unique connections.
- Consider hobbies that improve health and well-being.
- Follow your curiosity.
Baking & Gardening - Emily Dickinson
“I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a great deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.”
– Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root, September 25, 1845
Despite being one of the most important figures in American poetry, Emily Dickinson was more known as a homebody and gardener during her time. This is partly due to the fact she never published anything under her name, but also because she was a recluse that suffered from anxiety.
Poetry was one way of expressing herself and supporting her well-being, but she also had other hobbies that added to her creative lifestyle, like baking and gardening.
Baking
The kitchen appears to be one area where Dickinson also found comfort and opportunities to express her creativity. Emily loved to bake, especially bread. Her father would later say he approved of no other bread except hers. Her Indian and Rye bread even won second prize in the Amherst Cattle Show of 1856, although her sister Lavinia was one of the judges.
She also specialized in desserts. Her friend and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson shared Dickinson’s comments about desserts in a letter to his wife, saying, “‘people must have puddings’ this [was said] very dreamily, as if they were comets—so she makes them” (L342a).
Cooking and baking are great ways to practice creativity in the kitchen and with others. Dickinson liked to use baking as a way to express her love and fondness for friends. She would often send desserts as gifts.
You can learn more about her baking in Emily Dickinson: Profile of the Poet as Cook, with Selected Recipes.
Gardening
Dickinson loved gardening. Throughout her life, she cared for her family’s greenhouse and garden, growing hundreds of flowers, vegetables, fruits, and other plants. Nature was important to her, and she often referenced plants in her poetry. Her garden was a source of inspiration and companionship. Science even shows there are many creative benefits of nature now on the creative mind.
Learn more about her passion for gardening at the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Tips
- Cook and bake foods from around the world.
- Make baking and cooking a time of creative play and collaboration with a loved one or friend.
- Grow plants and foods that boost productivity and creativity.
- Pair your gardening with a healthy eating habit – growing your own food can help you eat healthier.
- Make your gardening time a meditation and an opportunity to practice mindfulness to lower stress and improve mood.
Outdoor Adventures - Ernest Hemingway
“Where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.”
– Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway is a great example of creative living. Yes, he had some bad habits, but he also showed mindfulness for those habits and a need to balance them with healthy habits that support his creativity. Most notably, his passion for being an outdoorsman.
Hemingway loved to write, but he also loved to be outdoors. So much that he balanced his time by writing in the morning and being outside in the afternoon. Whether it be hiking, traveling, skiing, hunting, fishing, or something else outdoors, he found balance and appreciation for nature.
Connecting with nature and spending time outside is one of the best things you can do to support creative living. Learn from the adventurous life of Ernest Hemingway and find a balance between your creative work and creative living by getting outside and trying new things. Find an outdoor sport or hobby that sparks your passion. Make getting outside a daily habit to support your creativity and well-being.
Tips
- Studies show nature walks can improve mood, self-reported restoration, and sustained attention.
- Seek out new and unique experiences.
- Learn outdoor skills to challenge the creative mind and stay safe.
Outdoor Hobbies for Creativity
- Photography
- Hiking
- Camping and Backpacking
- Fishing
- Skiing
- Cycling
Archeology - Agatha Christie
“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”
– Agatha Christie
It’s no secret that Agatha Christie, an English writer known for 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, liked mysteries. So much so she had a hobby and interest in archaeology.
She first got interested in archaeology during a visit to the site of Ur (in modern Iraq) in 1928, where she also met her future husband and archeologist Max Mallowan. She would often accompany her husband to digs and even be an assistant, cleaning, repairing, and cataloging finds.
Some of her most important stories were inspired during her time accompanying her husband on digs, including Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, and Murder in Mesopotamia.
Tips
- Dive into the history of your community or plan travel around history.
- Join amateur archaeology clubs.
- Learn how to use a metal detector and go exploring.
- Educate yourself about the laws and regulations of archeology – i.e., the Antiquities Act.
- Join an archeology class.
Chess - Leo Tolstoy
“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”
– Leo Tolstoy
Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, known for his epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, had a fascination and passion for playing chess. He learned how to play as a child and even recorded many of his games. Without studying chess literature and only learning from experience, he won often.
Chess is great for creative minds. It teaches problem-solving, visualization, critical thinking, and other elements needed to improve and support creative thinking. Tolstoy saw this value. He even welcomed interruptions and distractions because of the added challenge.
Tips
- Practice beginner’s mindset, embrace failure and enjoy playing.
- Practice empathy and learn to think like your opponent.
- Challenge the mind with chess puzzles.
- Try different chess apps.
Mycology - Beatrix Potter
“We cannot stay home all our lives, we must present ourselves to the world and we must look upon it as an adventure.”
– Beatrix Potter
The English writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter, known for the Tale of Peter Rabbit, was also a natural scientist and conservationist. She had a passion for nature and connected her hobbies and creativity to the natural world. Her study and watercolors of fungi even led to a successful career as a mushroom hunter and amateur mycologist. Unfortunately, the scientific community ignored her discoveries at first due to sexism.
In the book Beatrix Potter, Scientist, Metcalf shares how potter’s creative life was deeply connected with nature:
“Beatrix juggled her passions for art and nature. The day after she found a rare fungus, she wrote the first draft of her most famous story in the form of a picture letter. Five-year-old Noel Moore, the son of her friend, was sick, so she wrote him a story about her bunny Peter Piper.”
Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungi, but that doesn’t mean as a hobby, you need to bury your head in books to gain the many benefits of mushrooms. The beautiful thing about this hobby is the connected benefits of exploring nature that can inspire creative thinking and improved well-being. There are also the benefits of cooking and eating mushrooms, which have been found to lower depression, boost memory, protect your aging brain, and more.
Tips
- Learn more about Beatrix Potter’s Mycology hobby and creative life in the book Beatrix Potter, Scientist.
- Learn how to hunt for mushrooms by joining a mushroom hunting group.
- Bring your mycology hobby to the kitchen by cooking different kinds of mushrooms for healthy and creative eating.
Inventing - Mark Twain
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.”
– Mark Twain
Mark Twain, also known as Samuel Clemens, wasn’t just one of the greatest American writers. He was also an inventor and entrepreneur. Like many great writers, he was observant and curious, which led to a fascination with science and scientific inquiry. His curiosity and scientific inquiry led to a lifelong hobby of inventing and three patented inventions, including an improvement on an elastic garment strap, a history trivia game to improve memory, and a self-pasting scrapbook, his most commercially successful, which sold over 25,000.
His passion for science even led to many creative relationships, like his close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla. Because of these relationships, he would also finance others’ inventions, including the Paige typesetting machine.
You can see his passion and interest for innovation throughout his creative work, like fingerprinting as a forensic technique in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). He also used time travel in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). He was also one of the first American authors to use a typewriter to submit a work to a publisher.
Tips
- Follow curiosity. Use other creative fields to support your passion and let curiosity guide you.
- Don’t just brainstorm ideas. Seek out problems in your life and others that need solutions.
- Befriend creatives in other fields to support their innovation and vice versa. You never know what perspectives and creative fields can aid in your creativity.
Piano - Madeleine L’Engle
“Playing the piano is for me a way of getting unstuck. If I’m stuck in life or in what I’m writing, if I can I sit down and play the piano. What it does is break the barrier that comes between the conscious and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind wants to take over and refuses to let the subconscious mind work, the intuition. So if I can play the piano, that will break the block, and my intuition will be free to give things up to my mind, my intellect. So it’s not just a hobby. It’s a joy.”
– Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle was an American writer known for her award-winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Despite her success of more than 60 published works and four film adaptations, she nearly gave up before her career even started. Her perseverance despite many years of rejection is an inspiring lesson of creative living. It wasn’t until she wanted to give up and a ten-week cross-country camping trip that she finally got her idea for A Wrinkle in Time, and even after finding an idea she believed in deeply, it still took time and patience to find success.
Hardships and challenges are unavoidable, which is why creatives need to support their work with a creative life full of hobbies and activities for creativity to flow and well-being to thrive. L’Engle loved swimming, walking her dog, cooking, and perhaps most importantly, playing the piano.
Many creatives have used musical instruments to support their creativity. Albert Einstien, for example, loved to play the violin when he was brainstorming. Many scientific studies even back this up with evidence showing playing music can improve your visual-spatial intelligence, regulate mood, strengthen memory, and support creative thinking by stimulating the brain and creating new neural connections. This is why Einstein, L’Engle, and other famous creative minds would play music when they needed to brainstorm.
Tips
- Learn to play songs that make you happy to spark divergent thinking.
- Pair your practice with brainstorming to support the creative process.
- Practice with others to support play and collaboration for greater creativity and well-being.
- Learn different types of music from around the world to enhance cognitive development.
Conlang, Language Invention - J. R. R. Tolkien
“The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien is most known for his worldbuilding and storytelling in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. To say he loved the written word is an understatement. When you look deeper into his work, you discover hobbies and interests that support his passion for writing, most notably creative languages. In the book In the Land of Invented Languages, author Arika Okrent writes that for Tolkien, “language creation was an art all its own, enhanced and enriched by the stories.”
As a child, Tolkien and his cousin created a language based on animal words. Later, as an adult, he would spend his days tracing and studying the historical origin of words for the Oxford English Dictionary and then teaching at the University of Leeds. But in his free time, he continued his secret conlang hobby of creating new languages. Tolkien described his language invention hobby as “a private enterprise that was undertaken to give pleasure to myself by giving expression to my personal linguistic ‘aesthetic’ or taste and its fluctuations.”
In his lifetime, Tolkien invented almost 10 unique languages, many of which make up the world of his Middle Earth books. He also paired this with another creative hobby he was skilled in, calligraphy. Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology and the foundation of his storytelling. His choice of Conlang as a hobby was only a fascination to him but a way to support and bring other creative passions together to support his creative life and work.
Tips
- Break down your creative passion to its most basic elements to find related hobbies to support your creative lifestyle and well-being.
- Build onto your hobbies by stacking them with others to grow and keep your hobby fresh and challenging.
- Pair with creative travel and learn new languages to strengthen the creative mind.
Stamp Collecting - Ayn Rand
“In collecting, every new stamp is an event, a pleasure in itself and, simultaneously, a step toward the growth of one’s collection. A collector is not a passive spectator, but an active, purposeful agent in a cumulative drive. He cannot stand still: an album page without fresh additions becomes a reproach, an almost irresistible call to embark on a new quest.”
– Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
She was a disciplined and incredibly hard worker. Even when she had a creative block, Rand would stay at her desk. While writing Fountainhead, she once worked for thirty hours straight, only stopping to eat. The problem with this level of hard work is that sooner or later, you hit a wall. Rand tried to overcome this wall with the help of a doctor who prescribed Benzedrine, but when it became a crutch, it only led to other challenges later on.
Later in life, she would rediscover her childhood hobby of stamp collecting and unlock a new way to support her creative mind. In an essay titled “Why I Like Stamp Collecting,” Rand shares how this hobby provided a new way of aiding her mental fatigue and supported her creativity.
“In all those years, I had never found a remedy for mental fatigue. Now, if I feel tired after a whole day of writing, I spend an hour with my stamp albums, and it makes me able to resume writing for the rest of the evening. A stamp album is a miraculous brain-restorer.”
She describes her hobby as a purposeful one motivated by long-term goals for one’s own pleasure and restoration. It had elements like a career but without challenges. For her, stamp collecting provided an opportunity to get into a flow state. Instead of focusing on problem-solving or other challenges, she could get lost in the colors where each stamp was an event in a grander journey. It provided her freedom and privacy with a large-scale view of the world and a very benevolent view.
Tips
- Pair your stamp collecting with happy memories that trigger the senses and imagination.
- Use stamp collecting to motivate creative travel. There are even stamp atlases and maps for international stamp collecting.
- Start a collecting hobby to add inspiration to your creative space and support learning in your creative field.
Drawing/Painting - Victor Hugo
“The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.”
– Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright with a literary career that spanned more than sixty years. His stories like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables continue to inspire today, with many remade into movies and other media. What is not typically known about this writer, especially during his time, was his creative hobby and talent for painting and drawing.
He produced over 4,000 drawings and paintings in his lifetime. Never showing them to the public, fearing it would overshadow his literary work. Only a few family and friends had ever seen/known he liked to draw and paint. Later, when his art started getting shared, artists like van Gogh and Delacroix would say that if Hugo had decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century.
His unique Surrealism and Abstract expressionist style incorporated unique materials like coffee, soot, charcoal, and even children’s stencils to create the desired effects.
What started as a casual hobby grew in importance throughout his life, especially after being exiled and when he gave up writing to pursue a political career. Drawing and painting were often an exercise for him to tap into his unconscious mind. This hobby was a way to experiment with many different ideas and perspectives of seeing the world around him and the world he created in his writings.
Tips
- Overcome writer’s block by taking a break from writing to draw your story. If you’re stuck, change your medium. Brainstorm in new and unique ways to get a new perspective on your writing.
- Drawing is a great way to trigger flow. Relax your mind and step away from your creative problems with meditative drawing.
- Drawing and doodling have many benefits for the creative mind, from improving memory to relieving stress, don’t just use it to support the creative process. Use it to support creative well-being.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
