Do you sometimes worry that you have to choose a single career, discarding the bits of you that do not serve it?
 
Chantal Stewart is a medical doctor, author and poet who has found ways to sustain her creative gifts while navigating a successful career. She works full-time in a government hospital and spends her free time facilitating creative writing workshops. Her poems have been widely anthologised, while her debut novel, The Veil of Maya (Minimal Press, 2022) won the NIHSS Best Fiction Novel Award and the UCT Book Award and was republished by Karavan Press in 2024.
 
“I started enjoying creative writing from a very young age,” she remembers. “When I was eight or nine years old, I decided that I wanted to write my first novel by the time I was eighteen, which seemed a very advanced age at the time. Needless to say, this did not happen.
 
“My father was a GP, and his practice was adjacent to our home, so I was steeped in the practicalities of medicine for as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, if one did well at school one either did medicine, law, teaching or engineering. So I decided that I would do medicine and study literature later. There was never any chance that writing and literature would not be part of my life.”
 
“My medical and writing life have always been separate. I have seen them as left brain vs right brain. I very seldom write creatively about my work life, though this is starting to happen now, maybe as I make peace with the two disparate parts of myself.”
 
Read the useful tips Stewart has shared for sustaining creativity in the midst of a busy working life and let them feed your own creative fires:
 

1. The first thing to say is that very few people can make a living from writing, so don’t necessarily think of this as your career.

 

2. Find time (both physically and in your mindset) to nurture creativity in the midst of a demanding job. And even when time is limited, reading is always essential. The more widely one reads, the better it is for writing and creativity.

 

3. Create deadlines for yourself. What sustains me now is that I have to write. I suppose it is a compulsion. These days, I cannot imagine not writing creatively in some way for any length of time.

 

4. Writing communities are very important. If you can, regularly attend workshops. Apart from getting you to write, they can also put you in contact with like-minded people. There are various groups who meet once a week or once a month to write and discuss writing. Look them up and join them.

 

5. Many writing coaches talk about keeping “morning pages” or journalling. I find it very useful to spend 5-10 minutes jotting down memories at the end of a long day. This does not have to be detailed, but it is good both as an archive and to rid oneself of the “stuff” of the day.

 

6. Finally, there are many writing competitions dedicated to all genres of literature. It is useful to submit to some of these, as they provide a goal or a purpose to one’s writing.

 
In the next few days, write a poem that describes a second life that you would like to have. It could be a secret ambition or a dream of luxury that feels impossible even to pursue. Explore how it might feel if you could fulfil this dream. Make it as far-fetched or as ordinary as you like.
 
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition is opening for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and familiarise yourself with the competition rules.