The Healthy Creative with Joanna Penn - a podcast by Mark McGuinness

This week's guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, under the name JF Penn.



Meanwhile as Joanna Penn, she is an expert on writing, publishing and marketing books, giving advice to authors via her non-fiction books, her e-learning courses and her popular podcast The Creative Penn.







Altogether she has written 28 books and sold over half a million copies in 84 countries and 5 languages.



She has been nominated for the prestigious International Thriller Writers Awards, and this year she was awarded Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.



Joanna was one of my guests in Season 1 of the 21st Century Creative, talking about The Successful Creative Mindset, which has been one of the most popular and enthusiastically received episodes of the show. So when she released a book called The Healthy Writer, I told her she really had to come back and complete the mind-body connection!



As soon as I read through the table of contents of The Healthy Writer, I started getting flashbacks to some of the health and fitness problems I’d encountered as a result of spending so much time sitting in front of a computer in pursuit of my creative ambitions.



As I said right at the start of Season 1, the 21st Century is the best of times, and the worst of times for creators - the technology that allows us to create amazing opportunities for ourselves can have a very big downside for our physical and mental health, if we’re not careful.



It’s typical of Joanna that she has not only made big changes to her own working habits in order to improve her health, but she then teamed up with a medical doctor, Dr Euan Lawson, and wrote a very practical and useful guide to taking care of yourself while you’re getting your creative work done.



The book is called The Healthy Writer, but as we say in the interview, just about all of the problems and solutions in the book apply to other types of creative, not just writers.



So if you’ve ever suffered aches and pains from too much time at the computer or in the studio, and if you want to be healthy and happy as well as creatively successful, then listen to Joanna’s advice on how to be a healthy creative.







Joanna Penn interview transcript



MARK: Joanna, the word ‘healthy’ and the word ‘creative’ probably are not words that we would naturally associate together. Why do you think that is?



JOANNA: Oh, that’s such a deep question, Mark. And I think there’s a few things. There are myths about creative people. We’ve heard of the poor author in the garret or the poor painter in the garret. So that kind of wealth poverty side also kind of spills into a health poverty, I think, in that people think, 'You've got to be hunched over your desk as a writer or spending hours and hours and long nights of the soul, torturing yourself.' The tortured artist, I think, is another myth that is unnecessary.



And it’s things like really bad stuff like drug addiction, alcohol addiction. And almost the romantic myth of the artist who commits suicide, if we’re going to talk about mental health. You’re a poet. Sylvia Plath being one of the most famous ones.



You and I are both positive people. We live in this amazing creative world, the 21st Century Creative world where we can be a healthy creative and we can create stuff and we don’t have to be tortured. We work hard. We go deep into ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we need to have a wreck of a body and we can look after our mental health wherever we are on those spectrums.



MARK: Yeah, let’s face it. There’s enough suffering in doing the work itself without loading on additional stuff.



JOANNA: Not loading on more.

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