Forget coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. It turns out that the favorite stimulant of writers is . . . walking.
"Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move," wrote Henry Thoreau, "my thoughts begin to flow." And similar discoveries have been made by countless other authors, including Kierkegaard and Goethe, Wordsworth and Whitman, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, Gretel Ehrlich, Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Joyce Carol Oates. Thoreau described walking as "a great art," and Ehrlich calls it "an ambulation of mind."
In his superb book Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (2004), essayist Phillip Lopate acknowledges a link between "the physiology of walking and writing": "The mind relaxes through the calming, repeated movement of a stroll, while the legs' cadences trigger the rhythms of poetry."
Walking has long been prescribed as an effective prewriting strategy and a cure for writer's block. Here's advice from a century ago:
Take long walks, after business, with no other companion than your subject. Do this for the sake of the arrangement of it as well as the thought. Never neglect to take pencil and paper with you to jot down anything that may strike you.
(G.H. Northcroft, "How to Write an Essay." Great Thoughts From Master Minds, vol. III, 1907)
More recently, in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990), novelist Orson Scott Card has suggested that it's "worth the time to take an hour's walk before writing. You may write a bit less for the time spent, but you may find that you write better."
Not surprisingly, there's also a long tradition of writing about walking. "Walking-around literature" is Lopate's term for the many poems, stories, and essays that have been organized around walks--ambles and rambles that are usually undertaken alone as a way to "deal with, act out, dramatize, defend, or deplore one's solitude."
According to Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000), the "first essay specifically on walking" was William Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey." It established, she said, "the parameters for 'walking in nature' and for the literature of walking that would follow."
To help you decide whether walking should be a part of your writing routine, take a look at one or two of the peripatetic essays in our collection of Classic British and American Essays and Speeches:
- On Going a Journey, by William Hazlitt (1821)
- Night Walks, by Charles Dickens (1859)
- Walking Tours, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1876)
- The Art of Walking, by Christopher Morley (1918)
- Going Out for a Walk, by Max Beerbohm (1918)
- Street Haunting: A London Adventure, by Virginia Woolf (1927)
And remember, to paraphrase comedian Steven Wright, all places are in walking distance--if you have the time.
To learn more about the rewards of walking, please stop by the excellent website hosted by Wendy Bumgardner, the About.com Guide to Walking.
Image: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate (Anchor, 2005)
Comments
As a person who rarely leaves the room and has never tried to read the scientific evidence that associates walking with clear thinking and sense of purpose, I am not in a position to comment on all the benefits that the above mentioned authors have associated with walking. However, of all the benefits that have been mentioned, help with the subject matter or apprehension of subject sounds plausible; whereas saying that regular walks can turn a person into a better writer seems like taking things too far in order to promote or sell an activity that one likes.
What I must add is that Steven Wright’s comment, even in its paraphrased form, was the highlight of the post.
I do believe that great writing comes from walking. as one is walking, alone, there are several things that can strike the mind which then develops into an idea. and the great thing is that you can reflect at that moment