Walking to Write
The incredible value walking adds to your writing process
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There are literally thousands of articles and think pieces available on the internet right now — in the archives of this publication, in fact — that provide salient and scientifically verifiable advice for writers hoping to improve their writing processes. Suggestions for overcoming writer’s block. 8 Writing Tips From Kurt Vonnegut. Tips for writing a Medium post that goes viral and earns you thousands of loyal followers. This is not one of those articles. Rather, it is a testament to the creative benefit of periodically detaching yourself from your desk, forgetting about whatever it is you are struggling to write about, and going for a nice, long walk.
If you make a habit of doing this — if you build walking into your writing routine — your writing will improve. Or at least this has proven true for me.
Now, the first thing most writers who subscribe to this walking-as-taking-a-break thing initially marvel over is the way in which walking seems to empower you — upon returning to your desk— with a new, sort of fresh editorial perspective. This is generally true of all forms of “taking a break”. The phrase you hear often is “like seeing the work with a new set of eyes”. And it’s totally true. But taking a break by way of going on a walk— especially if you make walking a regular and critical component of your writing process — this has an even more powerful effect. It doesn’t just change the way you see your writing, the words flickering black and white on your page — it impacts the way you see the world around you.
I live in San Francisco. I also happen to write about San Francisco — mostly for a magazine called The Bold Italic, but I’m also writing a novel that’s set here.
About a year ago, I made walking an integral component of my writing process. Not walking to get somewhere, or to find something, but as a means of meditation, a form of mental refreshment. And what I’ve found is that this has, over time, deepened my understanding of what exactly this place is, what it has become, what it’s composed of. For instance, how else could San Francisco be more perfectly epitomized than by living room windows framing wooden desks glimmering with expensive-looking pieces of technology, captained by shirtless, poorly-postured white guys wearing giant noise-cancelling headphones? Rachel Maddow’s face displayed defiantly on a big-screen HD TV. The translucent priapism of a glass bong resting peacefully on a wooden coffee table. Tree-limbs twinkling with tea lights, flowers in pots dangling from street lamps. Street signs corrupted by fog.
Where else is the pain of this place more visible than on the leathery-looking faces staring blankly out the spit-stained windows of a Muni bus as it trundles through ChinaTown at rush hour? Piles of discarded needles and human excreta. Where is the chaos of this city more evident than in the crowded darkness of a Tenderloin SRO? Where else can one see the urgency of this city’s inequality more clearly than through the back windows of an ambulance speeding through SoMa, the eyes of the wild-haired woman tethered to the stretcher wide and terrified and lost? Where else are the less-admirable aspects of ourselves more visible than through the tinted windows of an Uber, where the two sets of downcast eyes in the back seat are lit blue by palm-cradled phones?
I’ve come to the conclusion that the things we as people (and as writers) experience and observe day-to-day are for the most part superficial, guarded, prepared, perfect — and thus not real, as fake as the facade of a Facebook profile. We proceed through our lives protected by the blinders of our routines, impelled by the calendars on our smart phones, and on top of that, everyone we meet and everything we choose to see is for the most part ready for us, on its best behavior — and if they’re not ready for us, we generally ignore them. This is a bad way for writers to consume/experience our surroundings — ignorant of the world as it appears in repose — mostly because the experiencing part of writing is just as important as the writing itself.
Taking a break from writing to go for a walk sort of forces you to engage in the “experience” part, and it forces you to do so a bit more open-mindedly, a bit more purposefully. It not only helps you make sense of the aspects of your plot or piece or post that are giving you pause — as thinking hard about the same thing for a long time inevitably becomes recursive and unproductive, after a while, that dance of self-defeat — it teaches you to consider both your setting and the world around you as comprised by layers of history and character and complexity and pain, which will in turn make you a more empathetic writer.
Or at least this has been my experience. I wonder whether or not Kurt Vonnegut might agree.
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