Walking and writing

 

Walking is good for your health. It helps you burn off all those puddings and cakes you ate, when you really should have not –or at least it appeases your conscious. However, it is not what makes walking so attractive. Walking is also a way to enjoy your surroundings, to take notice of details that would have escaped you, had you been driving or cycling by at great speed, trying your best to not be late at school/work/an appointment.  

In the country it could be the frothy lace of wildflowers in a hedgerow. An empty snail-shell, striped yellow and brown. A feather from the wing of a buzzard. Moss draped over the branches of an ancient tree. Clusters of blackberries, purple and plump. Or elderberries glistening like dark-blue pearls. Lambs playing in a meadow, stopping to watch as you pass them by. The smell of hay being cut. A gurgling brook, bounding over rocks, as if it was trying to escape from its bed. A pile of pebbles made as an offering to the fairy world. Pine-cones half-nibbled by vagrant squirrels. 

In a city it could be a tiny tea-shop selling homemade cakes and freshly ground coffee. A heavy, ornate, wooden door, dating back from Medieval times. A narrow cobbled street winding up a hill, leading to a hidden garden, or a castle-like building. A road you’ve never taken before, going to a part of town you’ve never visited before. Fragrant lilac spilling over a wall. Sparrows squabbling for crumbs of bread.

Walking is accepting a slower rhythm of life. It is forgetting the rush working or studying implies, deadlines, cramped timetables. Walking is allowing yourself to take a deep breath and look around you. But this is not the only good point: I think that walking is good for my writing. 

Walking gives you the leisure to look around you and take in the world that surrounds you. But also to daydream and let your thoughts wander –which is not the case of driving, if you want to stay alive, that is. All the details you consciously or subconsciously notice can feed your imagination, whether you realise it or not. An idea for a new setting. The seeds of a short story, of a novella, of a series of novels… The terrace of a café becomes the ideal spot for a romance. An abandoned house becomes haunted. The gait and clothes of a passer-by inspires a character. A dark passage-way, glimpsed as you went by, suggests to you the plot of a thriller. And the more you look at, and for, all those details with the eye of a (would-be) novelist, the more ideas they suggest as you walk by.

As I said, walking allows you to daydream. To daydream about your novel. I find that walking helps when I’m a bit stuck with my work in progress. As if moving my feet unclogged my brain, giving it a fresh intake of energy and inspiration. Being outdoors helps a lot when you’re going round in circles with your writing, not being able to find a good ending, or a good beginning, or whatever. But being outdoors and walking, being outdoors and being in movement, gives, in my opinion, even better results. As if being physically active allowed you to be intellectually active. 

I think about my novel as a walk. I “play” in my head different versions of the scenes I’m stuck with, until I find the right one. Or I just let my thoughts wander and ideas come to me, shaping themselves, being influenced by my surroundings and the mood of the moment…