The walking is the writing

How long walks have always bestowed me with my best ideas

I had a paper route as a kid, from the time I was about eleven through early high school. Six days a week, I looped through our subdivision on the edge of town, delivering newspapers to porches, mailboxes, inside the pro shop of a golf course, and inside screen doors. The route took me up long driveways, up and down hills, and up every street of the neighborhood—probably a two-mile route every day, regardless of weather.

The whole time, as I walked with the canvas bag of rolled-up papers thumping against my hip, I was telling stories to myself. Making up elaborate dialog, plot twists, and character relationships in my head. Sometimes I even whispered or murmured the narratives out loud. If someone had seen me, they probably thought I was a weird kid talking to myself. No one knew about the whole worlds I was inventing on those walks. During that time, I also started writing stories—and my best ideas, my favorite stories, always came to me on those routes, which I knew so perfectly by heart that I could let my mind wander to more captivating places.

I couldn’t predict it at the time, but this would become the primary way ideas for stories would materialize and click for me—on long, solitary, meandering walks.

Returning to the scene of the magic

It’s no wonder that creative output increases by 60% when people walk compared to sitting, according to a Stanford study. It doesn’t matter whether they’re walking outdoors in a beautiful setting or on a treadmill, the researchers found: either way, the study’s subjects were all able to develop creative responses to an experimental problem after walking. The study also found that walking is especially good for creative brainstorming, rather than focused thinking.

It makes total sense biologically. Walking increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain while also creating a relaxed, rhythmic flow that is essentially our brains’ happy place, quieting inner criticism and calming stress while fostering daydreaming and reflection.

Still, it’s funny to me that long walks have so unintentionally fueled my writing practice. Recently I took a hike with my husband and my dog on a trail in Oakland’s Redwood Regional Park. In the early days of living in Oakland, I did this wonderful hour-and-a-half hike all the time. It drops you down deeply into a fragrant redwood forest, then forces you to climb back out of it at the end—melting away all your stress along with it.

When I hiked that trail, I did it to exercise and relax. But what I was really doing was writing The Pearl Farmers. I didn’t even think about this until Andrew, Winston, and I were retracing the steps a few weeks ago. As I rounded a bend, I’d remember working out a sticking point in the plot, or ruminating hard on what I wanted for Penn or Anna as I pushed myself up the rough dirt path. Whole scenes assembled themselves. Connections I hadn’t seen before fell into place. By the time I arrived back at my car, sweating and happy, I was unblocked and ready to sit down and write.

I think now that The Pearl Farmers wouldn’t have happened without those hikes. The trail did half the work.

A tradition of writerly walking

There’s evidence that many writers through history have been compulsive walkers. By some estimates, Wordsworth walked some 180,000 miles in his lifetime—and wrote about the experience, with lines like, “Let the moon shine in thy solitary walk; and let the misty mountain-winds be free to blow against thee” Dickens took twenty-mile walks through London at night, and Virginia Woolf recited her drafts aloud as she walked. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote about working out his stories while walking the quais of Paris:

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

The epiphanies that come to me on long walks have ambushed me in the past. I didn’t go out explicitly to find them, yet there they were: the idea showed up because I wasn’t necessarily looking for it.

When it happens, it feels like a gift. A few months ago, Winston and I walked a new path at Coyote Hills, a nearby regional park known for its nearly 300 bird species nesting in marshlands near the water. As we walked out along the spectacular San Francisco Bay, alone on a secluded trail watching hawks tilting overhead and pelicans bobbing for fish, a perfectly formed idea for a novel filled my mind. It wasn’t an idea I was even looking for—I already had three other books in progress, with no interest in writing in the genre of the book that came to me. But I had no doubt that this would be the next book I would write.

Preserving the practice with openness

Now that I’m aware of this phenomenon, I’m trying to figure out if this is something I could incorporate deliberately into my practice. What are the chances that this kind of serendipity will happen predictably if I go looking for it, instead of hoping it will keep happening accidentally and when I least expect it?

Part of the danger, of course, is that I’m now thinking about writing all the time. I dictate pieces of stories while driving, or I’ll stop and make notes in Notion whenever I come up with an idea while walking the dog in the mornings. All of this means I’m not recreating the conditions that have brought on these magically brewed story ideas in the past: unstructured mind-wandering, letting the blood flow freely through my brain, rejoicing at how my body was letting go of all its pent-up tension and the brain was releasing its cares.

Now that I’ve acknowledged the formula, can I ever lose my self-consciousness enough to get back to that place again?

I don’t know, but I’m definitely committed to trying. One long, rambling walk a month, in nature, with no podcasts or music. Just quiet, an eye for birds and a nose for pine, and the resolve to let it all go—opening up the space for new ideas to enter, if they’re so inclined. No disappointment if they don’t. Only gratitude if they do.

Writers: are long walks part of your practice too? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.