The Best Cure For Writers Block is to (Literally) Walk Away

Why you should make walking a part of your writing routine

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I’m fascinated by behaviors that changed because of the pandemic. One big change that I noticed in myself and others: we became walkers.

As we were forbidden to exercise in gyms and couldn’t gather in bars and restaurants, the best way to exercise and socialize took on an ambulatory flavor. My week’s social calendar increasingly took the form of walks, and in order to establish a regular exercise routine, I set a goal of 10,000 steps per day.

I’ve always wanted to make walking a part of my writing routine since I read how Wordsworth walked in order to write. He famously ambled through England’s Lake District, walking as many as 175,000 miles according to his friend Thomas De Quincey. His poems are full of hikes up mountains and over dales, through forests, and along public roads.

“The act of walking is indivisible from the act of making poetry,” he said. “One begets the other.”

Walking is writing. When I walk, I feel the borders of myself change with my steps. I lose my role, my status, and even the borders of my body. I move through landscapes as an observer, attuned to my aesthetic maunderings and warblings. With the rhythm of my steps, my body merges with the undulations and textures of the land I’m striding.

One of the great advantages of walking is that it is slow, allowing you to experience a place rather than just pass through it. When you’re immersed in the widening space of the world, your thoughts naturally expand into that space. I gain oneness with my surroundings, especially when I don’t have a destination because, without a destination, there is no point in hurrying, no overlay of a timeline.

Walking holds a significant place in the history of thought. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. Henry David Thoreau thought that his ideas began to flow the “moment my legs begin to move.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau said he could “meditate only when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”

Baudelaire conceived of the artist as a “flâneur,” which means stroller. A flâneur is a connoisseur of the streets, walking into crowds as a bird flies through the air and becoming “a botanist of the sidewalk,” a “passionate spectator” who resides in the ebb and flow of the movement of the city.

“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in her wonderful book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. “A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”

Wordsworth’s walks led him to see a wider world than most others. He encountered poor vagrants and fellow wanderers who he portrayed not for their picturesque or more pitiable qualities, as others of the time did, but with voices and spirits and stories.

Walking led Wordsworth into a more casual poetry, its stride more of the world than of the parlor, full of the musicality of conversation. He wrote poems such as “The Leech Gatherer,” “The Female Vagrant,” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” His walks guided his aesthetic, leading him to democratize the language of poetry by making it plainer and easier to understand.

When you move your legs, you move your mind. Your words and your steps are like siblings. Each step creates a flow that allows the new wisp of thought to drift out of its hiding place. The cadence of walking guides the rhythm of your thoughts, bringing on a meandering drift of time, a meditative state that can be almost like a dream. You don’t have to devote too much of your brain’s attention to the act of walking, so your thoughts become free to wander (and wonder). The conscious and unconscious co-mingle.

Writing and walking are similar in that when we embark on a path, our brain must survey the surrounding environment and create a mental map — a narrative that guides our footsteps through the terrain of the world and our minds. Your story, which might be a compressed knot in your mind, has a chance to loosen and expand as you traipse through the rustling murmurs of all that’s around you, whether you walk on a busy city street or in verdant nature.

Channel your inner Wordsworth to wander the world. As he wrote in Tintern Abbey:

“Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free

To blow against thee:”

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He’s the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.