Member-only story
Writers Who Walk
If It Was Good Enough for Wordsworth
What is it with writers and walking, and why do so many of us do it?
It’s nothing new; Thoreau did it, and so did Virginia Woolf and Dickens. I recently read that William Wordsworth walked a total of 170,000 English country miles on foot during his lifetime. (He must have gone through a lot of shoes.)
I love walking, and thanks to my dog, I get out daily. But I need to do more of it, and sometimes I need to do it “sans doggie.” He is a beagle, and when he’s on the trail of something, he pulls like a little furry traction engine. I imagine it must be what fishing for halibut feels like.
A long time ago, when I was in my teens, I used to wander about for hours. I would lose all sense of time, and if I was chewing on a problem, I almost always felt more grounded upon my return. Why did I stop doing that, I wonder? And when? Because long walks provide beautiful opportunities to observe things: nature, weather, people, you name it. And if you’re a writer, you can mindlessly scuff through the fallen leaves while surrendering to your imagination. You can fix that plot hole, flesh out your characters, or come up with that perfect “where the hell did that come from?” twist.
Research shows that people who walk, whether indoors or…
