Walking Out the Story: One Tip For the Writing Life

walk out the story — Charlene’s walking shoes

Are you a writer? Do you enjoy walking outdoors? This post is dedicated to anyone working on a piece of writing. It’s a reminder to those of us (especially myself) who practice some kind of writing life, word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph, to get moving. We’re giving the page a written piece of our mind. We need to give our bodies a push out the door. With busy schedules, let’s challenge ourselves to do it despite the busy-ness, especially at this time of year. We just may receive unexpected gifts.

Note: I write this with mixed feelings. As I write, fires devour parts of Southern California. Reports tell us the air is toxic. Children cannot play outside. Many people are in respiratory crisis. Going for a leisurely walk outdoors is prohibitive. In other countries, and in some places in the U.S., it’s also just too dangerous to be on the streets. Also, unfortunately, due to health issues, walking is impossible for some people. So, if we have the luxury of walking, let’s not take this gift for granted.

Move your feet. Move your writing

With the abundance of information about healthful living, you’ve probably heard that walking in nature is one way to relieve stress. Among other things, it offers us practice in paying close attention, being near growing things, hearing the songs of birds (my father might have teased me at this point and said, “Watch out that your writing isn’t for the birds.”) That said, we’ve often heard that writers who became famous extolled the virtues of walking—it was a tonic for their souls and for their stories.

“Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “my thoughts begin to flow.” Writers like him treasured their walking time. Do we? I invite you to read this fabulous article → What Famous Writers Know About Walking

Walking out Undertow

While I was writing the tome that became my memoir, Undertow, brisk walks were my friends. They calmed me, shook out new ways to write chapters, talked me down off the ledge called, “I must be crazy for trying to do this.” For instance, I got the idea (from a suggestion my editor, Alice Peck, made to begin the book later in the story) to change the first chapter from a scene in 1984, to the scene which opens the book now, “Hiding In Plain Sight.”

Go quietly and leave earbuds home

Instead of listening to music while walking, I challenge us to leave the earbuds on the desk. Instead, pay attention to how the air feels on our faces. To how our shoe strings snap, snap, snap. To what color the clouds are. To where other people are on the street around us. In other words, transfer the lessons from yoga class, Charlene, to your walking practice. Focus on the moment, not on music or passerbys’ cell phone conversations. Focus on the breath.

Get out and go

In 1987, I took an English composition class at a branch campus of The Ohio State University. At the time, I lived out in the country, so I walked miles and miles down surrounding country roads, both dusty and paved. I walked on blacktop’s bubbling tar, I walked on the browning grass, I walked through dandelions and near purple thistles peeking through twisted wire fences of the cow pastures. It was only natural, for one writing class assignment, that I ended up handing in an essay titled, “I’m Goin’ Walkin’.” That piece of writing was a few lifetimes ago, but I’ll tell you something. Walking and writing back then, and keeping it up during the following years of writing poetry, essays, and technical material for my day jobs, helped get me to writing this NOW, to HERE.

Have you thanked your feet lately?

This afternoon, Rachel, my daughter, happened to open a book on my shelf while we talked about this blog. It was The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate. As she flipped through it, she stopped at an essay by Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods,” about when he went to camp in the forest for a time. The following is a tidbit she read aloud to me. I hope you enjoy it, as I did. Then, when you’re able, move yourself into nature for a time, too.

“I have departed from my life as I am used to living it, and have come into the wilderness. It is not fear that I feel; I have learned to fear the everyday events of human history much more than I fear the everyday occurrences of the woods; in general, I would rather trust myself to the woods than to any government that I know of. I feel, instead, an uneasy awareness of severed connections, of being cut off from all familiar places and of being a stranger where I am.” (672, 673).