How To Walk Out of Writer's Block

Get into your creativity by getting out of yourself

Every Friday afternoon, to close out the work week, I head out for a walk. Down the driveway, up the rise, left along the dirt road to the paved one, right to the mailbox and the little free library where swallows nest behind the paperbacks, and right again along another dirt road, wilder and dustier than the first, where there are often deer or turkeys or osprey. Always there is the sound of the river roaring beyond the trees.

The walking is an unbending. It puts me in mind of Wemmick, the legal clerk in Dickens’ Great Expectations. At work, Wemmick is hard and inscrutable — Dickens describes him as a human “post-office” whose rigid mouth resembles nothing so much as a mail slot. Every day, as Wemmick crosses London bridge on the walk home from his job in the city, he softens into his better, truer self: a loving homebody who gardens, cooks, and cares for his aged parent.

On Fridays, walking does the same for me — if I begin stiff with the work of the week and the cares of the world, I am warm and mellow by the time I've completed the mile loop. I have left the weight of the week behind. I am lighter, easier, more myself.

II. A SHORT WALK THROUGH LITERARY WALKING

I first met Wemmick when we read Great Expectations in the ninth grade. This was my first encounter with Dickens, and I was powerfully taken with him. I made a list in the back of my paperback of all the wonderful character names: Jaggers. Pocket. Magwitch. Havisham. Pumblechook — Pumblechook!! And, of course, Wemmick. Dickens’ description of how Wemmick walked himself into and out of different sides of his personality – one for work and one for home; one armored and cold, one open and warm – stayed with me. When, many years later, I began teaching English at the University of Pennsylvania, I often thought of Wemmick as I walked across the Walnut Street Bridge to and from campus, imagining my own self moving in and out of the protective, professional guise I wore to work.

By that point, I’d read enough Dickens to qualify as an actual Victorianist, and I knew that Wemmick was not a lone walker. Dickens loved to send his characters on walks. A nine-year-old Oliver Twist walks seventy miles to London to escape his life as an undertaker’s abused, starved apprentice. David Copperfield, not much older, runs away from his lonely, orphaned London life, walking nearly 80 miles to live with his aunt on the Dover coast. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dr. Manette distances himself from painful memories by pacing back and forth in his room. Whether urban or rural, outdoors or in, Dickensian walks are always existential journeys as well as physical ones. Walking, Dickens’ characters move through the liminal space between here and there — pasts are left behind, possibilities are created, futures are approached. Perambulation is transformation.

Walking matters in Dickens’ fiction because it mattered tremendously to Dickens himself. He was a devoted and prodigious walker, often covering twenty miles at a time, doing one mile every fifteen minutes. Prowling the darkest corners of London by night, marching across the countryside by day, Dickens used movement to think through his novels.

Dickens in walking attire

These were the days of serial publication. Novels appeared in weekly or monthly “numbers” before they were published in volume form. Dickens excelled at this fast-paced, high-stress mode of publication and he was always writing to deadline. He needed his brain to give him large chunks of story at speed, and walking made it happen. His imagination kept pace with his legs, spooling out complicated plots as he went. The process was so intense that Dickens experienced it as an altered state, a deep dive into imagining that felt like a sort of creative sleep-walking: “Mile after mile I walked, without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly.”

It was the same for Wordsworth, whose walking was critical to his poetry, and who is said to have covered more than 180,000 miles on foot. Darwin walked twice a day on his “thinking path,” where he kicked at rocks and developed his theory of evolution. Virginia Woolf, like Dickens, felt walking to be a “trance-like” experience, akin to “swimming, flying through the air” on “the current of sensation and ideas.” Nietzsche often walked up to eight hours a day, composing in his head the while. “Sit as little as possible,” he advised; “do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel.”

Darwin’s thinking path

Of all the literary walkers, Anthony Trollope has a special place in my heart. As a little boy, he was bullied and ostracized. He survived the daily twelve-mile trek to and from school by disappearing into his imagination, making up an ongoing story that got him through his lonely commute: “I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and properties and unities.” This was survival for him as a child, and it was also the training that allowed him to become one of the most important novelists of his time.

As an adult, Trollope was an extraordinarily prolific, extremely rhythmic writer. He was at his desk by 5:30 every morning, where he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes for three hours. “This division of time,” he wrote, “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year.” In the course of his career, Trollope wrote 47 novels, 12 stories, two plays, 18 non-fiction books, and countless articles. He was like a creative faucet that never turned off. It all started when he taught himself storytelling while walking to and from school as a boy.

Wordsworth, Dickens, Nietzsche; Trollope, Darwin, Woolf: These are some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the last two hundred years. Each in his or her own way found that walking was a critical aid to the quality of their thinking, enabling them to generate ideas, solve problems, develop theories, birth poems, and craft stories. Walking was a way of moving the mind away from the mundane concerns of everyday life and into the exalted zone of creativity.

III. IN WHICH SCIENCE EXPLAINS WHAT WE KNOW TO BE TRUE

In 2014, Stanford researchers published a landmark study on the relationship between walking and creativity. They divided subjects into groups: some walked indoors, and some walked outside. Some sat inside, and some sat outdoors. Then they asked subjects to perform creative tasks. The walking groups were on average 60 percent more creative than the sitting groups. In one exercise, subjects were asked to invent analogies to specific prompts; for instance, “a robbed safe.” One hundred percent of the walkers came up with complex analogies — “a soldier suffering from PTSD” was one — while only half the seated subjects did. Moreover, the effects of walking lasted for some time after the walking ceased — subjects retained their boosted creativity even after they sat back down.

Walking, the study concluded, enhances our capacity to do “divergent thinking” — to think, in other words, outside the box. Subsequent studies have shown that activities such as cycling, dancing, and jogging can also boost creativity, although walking bears, I think, a unique and probably evolutionarily significant relationship to thinking: as one study found, the more steps we take in the five minutes before we try to solve a problem, the more creative our solutions will be. The mind wanders when we do; as Rebecca Solnit has beautifully put it, “the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles per hour.” Four, if you are an ambulatory overachiever like Dickens.

Divergent thinking is facilitated by any movement as long as it’s active and rhythmic, not too physically or mentally taxing, and ideally done in nature, away from the distractions of comfortable interiors and busy streets. Movement of this sort induces “hypofrontality,” a state in which the prefrontal cortex — the place where we reason, decide, and focus — receives less blood flow. When that happens, our sense of ourselves as selves fades. And when we stop being so self-conscious, our mental chatter quiets. Our inner critic finally, blissfully, shuts the hell up.

That’s when the magic happens. Getting out of our conscious minds — moving our bodies to move out our of own mental way — allows our creativity to wake up. With the prefrontal cortex offline, the rest of our brain is free to work on whatever problem we’re trying to solve. Our minds wander, and we stumble on novel ideas. We make unusual connections. Our imaginations spin and leap. And sometimes, suddenly, an idea pops up, fully formed: an answer we couldn’t find through reason; a solution surfacing from the pre-cognitive deep. This process is known as “incubation.”

A skilled artist is always also a skilled incubator, and can use incubation at will. This is what Dickens, Darwin, Woolf, and others were doing when they walked themselves into creative clarity. It’s what people like Joyce Carol Oates do today. “The structural problems I set for myself in writing,” she says, “I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.”

Worth noting: Oates is pretty much the Trollope of our time, when it comes to output: in the sixty years that she’s been publishing, she’s released 62 novels, 47 story collections, and nine books of poetry, in addition to plays, children’s books, and countless essays and reviews. Both artists are, I expect, super-incubators, writers with a special genius for unlocking language with their legs, for using hypofrontal states to unleash their storytelling gift.

IV PHONING IT IN

My Friday afternoon walk is never my first walk of the day, nor is it my last. I take walks the way people eat meals. I get hungry for them, and they feed me. Strangely, they are expenditures of energy that create energy. Always, the movement and the change of scene free my mind, allowing me to solve problems, strategize, and plan.

I find things while I walk, wild turkey feathers, toadstools shimmering with poison, fallen nests, and once, the clean white skull of a beaver, its long, curved incisors rusted to a deep, even orange from the iron within them. Walking, I find language, too. Words that eluded me while I was sitting at my desk suddenly appear. Sentences spool into paragraphs, fully formed. When this happens, I feel that I am glimpsing what it must have been like for Dickens to dream on his feet, for Woolf to enter her walking trance of words.

My thinking path

I have learned to carry my phone with me when I walk, so that when an incubating idea hatches, I can catch the words as they come. All I have to do is press a button and take dictation: I speak the words entering my consciousness from elsewhere, and my phone turns them into prose. Voice-to-text thus allows me to write while walking. It closes the distance between inspiration and transcription, allowing me to create with an astonishing level of ease.

In this, I feel so very lucky to live now, in this moment.

I don’t have to walk with paper and pen, stopping frequently to scribble, as Nietzsche did. And neither do you.

I can follow deer trails through the forest, picking my way among the rocks on the riverbank, letting my mind go free, and so can you.

Walking with a computer in my pocket, I can capture the flow of ideas in real time. And I can do it without the strain of trying to hold onto the good ideas when they bubble up. There is zero friction between the fun of figuring something out and the fear of losing the thought before I get home.

This particular ease is, I believe, a quiet revolution in the history of creativity.

I find myself wondering what the great writer-walkers of the past might have done, had they been able to catch their best thinking as it was happening.

What would Dickens or Darwin have done with such a power?

What will you do with it?