Writers and Walks

Why Writers Love To Walk:

I had sunk into my chair and my feet had become roots. Dullness weighed down on my temples and my brain was parched like a river bed caught in a famine. A walk was going to do me good, but, I couldn't be bothered.

I picked up the novel that I was editing and decided to get to work. I got to page 83 and began reading. The protagonist walked, and walked and walked, and on every other page, I found him walking. Walking to his lover, walking through the city he hates, walking away from his job, walking his dog, walking his demons down, chasing his desires, walking, and dragged along by forces unknown, still, walking. I got off my laptop, slipped into my ripped sandals, and set off toward the shore.

A long time ago, I remember watching Sult by Henning Carlsen (based on the novel Hunger by Knut Hamson) about a starving writer. Throughout the movie, all he does is walk around in a state of absolute poverty, delirious with an empty stomach, and desperately searching for the right words to put on paper. As the movie moves on, you realize that his hunger is not for food, nor is it for a story. Hunger is for the search itself, and there is no search without hunger. Search for what you ask. I don't know, probably whatever you want it to be. Regardless, the best way to go about searching is by foot, and that is a scientific fact (almost anything these days can be passed off as a "scientific fact" looks like).

In one of Irvine Welsh's interviews, he talks about his book Trainspotting, where the main character and his mates are mostly just walking around Scotland; that is pretty much how Welsh spent his time. Nietzche is another writer who walked a lot, about 10km a day, and it's on his walks that he got to work out many of his philosophical ideas. Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Henery David Thoreau; the list of writers who have used walking to aid their craft goes on and on and on.

A writer's life is a complicated one. I am not trying to make our lives sound cool and I don't believe in the tormented artist stereotypes. The complications I am talking about here are primarily caused by the relationship that the writer's life has with writing. I can't speak for every writer here, but when one sincerely and honestly takes up writing, they do it only because there is no other option to purpose and life. When posed with the question—do you live to write or write to live, the answer almost always has to be

I write to live, hence, I ought to live so I can write.

I am not speaking about the health benefits of walking here so we live a long life; we stuff our lungs with cigarette smoke, drown ourselves in caffeine, and poison our liver with whiskey (don't even get me started on how cliche and pretentious many of us writers get), we don't really care about health benefits. But, what I have come to realize is that when I do put on my sandals and pace on, life somehow comes to me.

My toes, with painted red nails, poked out of the little rips in my sandals like dark secrets sticking out of a hidden closet. My daughter had done my nails and we were out of acetone, leaving the red stuck to my toes for eternity. I walked down the hill, to the beach, removed my sandals, and went into the water. The gentle five-inch waves shook the pebbles on the shore to play the maracas. A track ran along the coast and went into the woods. I hid my painted nails in my sandals again and followed the trail.

The brain is a mechanical washing machine whoes pedals are at the feet.

With every step the machine in my skull tumbled, creating a storm. And it is always in these storms that clarity and order are easily visualized and recognized. This is probably why it's called brainstorming.

The more I walked, the more I understood what the book I was editing was about. The deeper I went into the woods, the deeper I was in a zone that flowed past like a lucid dream. Forests, for as long as we humans have been storytellers, have always represented our unconscious in one way or the other. Hiking through the wilderness in reality literally feels like exploring the mind with a torch light.

Walking cities and towns on the other hand are not the same. While it is easy to zone into a meditative state in the wild, the cityscapes are a wee bit different. The hoardings and advertisements are built to distract you, and everything and every person on the road are screaming for your attention. End of the day we are mere animals who are trained and schooled to fall prey to these tasteless traps. Nevertheless, cities are still the waterholes where a million stories meet. It's not always safe in there but it certainly is a necessary poison that carries in it a cure for writer's block.

I walked into the bar by the beach and ordered a coffee. I borrowed the waitress's pen and wrote a couple of poems on a paper napkin. I lit a cigarette and sipped on the heavily caffeinated bevy. I ordered a whiskey and downed that too. Imposter syndrome kicked in hard but the dullness that loomed above my soul was gone. I crushed the poems and shoved them into my coffee cup. I got back home and wrote this piece of s**t.

Kahan J Sudev