Why Every Writer Should Go for a Walk (And Sometimes a Very, Very Long One)

You're stuck. The sentence won't move. You've rewritten the same paragraph four times and it's getting worse, not better. The screen is bright and close and the room is small and the words are piling up behind your eyes like traffic. You know what you need? You need to put your shoes on. Go for a walk. Not a metaphorical walk. A real one, with legs and weather and a horizon. 

Every writer knows this and most writers forget it: the work doesn't happen at the desk. The desk is where you transcribe. The work happens in the shower, in the car, in the queue at the post office - and more than anywhere else, on a walk. There's something about forward motion that unlocks something in the brain. Stanford researchers proved it a few years ago: walking increases creative output by up to sixty percent. Sixty. You don't need to walk far. You don't need to walk fast. You need to walk.

And if you're tempted to write about the walk afterwards, take a lesson from The Salt Path: Raynor Winn's memoir of walking the South West Coast Path with her dying husband sold a million copies, got a film deal, and was hailed as a raw, honest account of survival. Then a 2024 Observer investigation alleged that large parts of it weren't true. The best walking memoir of the decade may be the best fiction of the decade.  By all means, walk. Just don't let the story get ahead of the footsteps.

Obviously, some walks are longer than others. And some walks aren't about a creative boost - they're about survival, transformation, or the kind of reset that only happens when you put one foot in front of the other for days and weeks until the person walking isn't the same person who set out. 

To inspire you, here are a few authors and their books to get you going:

Stephen King, or the daily walker

Stephen King walks every day. He's done it for decades. In On Writing, he describes his routine: write in the morning, walk in the afternoon. The walk isn't a break from the work. It's part of it. The problems he couldn't solve at the desk have a way of solving themselves somewhere along the road between his house and the point where he turns back.

And then, in 1999, walking nearly killed him. A pickup truck hit him from behind while he was walking near his home in Maine. Collapsed lung, shattered leg, shattered hip, scalp laceration. He was lucky to be alive. The man who walked to think couldn't walk at all.

During his recovery - in pain, unable to sit at a desk for long stretches - he wrote. He wrote Dreamcatcher longhand, in a notebook, because he couldn't type at a screen. The protagonist, Jonesy, survives a horrific car collision that shatters his body. King wasn't disguising what had happened to him. He was working through it on the page, the way he works through everything. And then something stranger happened. He started thinking about Misery, the novel he'd written twelve years earlier, about a writer named Paul Sheldon whose legs are shattered in a car crash and who is held captive by a fan who won't let him stop writing. King had invented Paul Sheldon's pain from imagination. Now he owned it. He'd lived it. The accident didn't inspire Misery - it gave him a second reading of it. The walk, or what happened on it, had changed his relationship with his own work.

King's lesson isn't that walking is dangerous. It's that walking is load-bearing. Remove it and the structure wobbles. He walked before the accident because it helped him think. He walked after the accident because it helped him live. The writing followed both times - and the second time, it reached back and changed the writing that came before.

Laurie Lee, or the walk that became the book

In 1934, a nineteen-year-old Laurie Lee left his village in the Cotswolds and walked. He walked to London, and then he walked to Spain. He walked through a country on the edge of civil war, playing his violin in the streets for food, sleeping in fields, learning what the world looked like one step at a time. He didn't take a notebook. He didn't take a camera. He walked, and he watched, and he remembered.

Thirty years later, he wrote it all down. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the book that came out of that walk, and it's one of the great travel memoirs in English. But the book isn't what matters here. What matters is the gap: thirty years between the walking and the writing. Lee didn't walk to gather material. He walked because he was young and restless and the road was there. The writing came later, when the experience had settled into something he could shape. The walk fed the book the way a river feeds a reservoir - not in a rush, but over years. And unlike some walking memoirs, he didn't need to improve the truth. The walk was enough.

Most writers don't have thirty years. But the principle holds: the things you see when you're walking have a way of becoming useful later, in forms you couldn't have predicted. The conversation you overheard on the lane. The way the light hit the hill. The dog that followed you for half a mile and then left. None of it is research. All of it is material. The walk gives it to you without asking, and the desk finds it when it needs it.

The novel that understands what walking does to you

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. Harold is retired. He lives in Devon with his wife, and they don't talk much, and the silence between them has become a third person in the house. One morning he walks to the post box to send a letter to an old friend who is dying. And then he keeps walking. Six hundred and twenty-seven miles, from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed, because he's decided that as long as he's walking, she'll stay alive.

It's a novel about what happens to a person who commits to a walk. Not a stroll. Not a ramble. A walk that takes months, that destroys his shoes, that turns his feet into something he doesn't recognise. And the thing that happens is this: Harold starts to feel again. The grief he's buried, the marriage he's abandoned, the guilt he's carried for decades - all of it surfaces, not because he's confronted it, but because he's kept walking past the point where he could run from it. The walk doesn't fix Harold. It makes him honest. And that's what writing needs too - not fixing, but honesty. The willingness to keep going past the point where it hurts.

Rachel Joyce wrote Harold Fry after years of writing radio plays for the BBC. She wrote it during a difficult period in her life. And she's said that the walk she gave Harold was the walk she needed herself. The novel isn't a treatise on the benefits of walking. It's a story about a man who couldn't sit with his own life and found, hundreds of miles later, that he didn't have to. The walking carried what he couldn't.

The thriller where the walk is the crime scene

Force of Nature by Jane Harper. Five women from the same company are sent on a corporate retreat in the Giralang Ranges, deep in the Australian bush. They're meant to hike, bond, and come back as a team. They come back as four. One of them is missing. Federal agent Aaron Falk, who's been investigating the company for fraud, is called in. The trail goes cold. The bush keeps its secrets.

Harper's novel is the counter-argument to every gentle book about the healing power of walking. Because walking doesn't heal you. Walking strips you. It takes away the office, the phone, the commute, the noise - all the things you use to avoid the people you work with and the person you've become. And what's left, when those things are gone, is the truth. In Force of Nature, the truth is that these women hated each other. The walk doesn't bring them together. It pulls them apart, mile by mile, until someone disappears.

For writers, the lesson is the inverse of Harold Fry's. Harold walked to feel. Harper's women walk and can't stop feeling, and the feeling is worse than the silence they were running from. That's the other thing walking does: it removes the escape routes. You can't scroll, you can't change the channel, you can't pretend you're busy. You're in your body and your body is moving and your mind has nothing to do except think. For a writer, that's the gold. Not the thinking itself - the thinking is uncomfortable, messy, the mental equivalent of blisters. But the thoughts you have when you can't escape them are the ones worth writing down. They're the ones that come out true.

Harper writes the bush the way King writes Maine: as a landscape that knows you better than you know yourself. The Giralang Ranges are fictional, but the fear is real - the fear of being in a place where your phone doesn't work and the person behind you on the trail knows something you don't. It's a thriller that uses walking not as backdrop but as mechanism. The walk is the plot. The walk is the weapon. The walk is the thing that turns colleagues into suspects.

So how far should you walk?

Far enough that you forget you're walking. That's the threshold. For some people it's ten minutes. For others it's an hour. For Harold Fry it was six hundred miles. For Laurie Lee it was the length of Spain. The distance doesn't matter. What matters is the moment when the walking becomes automatic and the mind unclenches and the thing you couldn't see at the desk appears in front of you like it's been waiting on the path the whole time.

On Naxos, we walk. Not because it's part of the programme - it's not, not formally. But the retreat sits in a landscape that asks to be walked through. Olive groves, coastal paths, the road that winds up into the mountains. Writers who come to the retreat talk about the walks. They talk about the sentence that arrived on the coastal path. The plot problem that dissolved somewhere above the harbour. The character who showed up on the walk back from dinner and wouldn't leave.

Writing a book and walking the distance are the same act, performed with different parts of the body. You put your head down. You take the next step. You don't think about the end because the end is too far away to be useful. You think about the next step, and the one after that, and at some point you look up and the landscape has changed and you're somewhere you didn't expect, and the book is there. Finished, or close to finished, it belongs to the person who walked all the way there.

Put your shoes on. The sentence will be waiting when you get back.