The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Walking and inspiration
Getting ready to write

Many writers I’ve met, or whose lives I’ve studied, remark on how they take long walks each day, and that these walks are an integral part of their creative process.

Ian McEwan often hikes with his friend Ray Dolan. They sometimes joke that, if one of them gets Alzheimer’s, the other will “take him off to Amsterdam and have him legally put down.”

On one of his hikes with Dolan in the Lake District, McEwan imagined “two characters who might make such an agreement, then fall out and lure each other to Amsterdam simultaneously for mutual murder.” McEwan was writing another novel, so he “sketched the idea out that night” and put it away. When he turned to writing Amsterdam (1998), which he’d conceptualized on that walk, the work took on “a life of its own.” He included his and Dolan’s walk in the novel—the “route that the character Clive Linley takes.”

Alice Munro walked three miles a day. Her walk, like her writing, was a daily practice. (Now in her eighties and frail, Munro no longer writes.)

Munro walked because she felt it was necessary for her to continue to be alert, to train her “capacity for responding to things,” rather than “being shut off in some way.” This allowed her to be “totally alive” to whatever she was writing.

Munro’s daily walk was essential to the vitality that she believes every writer must cultivate lest this capacity to witness the world “shut [itself] off in some way.” This required Munro’s vigilance in maintaining her daily walking and writing practices. She linked her capacity to generate new work with her compulsivity to stay active. “Yes,” she said, “I don’t stop [writing] for a day. It’s like my walk every day.… The vigilance has to be there all the time.”

In March 1927, before Virginia Woolf began writing Orlando (1928), her love letter to Vita Sackville-West, she promised herself to be alert to the “symptoms of this extremely mysterious process” of when and how she conceptualized a new book. She had become interested in her own creative process, not to try to control it but to try to understand it so she could work with its mystery rather than subvert it. Woolf was finishing correcting the proofs of To the Lighthouse at the time, and she believed she was “passive, blank of ideas.”

A few weeks before, Woolf had pledged herself to a series of “long romantic London walks” to relieve the intensity of the work she was doing. She understood how these walks refreshed her but also how necessary they were to her creative process. During the night of March 14, 1927, Woolf suddenly conceptualized a new book, a “fantasy to be called ’The Jessamy Brides.’” She began to see characters—“[t]wo women, poor, solitary at the top of a house.… [T]he Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes.… Sapphism is to be suggested.… The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view.… Everything mocked. And it is to end with three dots … so.”

Woolf would have to wait before beginning the book that became Orlando—she had other projects to complete—but she wanted to record and remember “the odd hurried unexpected way in which these things suddenly create themselves—one thing on top of another in about an hour.”

Woolf remembered how she’d “made up The Lighthouse one afternoon in the square here” (Tavistock Square in London). In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), Woolf recalled how “one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind.”

While Woolf walked, and relaxed, and turned her mind to the sights she was seeing—“The greed of my eye is insatiable,” she said—she entered that receptive, passive, meditative, yet alert state that created the optimum condition for the inspiration for a new work to surface in enormous detail. And Woolf trained herself to be alert to when that process was occurring, so that she could capture it, remember it, and record it.

Robert Stone, author of Outerbridge Reach (1992), about an ordinary man testing his endurance in an around-the-world boat race, finds that movement helps him when he’s writing: “I pace a lot,” he says. Part of Stone’s process involves working freely, which is risky—“You have to be able to surprise yourself.” Stone makes a short list of subjects indicating a very loose sequence: he says “I know the beginning and usually the end. My problem is the middle.”

To work in such an open-ended way, Stone believes that it’s essential for a writer to work to “eliminate self-consciousness”—this doesn’t come naturally and must be cultivated. The more consciously a writer works, Stone believes, “the more difficult it is” to create. Stone’s solution is to “do a lot of walking. I really like walking and I do a lot of thinking when I walk.”

But as he thinks, Stone doesn’t ruminate about his work; instead, he tries to let “the story take over,” surrendering and becoming involved in the process. Stone believes that a writer can’t be outside the work, “constructing it consciously, self-consciously, moment by moment.” Instead, “You’ve got to let your imagination go. And begin to hear voices, figuratively speaking.… Beguile yourself. Entertain yourself. And keep yourself inside it.” Or, as Stone says, it’s important to “[R]elax into the story.”

Which is what Stone did as a young child. He was, by his own description, a solitary child, who often listened to the radio, which, he said, “fashioned my imagination.” Narrative in radio fascinated him; it embodied both “action and scene.” When he was “seven or eight,” Stone would “walk through Central Park like Sam Spade, describing aloud what I was doing, becoming both the actor and the writer setting him into the scene.” That early habit of simultaneously walking and creating, and acting and writing, Stone says, was how he “developed an inner ear.”

I once met a full-time writer who told me he walked to work but that he wrote at home.

“You walk to work?” I asked, perplexed. “But you write at home?”

Each day, after breakfast, this writer walks his kids to school, returns home, takes a shower, dresses in nicer clothes than the sweats he wears when he drops his kids off, goes back outside, and walks back to his house to work. He walks the same route each day, around the block, past a newsstand where he buys a paper, past a deli where he buys himself a cup of coffee, and past a vegetable stand where he picks something up for supper. His walk takes fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. On his walk, he sees people on their way to work; he’s walking to work, just like them, and it makes him feel professional. By the time he reaches his desk, he told me, he always knows what he needs to do next. On his walk, he’s unlocked a puzzle in a chapter, or imagined a scene—sometimes, even, a whole book.