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Thinking Paths
How going for a walk can help writers solve their creative problems
Every writer should have a thinking path. When I learned that Darwin, Dickens, and Wordsworth had one, I wanted one too. And it has transformed my writing process.
I’ve always been a walker. My earliest articles were for walking magazines, and I’ve also written a guidebook for walkers. But for any writer, walking produces the perfect thinking time.
It was Darwin’s father who introduced him to thinking paths. Every morning, at his childhood home in Shrewsbury, young Charles accompanied his father on a route around the garden, where he was encouraged to think about his upcoming day. When he moved to Kent as an adult, he created his own thinking path, which he strolled daily as he developed his ideas for the Origin of Species.
While I’m no Darwin, whenever I’m stuck on a novel plot point or can’t get an article to flow, I get up from my desk and go for a walk. There are a couple of circuits from my front door that take me through fields and trees and over hills. With no dangerous roads to cross, I’m free to get lost in my thoughts. It’s amazing how a half-hour stroll produces a solution to my writing problem.
Dickens described his two types of walking in The Uncommercial Traveller. One, which was ‘to a…
