If You Have Nothing To Write, Go For A Walk

All writers love to write or they would not be writers naturally. But it is impossible to always be able to produce material worth publishing in writing sessions. Sometimes, your mind just has nothing to give on that day. So what to do? I will not pretend to speak for every writer, only for me. Each writer has his or her own system and strategies for managing when the muse abandons them. Here is what works for me and hopefully you will find it of some value. It basically sums up to "don't force it". If you have nothing, don't stress about it, just do something else. 

Passionate as we may be about our craft, we are very limited in what we can write about if we have experienced little of what our world has to offer. I believe that writer's block is simply our subconscious trying to tell us that we need to feed our brains new experiences to draw material from. Or maybe it is simply communicating some form of fatigue be it physical,  mental, emotional or otherwise. In either case, it calls for a break and my recommendation therefore remains. Now the question becomes what to do with that lull in the action. 

The answer for me is to go for a long walk. In my experience, this is a gold mine for finding new material, especially if you live in large cities. Much of my first poetry collection came from this. In fact, I probably spent almost as much time walking as I did writing for that collection. I'm telling you it works, just make sure to stay present and assume the mental makeup of a detective. You will be amazed by how many powerful insights begin to arrive as if by magic. You will also gain an acute sense of the darker underbelly of your city which will only enrich your writing and your perspective of the world around you. You will learn quite a bit about life from graffiti, ill-maintained sidewalks and the wayward ways of those to whom life has been less than kind. You will understand how badly the system fails us, how badly the system fails them and how badly light needs to be shined on problems that so many would rather be swept under the carpet.

The writer that will return from these walks will be one with the right combination of empathy, anger, intelligence and perception to have an astounding run of productivity. But more importantly, the writer that emerges will be a voice of the voiceless, a champion of the ordinary, a light upon the darkness. Anonymous figures like the shopkeeper, the taxi driver, the beggar, the students and their wide-eyed dreams, they will all take on life of their own in your work. The supposedly well-off executives, and the anxiety drawn upon their faces, the skyscrapers and their gleaming windows, they too will get a new lease on life thanks to you. And my friend, all of this will be because you took a walk. It's not only in baseball where a walk can be just as good as a hit. 

For those of you in the country, walking affords you a different luxury, that of reconnecting with nature. Nature has always fed art and writing is no different. Poets like me and prose writers can agree on this. We are of nature just like we are of love. That is why they are inescapable in our art. This is because art is merely a reflection of us. Writing is no different. We are born of romantic love into nature and become subordinate to nature's laws. In connecting with nature, we come to connect with ourselves. People going for a walk in the country can do this free from the urban additives that we have in the city such as buildings, noise and the frantic pace at which we tend to live here. There are also naturally fewer people so the writing that emerges may be less people oriented perhaps, but no less important. 

The writer that emerges from these walks will breathe new life into the woods, the lakes and the stars. All of us will gain an enriched appreciation of these thanks to the work that emerges from this writer. The anonymous creek, the farm animals, suddenly these go from afterthoughts to incredibly interesting figures after meditating on them a little just like city folk meditate on the legions of people around them. The vastness of everything around, the combination of nothing and everything that exists in remote places, here you have a wonderful thought on which to base writing on. All that is needed is a brisk walk around to marinate in all of it.

Antonio Machado noted that "paths are made by walking". Joan Manuel Serrat posed this same truth to us in music as only a master of his caliber could have. This is a powerful truth in the arsenal of the writer. When the muse leaves, go for a walk. The paths you create may not become clear for a time, but when they finally do, they will take your breath away and you will wonder how you even came to that point at all. And then you may even want to write around that thought.