I didn’t start walking to write; in fact, the opposite: I walked to be able to escape the page.
To get some air, in the widest sense of the word. To move away from the tightness of tensed muscles and the frustration of lines that go awry. To rest my eyes on a horizon wider than the white border of the page, moving up and down in futile rhythms of writing and deleting, doing and undoing.
When the path through words became obscured, I left my desk and walked.
Walking down a road or around a park, a parking lot or a field, my limbs loosen up and my eyes start moving from sight to sight. My attention starts wandering, and leaps between thoughts and impressions, making connections born of movement. Somewhere in the parts of my brain where creativity and playfulness and fearlessness live, things start stirring and moving around too. Sometimes, while I walk, I listen to music, sometimes to the sounds around me, and sometimes I am somewhere else altogether, a place where music and silence, movement and stillness combine.
There are many reasons why so many writers find the experience of walking central to writing.
Virginia Woolf, in her essay Street Haunting, used the excuse of buying a lead pencil to wander around London. ‘The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful . . . The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves.’
Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City unfolds New York as a kind of revelation, the narrative following her as she moves through the city’s streets.
And then there is Saadat Hasan Manto, chronicler of the bloody Partition between India and Pakistan, who wrote with love and intimacy of the seedy bylanes of the city then called Bombay.
Whether you are walking through an urban sprawl or the countryside, you encounter intimacy and smell, colour and sound. You hear snatches of conversation, catch a flash of movement from the corner of your eye. In the crunch of soil or grass or concrete or sand beneath your feet, you stake claim to a place; you build an alliance with it.
For my own book, Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, I found that the idea of wandering around a city set me free to write about it in a way that was true to what I saw. It allowed me to communicate not just the facts but the feelings I encountered. For example, the feeling of a breezy Friday afternoon – the Afghan weekend – listening to the sound of the ice-cream cart play the Titanic theme song; crossing the street at the exact moment when the sun hits the mud-daubed wall of a house; dancing upon a nameplate embedded by its gate – a simple inscription of a family name that has survived forty years of war.
The line ‘The street teaches you’ is attributed to the American oral historian and journalist Studs Terkel, who built polyphonic accounts of places with working-class voices. For Terkel, the line was an indication of the abundance to be found in the midst of everyday life. For me, the line is an invitation, a reminder that walking sparks exploration. It is a path into unorthodox sources for our stories, like myths and fables, family dramas. It is a way to see walking in the way oral traditions see storytelling – plots and characters emerging from each other, secret doors unlocking a new way of seeing a familiar terrain.
By now, perhaps, you are thinking, ‘That may be true for travel writing, or to describe a city.’ But often the intonation of a particular voice you hear in passing makes the dialogue you have been struggling with fall into place. Other times, paying attention to one vital detail can change a familiar path to a new vista. I’ve laboured over a piece for hours and failed to achieve what a short walk away from the text yields. Walking makes the kaleidoscope move: it shifts the tiny glimmering pieces of text into intricate patterns that make sense.
My favourite way of walking is into the memories and stories of others.
I learned the beauty of this kind of wandering from my grandfather, who was skilled at such expeditions. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the explorer Marco Polo recounts descriptions of city after city to the emperor Kublai Khan.
My grandfather, too, often described places to me – places that he had never seen but knew intimately through reading. Walking through Kabul, he was my most reliable guide, offering paths through the city from his study in faraway India. His stories created in me a nostalgia for places I had never seen. For instance, his magical descriptions of Budapest, with its famous Chain Bridge connecting the two parts of the city’s name, Buda and Pest: when I finally walked across this bridge, shortly after his death, I was continuing the many walks he had taken in his imagination over the broad currents of the Danube. It was something like an inheritance.
No wonder, then, that for writers of an earlier era, walking and writing was linked to pilgrimage.
Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century travelogue Rihla feels like the ultimate walk – long, meandering, full of detours and surprises. It’s less about getting somewhere and more about being constantly in motion.
I think what really makes the connection between writing and walking work is that walking is the closest we can get to the act of writing with our bodies. Walking is time travel, it is being everywhere at once, it is reinvention and it is being embodied fully in situ. Your heart pumps faster, your eyes seek out shapes and colours differently, your mind races and plays, or slows down and wanders, as you change the tempo of your feet.
‘To think of the relationship between walking and writing as something that belongs only to writers is to think of creativity as a form of production, not a way of being. The street teaches you, and the street belongs to everyone.’
The pace of walking too mimics the act of writing.
We put one step after the other, as we place one word after the next. Line after line, we cleave to a path on the page. Or where the road vanishes, we create one, hacking away at the white spaces with our tiny black imprints.
This connection between writing and walking is one that resonates almost universally. Think of all the people who claim that they do some of their best thinking while walking. We celebrate flâneurs who are writers, but the tradition belongs to us all. To think of the relationship between walking and writing as something that belongs only to writers is to think of creativity as a form of production, not a way of being. The street teaches you, and the street belongs to everyone.
Years ago, I was struggling with a particularly stubborn part of my book while camped out in a friend’s home in the Indian city of Pune.
I used to write in a coffee shop, and I described my problem to the owner. She told me to climb the hill across the road from her shop. ‘It will help you,’ she said.
I walked up and sat on a rock, watched the sun set and lights of Pune come on. Somewhere in that ascent, I saw the vision of the story I wanted to share.
When I came down, I carried the words with me.
Taran N. Khan is a journalist and writer based in Mumbai. She grew up in Aligarh and was educated in Delhi and London. She has published widely in India and internationally, including in Guernica, Al Jazeera, The Caravan and Himal Southasian and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jan Michalski Foundation and Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
From 2006 to 2013, Khan spent long periods living and working in Kabul. Her first book, Shadow City, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award and the Tata Literature Live First Book Award for Non-Fiction. She teaches on The Writers’ Path – Faber Academy’s one-day writing and walking workshop.
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