I came across an article on walking and another one on a writer’s process chronicled.
What does walking have to do with writing? Turns out, a lot. Read this article from the BBC mag.
Wordsworth was a writer and we all know about the daffodils he saw on one of his walks. Charles Dickens walked, as did Virginia Woolfe, Henry Thoreau, W.G Sebald and many others.
“There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively,” says Geoff Nicholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking.
And there are many other authors who have explored this idea of walking in an increasingly urbanized world, where walking is more about patience dealing with traffic (more pedestrians die due to accidents than the people driving their cars) or keeping fit. And don’t think that walking with headphones or texting as you walk is the kind of mindful walking that has been prescribed by great thinkers and walkers.
Walking is no pedestrian business.
Have you ever wondered how an author writes the book? You might have seen the publicity interviews and listened to the tips enumerated by the author half in jest, half in denial(as writers are a little superstitious about giving away their trade secrets or maybe embarrassed by what the process of writing can do to them).
Andy Martin contacted Lee Child to understand more about the writing process and ended up writing a book called Reacher said Nothing.
Writing a bestseller ‘on the verge of a stroke’ is a must read for anyone who wants to take the plunge into writing as an occupation.
‘So far I have no title, no real plot…. I don’t have a clue about what is going to happen,’ Child tells Martin on the first day. This, for most novelists, would be a startling admission, especially in crime fiction where plotting is paramount. Martin perches on a couch as Child sits down, lights a cigarette, and begins to write. By the end of the day, Child has smoked 26 Camels, drunk 19 cups of coffee (‘I’m writing on the verge of a stroke,’ he quips) and written 2,000 words. It’s fascinating to watch the process of writing unfolding in real time —
Don’t you simply want to read the rest?
Imagine that you are being watched as you write and your every decision relating to your work is questioned. Would you be able to write at all? Lee Child did; he wrote his book under intense scrutiny, in seven months. When you are writing your twentieth book, however, the story is a different one altogether.
Have you read any article on the web that has made you wiser about the writing process? If you have, share it with us in the comments section.
I finished reading a book that is part memoir, part tryst with philosophy by author scientist and journalist, Barbara Ehrenreich. The book is ironically named for a book by an atheist. It’s called 
Two other books I was reading at the time were 
The other book called Reading like a Writer is a book I’ll be talking more about on the blog. Suffice to say, a writer should read on high alert- every punctuation, choice of word, structure of sentence and length of paragraph plays a role in shaping the text. There is no better writing school than a good book.
Anil read a book called 
