To celebrate National Walking Month in the UK, we’re speaking with Sarah Farley – a writer, brand storyteller and the founder of The Writer’s Walk, a successful Substack channel where she explores the deep connection between walking and creativity through prompts and insights that help others use movement to unlock new ideas.

We were intrigued by this connection between walking and writing that The Writer’s Walk brings together, and how the idea came to life. We were lucky enough to have Sarah guide us through this experience.

Walking & Creativity

Q: You’ve written short stories, poems and creative collaborations. Do you find that walking influences the form your writing takes, or does the idea come first?

With collaborations or commissions, someone else usually decides the form. They might ask for a particular writing style or genre, or have a precise number of words. When I take those kinds of briefs for a walk, it’s to help me mull it over to make sure I understand what I’ve been asked to do, or to start generating some initial ideas that I can work on back at my desk. 

With the things I create myself, it’s a mix of both. The idea for ‘Walking in zigzags’ came from Stephen Graham’s book The Gentle Art of Tramping. I took a few zigzag walks to see what happened and to work out if it’d make a good addition to The Writer’s Walk, and I wrote about it afterwards. The idea for ‘Walking around an airport’ came to me when I was walking through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and spotted a library – which was pretty unexpected!

Q: Many writers say walking helps them untangle tricky ideas. Have you ever solved a writing problem mid-walk?

Many times. I like to take my clients’ briefs for a walk – often straight after a meeting or call. I use the walk to think about the challenge they’re facing and how to approach it, so by the time I’m back at my desk, I have a plan and I’m ready to go. The writing problems I solve this way are either structural – like the format I’ll use to shape the writing – or conceptual. For instance, this might mean coming up with ideas for a commercial campaign or writing things like headlines or taglines.

Walking to Find the Words

We were particularly drawn to Sarah’s article ‘Walking to Find the Words,’ where she talks about the city as a source of inspiration – from billboards and graffiti to lost signs and ‘found poetry’.

Q: Can you share a time when a phrase came to you while walking and ended up shaping something you wrote?

I wrote about saltmarsh for a project called 26 Habitats – a collaboration between writers’ organisation 26 and The Wildlife Trusts. The brief was to write a centena: a piece that has to be exactly 100 words and where the first and last three words are the same. I didn’t know anything about saltmarsh, so my research included lots of walks around Rye Harbour Nature Reserve and Spurn National Nature Reserve.

As I was wandering, the phrase ‘the salt brings…’ kept playing in my head. I don’t know where it came from – one day it was just there and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So it became the starting and ending phrase of my centena, effectively informing the whole piece. There are lots of other things I noticed on my saltmarsh walks that made it into the piece, including a cuckoo calling. It seemed like every time I explored a saltmarsh I’d hear a cuckoo towards the end of my walk, so I had to write it into the poem.

Q: In your article, you talked about the ‘found poetry’ technique – the idea of collecting words, lines and phrases and combining them to create an entirely new piece. For readers who want to try this, what’s your advice on training themselves to ‘see’ words in the wild?

I think it’s best to look for them in towns or cities, as that’s where you’re most likely to encounter words in the wild. The main thing is to walk slowly, which makes it easier (and safer) to pay attention to what you see around you. The things you might want to look out for could include:

• Advertising: on billboards, buses, taxis, bus shelters and so on. 
• Signage: anything from street names or signs in shop windows, to road signs telling you to ‘slow down’, ‘look both ways’, ‘give way’ and so on.
• Art: a lot of street art is word-based, so if you’re walking in an area where there’s a lot of graffiti then you’re bound to find words and phrases to ‘borrow’ for your ‘found poetry’.

Reading & Walking

Q: Do you have a favourite book or author that captures the magic of walking in words?

That’s a great question! And so hard to pin down to one book. There’s The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, which is like a love letter to the Cairngorms. I like how she described her relationship to the mountain: 

‘… one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.’

I’ll be cheeky and quote another writer I admire, Mary Oliver, from her poem Sometimes:

‘Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.’

As Nan Shepherd hints, you can never experience the same walk twice. And I think a key to that is to always walk with curiosity, pay attention and show an interest in what you see around you. Find something that astonishes you. Tell about it through writing. That’s the idea at the heart of The Writer’s Walk.

Q: If you could take a walk with any writer, past or present, who would it be and what would you want to ask them?

I think it would be fascinating to walk with JRR Tolkien. I’d love to walk with him in his favourite landscape and ask about his connection with nature and how it influenced both the languages he created, like Elvish, and the stories he wrote to bring them to life. 

Tolkien’s stories of Middle Earth include themes of environment, living in harmony with the land and the vast, wild expanse of nature. I wonder what he’d make of the decline of nature in the UK and our loss of access to so many wild spaces. I’d also love to hear about the woodlands and mountains that inspired him, and how he came up with the names of places and characters. 

The heroes in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are on journeys, which they make, for the most part, on foot. Tolkien even wrote a ‘walking-song’ that hobbits would hum as they walk along, so I’d ask him what walking meant to him and how it was entwined, if at all, with his writing.

Bringing Words to the Page

Q: Do you keep a walking journal? If so, what kinds of things make it onto the page?

I don’t keep a journal, as such. But I do write a lot of what I call snippets. They’re often a drifting of thoughts, memories and ideas rather than anything structured. The things that make it to the page are words I see in the wild and want to remember, fragments of overheard conversations, random ideas and those wonderful moments when I figure out the best way to express something I’m working on and I need to write it down before I forget it. 

I’ve thought about creating a walking log – a bit like the ones scuba divers keep where they log the date, location, time and depth of their dives, and what they saw, but so far, the snippets work well for me.

Q: For those who dream of writing but don’t know where to start, what’s one simple walking-inspired writing exercise they can try today?

Try writing an acrostic poem, where the first letter of each line spells a word, and that word is also the theme of your poem. Your word is ‘walking’ and your theme is a walk you enjoyed, exploring how it made you feel. So the first line will start with W, the second line with A, and so on, like this:

W
A
L
K
I
N
G

Don’t worry about rhyming or rhythm – just write what you feel. There’s no right or wrong way to try writing for the first time other than to have fun with it.

To read more from Sarah or try one of her walking-inspired writing exercises, head to The Writer’s Walk.