Charles Dickens walked at night, roaming the streets of London to work on plot lines.
Mark Twain paced.
J.K. Rowling stated: “Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.”
Hemmingway also walked to think through his stories.
Is there a connection between walking and sparking creativity?
When you walk, you allow your conscious mind to access new ideas in the subconscious. For most of us, walking doesn’t take a lot of thought but does get our body moving and allows our mind to meander at the same time as our feet are wandering.
I recently listened to a radio program interviewing Eric Weiner about his new book, “The Geography of Genius”. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book, but I was curious enough about his idea to read online reviews, on which I based the following. I gather that his thesis is something about geography – in his theory, urban centres – being important to producing works of genius. He claims that genius thrives in chaos: in terms of geography, that means, cities. Urban centres abound with chaos as anyone from Grey and Bruce Counties knows when we try to navigate Toronto traffic. He points to historical genius figures who lived in cities, such as Mozart’s Vienna, and the Greek philosophers in Athens.