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walk write (repeat)
Author: Sonia Overall
Imprint: Triarchy Press
Extent: 92pp. Paperback
Size: 12.7 x 20.3 cm
ISBN: 978-1-913743-18-5
List Price: £12.50  Use code to save 20%
Publication: 18th January 2021. Available only direct from Triarchy until then.
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Tags: walking, writing, drift, dérive, sonia overall, creative writing, embodied writing, mythogeography, psychogeography.
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Readership

This  is a manual for creative writers, but the approaches and exercises can readily be adapted by practitioners working in other media. 

Read more:

See all Triarchy books on Walking
​See all Triarchy books on Movement & Somatics

walk write (repeat)
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Sonia Overall


​Walking helps you think (as anyone knows who has tried to resolve a problem sitting down). So this handbook uses walking as a tool for creative thinking and writing.
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Offering a whole array of sparks, experiments, projects, catapults, prompts, drifts and exercises, Sonia Overall invites us to see walking as a creative writing method. She sets out a particular form which she calls walking-writing and suggests ways to gather materials, submit to the sensory, explore your home like a tourist, and scour the streets like a metal-detector in search of the hidden, the forgotten and the overlooked.
This  is a manual for creative writers, but the approaches and exercises can readily be adapted by practitioners working in other media. All of the exercises included here have been foot-tested. Use the book to walk and work alone or in groups, together or separately. Use it to generate ideas, create text and read differently.
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Walking outside, in varied environments, will offer you novel experiences to draw upon. Many of the exercises here can be carried out in your immediate environment, or if mobility or opportunity are an issue, in your own home. Rescale and adapt at will. 

From the Introduction:

Writers are thinkers. We spend a lot of time sitting at desks, spines compressing, legs numbing, carpal-tunnelling. We use our hands to write or type, our eyes to read and our minds to process. Aside from the odd moment of rehydrating or caffeinating, we can forget that we have bodies at all.

 Without physicality in our writing, the world of our text will be nebulous. To be authentic, characters need to be bodies inhabiting real spaces, not floating bundles of motives and speeches. Objects need to be tangible. One way of ensuring this is to bring our bodies into our writing through movement and sensory experience.
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Walking ticks those boxes. Walking and writing together – ambulatory writing – captures the process as it happens.​
 
Inside the book:
Creative walking: ambulant writing exercises:
  • Sparks. (Use a spark to get started on a walk or to switch things up during a longer walk.)
  • Experiments. (Use an experiment to probe deeper.)
  • Projects. (Use a project to develop a creative piece.)

Walking-reading practices:
  • Walk Like (HG) Wells
  • Wide Sargasso Walk (Jean Rhys)
  • Walking with Riddley (Walker)

Creative walking-writing: DIY toolkit 
  • Catapults (Use them to help you drift, moving away from familiar routes)
  • Writing prompts (Use them to see your environment through a particular lens).
  • Distance Drifts (Use them to explore new spaces or freshen up the familiar). 
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