The writer walking the dog: creative writing practice and everyday life

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Writers write inside the routine of their daily lives, but the role of daily routines, duties and activities in shaping writing practice is not well understood. This study explores how the writer's daily chore of walking the dog contributes to writerly and social identity; shapes what is written - and how; and impedes, supports and shapes the techniques and rhythms of the working day. It is fundamentally a reflective project which offers a study of the writer's own creative practice, based on daily writing and reflection on a series of walks, providing a model for other practitioners and walkers to understand, contextualise and develop their own lives and practices.Walking has been a key topic for cultural and human geographers, social theorists, and artistic movements from the flâneurs to the Situationists to the psychogeographers and contemporary artists. Although much attention has been paid to walking considered as a cultural and aesthetic practice, this will be the first study of the role of dog-walking as a tool or instrument in creative writing practice. How does this daily chore impact on the daily business of writing? Is it simply an interruption or break in which work ceases entirely? Does it provide space for meditation or thinking things through. Can writing happen during the walk itself? And how does the nature of the activity - walking through a familiar landscape along established routes at particular times throughout the year - feed into the way the writer thinks and works?The study explores a number of relevant literary traditions, including landscape poetry, the Romantics, psychogeography, the picaresque, and rural, travel and memoir writing, and on a number of tropes such as dreams, imaginary walks, and lone walking, as well as the work of a range of specific writers including Francis Kilvert, Richard Jefferies, Harriet Tarlo, Iain Sinclair, Peter Didsbury, WG Sebald and VS Naipaul, in order to situate the writer's own writing practice and develop it further. It also considers the various techniques which writers, artists and cultural geographers have used to record their walking, and uses these to produce a book length piece of creative prose describing a series of imaginary walks.The aim of the project is not simply to reflect on the writer's own daily life and writing practice, but to provide a case study and a model for how other writers can think about their work in relation to the rhythms and routines of their daily lives. In this way it opens up an undeveloped area of enquiry into creative practice. In particular, by considering walking as both a socio-cultural practice in its own right and as a contributory practice to creative endeavour, it indicates ways in which writers and artists might negotiate the competing imperatives of daily and creative life and the different ways they might be seen by themselves and others.