8 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
Of course, William incorporated the
act of walking into his work. In “Sweet
Was the Walk,” he evokes the pleasures
of a mid-day stroll:Sweet was the walk along the
narrow lane
At noon, the bank and hedge-rows
all the way
Shagged with wild pale green tufts
of fragrant hay,
Caught by the hawthorns from the
loaded wain,
Which Age with many a slow stoop
strove to gain;...And his sister, Dorothy, detailed many
exhilarating walks with her brother in
her journals. In October 1800,There was a most lovely combination at the
head of the vale—of the yellow autumnal
hills wrapped in sunshine, and overhung
with partial mists, the green and yellow
trees and the snow-topped mountains. It
was a most heavenly morning.Many writers also find release walk-
ing through cityscapes. Walt Whitman
is always walking through the city.
“Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,”
he tells us of his walks, and “I too
walk’d the streets of Manhattan island,
and bathed in the waters around it.”
Baudelaire walked through Paris, con-
ceptualizing the flâneur, the wanderer,
connoisseur of the street.
Virginia Woolf made up To the Light-
house while walking through Tavistock
Square, and Mrs. Dalloway is all about
walking, which literally connects the
characters. (There is a London tour you
can take that follows Woolf ’s walks,
based on notes she wrote in her jour-
nals.) Joyce is Dublin; Ben Lerner’s dense
prose merges him as a character with the
living, breathing city around him.
Too, walking through places with
people in them makes us imaginethe experiences of others in a way
walking through nature doesn’t. The
writer Jolene McIlwain told me of an
exercise that she tried a few years ago.
She set one simple goal: to make eye
contact with one person involved in the
altercation every time she saw a domestic
dispute. But, she told me, the exercise
changed her. She started to see things
from another point of view, a view with
which she radically disagreed.Prior to making a conscious effort to meet
their eyes, I would always look away
from those situations, and I told myself
it was because I didn’t want to judge or
didn’t want a confrontation. But really it
was more about wanting to write my own
narrative. If I opened up my eyes (my
brain and my heart) I’d have to accept
that there were other parallel narratives
that could be happening.She says she soon saw a connection
with her own drafting process.I get the action down and then it takes
me multiple drafts to unpack the feelings
behind those actions, the narrative behind
the actions. And sometimes if I get the
actions and thoughts down, I don’t linger
there long enough. It’s like I’m at the store,
I see the fight start, I observe for a few
milliseconds, then I duck into the next aisle
and act like I’m looking for Advil.In this empathy exercise, McIlwain
learned that she needed to make eye
contact and hold it until another person
saw her seeing them. She needed to get
to a place where she felt uncomfortable
and challenged and—for lack of a better
word—alive. And then she needed to
take that same feeling into her writing.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi notes:The best moments in our lives . . . are not
the passive, receptive, relaxing times. . . .The best moments usually occur when
a person’s body or mind is stretched to its
limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish
something difficult and worthwhile.He calls this state of being flow.
For a story to be great, Stephen King
says, it must have two elements: drama
and empathy. It’s important to remem-
ber empathy is not about judging; it’s
about observing without prejudice. It
isn’t sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sad
that Bambi’s mother is killed by the bad
hunters. Empathy is trying to under-
stand the motives and feelings of the
hunters and the doe and Bambi himself
as the scene unfolds.
Empathy can be cultivated. In H Is for
Hawk, Helen Macdonald recounts how
training a goshawk helped her over-
come intense grief at the sudden death
of her father. In part, she survives by
losing herself in the hawk. She felt in
some ways that she became the hawk:I started to see the city through
[Mabel’s] eyes. . . . I would come out
and stare at what was going on and it
would baffle me. I’d wonder what a bus
was. Why is that woman throwing a
ball for her dog — why would you do
that? The whole city became very odd.
Later, when the hawk began to fly free
and hunt her own food, I really felt
that I wasn’t a person anymore. . . . I
became this feral creature covered in mud
and blood and thorn scratches. I didn’t
wash my hair. I was a mess, but it was
an incredibly good way of forgetting that
I was miserable.
— Electric Literature interview.First, though, Macdonald had
to be open to that empathy and to
understanding and analyzing it. “It’s
what the poet Wordsworth would have
called joy — joy and wonder. That’s
at the heart of what I love about the
natural world. If you’re receptive to it,