Does walking while dictating help you write?

Walking helps you come up with ideas, according to controlled studies. It has not been shown to help you draft or dictate prose. The studies measured short tasks that ask for ideas, not writing, so a walk is a good place to find the next idea, and you still have to write the sentences at a desk or on your feet.

Walking raised creative ideas in the controlled tests

In a 2014 study by Oppezzo and Schwartz, walking raised the creativity scores of 81 percent of participants on the alternate uses test, which asks for many different uses of a common object ¹. On a convergent test, the boost reached only 23 percent of participants ². Walking helps open up ideas more than it helps narrow them to one answer.

A 2022 meta-analysis pooled 28 physical activity intervention studies and found a medium effect on creative ideation, with Hedges' g = 0.47 ³. That review covers physical activity in general, not walking alone, and its studies used different creativity measures. It supports the same direction, not a precise effect for a writer.

Walking outdoors and a short sit afterward may add to the effect

The 2014 study also tested where people walked. In its fourth experiment, walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies, compared with sitting inside, walking inside on a treadmill, or being rolled outside in a wheelchair ⁴. The wheelchair condition let the researchers separate the effect of being outdoors from the effect of walking.

The boost also carried over. In another experiment, participants who sat down after walking still showed a residual creative boost ⁵. That is useful for a writer: a walk can set up a session at the desk, not replace it.

Walking may help planning, but no study shows it improves the sentences

Planning takes most of composing time. In the IBM study of letter writing, about two-thirds of composing time went to planning ⁶, and letters are not books. Idea generation is part of planning, so a walk targets part of that time. No study we found shows that walking improves the sentences that follow.

The studies also have limits. The tasks were short idea tasks, mostly with university students ¹, and none measured dictation, drafting or the quality of prose over a session.

What to do with a walk

1. Write one question before you leave, such as what happens next in the chapter. A specific question gives the walk a target.
2. Speak ideas as short notes, not full sentences. A voice memo or a dictation note is enough.
3. Sit down and draft within the hour, by dictating the scene while the idea is fresh. The residual boost was measured on a short idea test after sitting, not on writing, so treat it as a hope rather than a result.
4. Keep your attention on the road. A hands-free voice note is safer than writing on a phone while you cross streets.
5. Track the result for a few weeks. If your drafts come faster after walks, keep the habit. If not, the walk is still a rest.

For the method of drafting a whole book by dictation, see our guide to writing a book by dictation. For how writer's block and dictation interact, see can dictation help with writer's block. For the rates that set a writing session's pace, see how many words per hour you can dictate, and for whether a novel can be dictated at all, see can you dictate a novel. The wider subject is in our overview of dictation for work and study, and the basic term is explained in our glossary entry on dictation.