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

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.

Creative writers and other arts practitioners working outside academic contexts will derive creative and cultural benefits by learning how to understand the relation between their own creative practice and everyday life, and how to develop both as a result

My publisher will gain the financial benefits of publishing a new creative work

Readers of the novel will gain a new cultural experience of reading a new creative work

Contributing a distinctive 'walking and writing' workshop to the Bailiffgate Museum programme will create financial and cultural benefits to the Museum and cultural and social benefits for workshop participants; and will build a partnership for future collaborations and dissemination activities. The unusual link between walking and creativity will allow the Museum to develop new directions in representing local heritage, and help visitors to think differently about landscape and their place in it.

Delivering a similar but less locale-specific workshop at a National Trust site will similarly benefit the National Trust by helping it to engage visitors with cultural heritage and landscape in a new and distinctive way which can be replicated at sites across the UK, and will create cultural and social benefit for visitors by helping them to think differently about landscape, cultural heritage and their own cultural and creative identities.

National stakeholders in public health, well-being and public use of the environment will gain social benefits through having debates about (dog-)walking, creativity, health and well-being addressed in the national media in an unusual and distinctive way. Disseminated through media work the research will provide evidence of the value of (dog-)walking in radically different terms from those of public health, allowing walking to be promoted to individuals who are not engaged by those more traditional articulations of its value. The research thus has potential to bring social and health benefits, albeit indirectly, to a large number of people, by helping them to understand why they might like to walk and how it may benefit them in a range of ways beyond a narrow conception of physical health.

Dog-walking is a mass phenomenon, and this means that the research can bring cultural and social benefits to a large number of people who are already dog-walkers, by helping them to understand and think about this everyday activity and how it already contributes, and can contribute further, to their work, cultural and imaginative life.

The project blog serves as a focus for those interested in dog-walking and in creativity, disseminating the research as it happens, promoting the research and building interest in its outputs before they appear. It also allows links to be built with related projects regionally, nationally and internationally.