Finding My Characters in the Wild: What Hiking Taught Me About Writing
Author H.D. Carver explains what hiking taught her about writing and how it helped her focus on the right goals.
I started hiking the same year I decided to quit writing. I’d fought the good fight. I’d slogged through the query trenches, gotten a good agent, and written a book I loved. When we put it out on submission, I was thrilled to find editors who loved it too. But that’s where it all unraveled. Again and again, the book would make it to acquisitions, and it would die there. The verdict: It wasn’t marketable.
I was crushed, but I did what we writers are supposed to do—I forged ahead and started another book. But my creative spark was gone, and my new work had no heart in it. I knew now how long and hard the road was, and there was no guarantee if I set out on it again that it would turn out any differently. I couldn’t do it anymore.
So I quit. I left my agent, and I stopped writing. I wanted to feel the relief that’s supposed to come when you right the course of your life, shifting from an old path that wasn’t leading anywhere to something new. But all I felt was grief. I wasn't just mourning the loss of something I loved, or the years spent chasing a dream that didn’t come true. I’d wanted to become a writer because I wanted to earn my place in the world, prove my worth. And I’dfailed.
I took to the trails to try to shake off the deep sense of loss I was wrestling with. I’d always used the outdoors as a refuge, running the local trails when I needed to clear my head. I’d read Wild around that same time andrealized there was a whole world out there I’d never explored, mainly because my ability to run topped out around five miles on a good day. So I started hiking. It turns out running and hiking are completely different experiences.
Running for me is a place where I’m in control. It’s concentrated and intense. I can burn off emotions, outrun thoughts, solve problems. Hiking isn’t like that. It demands patience and comfort with uncertainty. It’s venturing outinto unknown places for long stretches of time. If the terrain or the elements are bad, you don’t battle them for 45 minutes and come home feeling strong—you suffer through them for an eternity, all of it reminding you that you’re at the mercy of a force that doesn’t give a damn about you.
I fell in love with that feeling. That nature didn’t care. Who I was, what I’d accomplished or hadn’t, the dreams I’d given up on. It didn’t care that my self-worth was tangled up in becoming a successful writer. I felt free from that.
But in nature, the farther out you go, and the longer you stay there, the more of the world gets stripped away, until you’re left with nothing but yourself. And whatever’s inside of you. That tangled sense of self-worth kept coming back to me, a stark contrast to the outdoors where everything else just existed without question. Where had I gotten the idea that I needed to earn my right to take up space in this world?
Answers flooded me. Old wounds and memories and past parts of myself I’d spent decades trying to outrun. Messy and uncomfortable truths that I’d buried away so I wouldn’t have to face them were suddenly staring me down, unavoidable. There was nothing to distract me from my own mind.
Check out H.D. Carver's We Became Wild here:
Sometimes the thoughts would come at me so fast I could barely keep up with them. I scribbled them down as fast as I could, just trying to get them out. Not writing, but journaling, taking notes, just trying to process it all.
I started to find a relief in puzzling it all out, in staring down the things I’d spent my life being too scared to look at. I dug in deeper, trying to solve my own mysteries. At some point, I realized there were the bones of a storythere, about a girl trying to outrun herself. My mind was still crafting, still using story to make sense of things, and I wanted to see where it all led, so I kept going.
But I’d finally stopped judging it and worrying if it was good enough or marketable enough, or if anyone would ever want to read it. I’d stopped trying to prove something. I wrote a story I just thought needed to exist. It was the start of We Became Wild.
The funny thing is I don’t think I ever actually quit writing. I just stopped trying to control the end result. I stopped measuring every word against some imagined future where success would finally make me enough. The wild taught me that not everything has to earn its place or prove its worth, that things can simply exist because they do. Maybe stories are like that too.
