Most writers have a system in place to drive the work they do. My own system, for example, is mad and unpredictable, and it’s based on a mysterious alchemy of guilt, panic, dumb luck, and caffeine-induced tweaking.

Craig Mod, on the other hand, has a fascinating (and slightly less neurotic) method for driving his work as a writer: walking.

Craig thinks of a walk as an operating system that he can use to support, feed, and inspire all the basic functions of his writing. Walking gets his mind moving, stimulates his bottomless curiosity, and energizes his creative force.

But it’s more than that: the whole gamut of work Craig does, whether digital, or tangibly, unapologetically analog—is supported by his approach to walking. Both how he writes and what he writes about are inextricably linked to the process, discipline, and experience of putting one foot in front of another.

The results speak for themselves. Craig’s writing has developed an engaged and loyal following over the years—tens of thousands of people read his multiple newsletters, and his work has appeared in publications like Eater, Wired, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

His greatest love, though, is making books. It’s the most tangible and soul-satisfying work product of all his walking. The latest is Kissa by Kissa, currently going into its third artisanal printing, and there’s another opus marching towards the presses in September.

So how does Craig transform steps into words, and words into books? Let's take a stroll together to see how walking enables Craig to do what he does.

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Craig Mod introduces himself

When people ask what I do, to keep it simple, I just say I'm a writer and I work on books.

Walking—and walking in Japan—is a core part of my identity

I’ve lived in Japan for most of my adult life, and I went on my first ‘real’ walk here about twenty years ago. I’ve gone on countless big walks around Japan—sometimes with friends and mentors, but more often alone.

Last month, I finished a 435-kilometer walk along a few routes of the Kumano Kodō UNESCO World Heritage pilgrimage trail:

Arriving in the rhythm of a long walk can take a few days, but I find that once I’m there, a momentum takes over—I get a natural high, the mind seems to open up, I become more creative, and I start to truly notice things. 

Through walking, I feel like I accidentally discovered a way of more fully interacting with place, and of connecting with people in situations that I would never otherwise get to be in. For example, I spend a lot of my time on these walks talking with farmers, say, or charcoal makers—folks I’d otherwise never bump into in my ‘normal’ life. But in the context of a long walk, our paths naturally converge.

Since my earliest walks, I’ve been investigating what I can do with walks. I like to carry out experiments to see what the experience of the walk might lead me to create or publish, in sounds, images, and words.

I think of my walks as an operating system—a platform for creative work

For me, a walk is a tool or platform upon which I can build, sort of like an operating system. When I become fully immersed in ‘walk mode’ the operating system begins to hum along, becoming almost autonomous, and I find the experience of this incredibly empowering. It just feels like the world and my place within it vibrates at a higher, more finely tuned level. 

I realize this sounds somewhat insane, and I suppose that’s true—but a long walk contains within it the act of losing your mind: the long hours, the endless kilometers. On a properly executed long walk, it feels like the world pops from HD to 4K in terms of detail and texture, if that makes any sense.

As I walk throughout the day, I find myself thinking about what I will write that night. And I become absorbed by engaging with the towns and villages I pass through and connecting with the people I meet.

If I’ve ‘programmed’ the operating system well, I’ll get into that elevated state of creativity and rigor. 

I program my walks by setting rules

Different walks have different rules, but when I’m on a walk, a typical rule is that I consume no newspapers, articles, or podcasts, and I use no social networks—nothing that could mentally teleport me out of the walk. I use Freedom to block all of this on my laptop and smartphone. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t use technology on my walks. Under the rules I made for a walk last year on the historic Tōkaidō road between Tokyo and Kyoto, I produced videos every day, made recordings of ambient sounds on the walk for my SW945 podcast, and wrote and published essays every night.

That meant that after a full day of walking, I had to import gigabytes of data, process audio, process video, export it, get it into a YouTube-friendly format, write and edit a newsletter, then push it through my complicated publishing system. 

So even if I felt completely spent, and was certain that I would die if I didn’t get to sleep immediately, the rules I set created an accountability that I took seriously: they said that I had to get all of this done. And because I was in this elevated, ascetic walking mode, I did! I got it all done—even if I was nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

Of course, when I come to the end of a walk, I'm absolutely zonked and I need a few weeks to recover—but I feel more of a deep-seated sense of being energized and having used my body and mind well, rather than pure exhaustion—and I love working this way.

I use Google Sheets to plan all my walks

Planning a walk on a spreadsheet is a critical part of my process. I take care of all the logistics and planning in advance, so I don’t have to think about the day-to-day. I can be 100% present in the walk. Even choosing a hotel for the next day would occupy too much mental space while in the walk itself. I’d rather that time be spent on photography, writing, synthesis, or recovery.

Here’s the Sheet for my walk on the Nakasendō in 2019. As you can see, each row is a day of walking, with a starting and an end point. Sometimes a day takes up multiple rows, with a row for each town I’ll be passing through. I include an estimated distance of the walk (usually an underestimate!), actual distance once I’ve walked it, and everywhere I’m going to stay. I book all my accommodations in advance—a lot of inns in Japan don’t have websites, and have to be booked with a phone call. This takes ages. I probably spend a dozen hours on the phone and websites mapping out a month of walking.