Dear Geist, How about a few tips/exercises to keep us hardworking writers in shape? —Cheese Danish Writers’ Circle, Bellingham WA
Dear Circle, Read something in a format or category you’ve never tried: a cookbook, a goofy zine, the full text of a law, a jargon-choked scientific entry in Wikipedia. Find a great page or paragraph by a writer you admire and write it out in longhand, word for word. Turn off your phone and go for a thirty-minute walk. No music, no radio, no podcasts, no headphones. If a passage you wrote is bugging you, have someone in your group read it aloud. Or hook up the Word text-to-speech (or similar) feature on your computer and have the program read it aloud. Here’s one from Colm Toibín: “To cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.” See also our posts In style, Flash momentum, The write time, Writing before writing and Protracted writing. —The Editors
