Dear Geist,

How about a few tips/exercises to keep us hardworking writers in shape?

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.”

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