Letter Writing as a Powerful Prompt

letters

Today’s guest post is by editor and author Stuart Horwitz (@book_arch).


When Franz Kafka handwrote a 45-page letter to his father, he may not have been conscious that it would end up as a literary document to be studied through the ages. When Bob Dylan wrote a not-very-nice 20-page letter to an ex-girlfriend—whom he had the courtesy never to name—he probably didn’t know that he would end up extracting from it the lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone.” But what these examples, and many more throughout history, show is the power of letter writing to benefit a wide variety of projects, from memoir to creative nonfiction to fiction.

My forthcoming memoir started as a letter to my daughter when she went off to college. I chose someone with whom I could be honest and self-revealing; fortunately, we have that kind of relationship. Getting to intimacy with an imaginary reader is hard; if you write to someone you can talk to, on the other hand, you can more easily achieve a confessional and arresting tone. This is because there is no such a thing as “voice” in the abstract. There is the voice of a speaker, and there is the audience of a listener or listeners, but what carries the words from one to the other is the tone of voice. This tone is carried by everything from word choice to content that reflects a shared approach to life.

If you choose the right addressee, eventually, the general reader can become a stand-in. You will be able to remove the direct address yet retain the warmth of tone. The best writing makes this journey from being a personal exposé to a larger, cathartic vision of how we all can live. The author Susan Steele once put it to me this way about her memoir: “The first draft was the gory, adult, vengeful Susan; the second healed me; the third healed my family; and the fourth was the story others needed to read.” I saw that firsthand with my own process, even though I would describe the finished product a little differently: The fourth draft really felt like the draft I could live with select other people not loving.

Your specific addressee does not need to be someone you see eye-to-eye with. In both Kafka’s and Dylan’s examples above, they were writing to someone with whom they had a difficult legacy. Some very powerful personal writing can be addressed to once intimate connections with whom you have fallen out. Not to complicate matters too much, but you may find both audiences present at once: someone who you believe will understand what you are saying, and someone who you fear won’t (or will refuse to) understand.

Your addressee may never read your letter in either its pure or its refined form. Sometimes issues of libel come up, and sometimes there are other considerations, such as wanting to continue to have Thanksgiving with your family members. But getting into your material via the prompt of letter writing—with the understanding that you don’t need to send the letter as is—can help you dig deeper into the things you think you can’t say. Without the fear of being interrupted, you can really hear yourself think. True confessional moments bring up grief, anger, and shame—those emotions we prefer to keep to ourselves. That material is why readers turn to writers in the first place—because writers are people who are brave and put themselves out there to help others through their struggles to be conscious.

What you can’t say face-to-face, you can say in a letter, especially one you will continue to work with. How you shape the material after that is up to you, of course. You might turn it into fiction, using the same hallmarks of storytelling you can employ in a letter—finding the scenes that ground the discussion through sensual detail, action, and point of view. You might write a letter from the point of view of one character to another as an exercise that can help reveal the inner workings of the relationships in your novel. Novelists often know each of their characters deeply in a one-on-one relationship, but those characters may not always know each other as well. The drama of a closed fictional world is always enhanced when characters are more clearly aware of what they want from others and what information they are withholding.

Whether you use your letter as a starter to get you somewhere else or use it to help you heal a living relationship in real time, letter writing can be more than a prompt or an exercise. It can be a portal that projects you into the discovery of a world.

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Jennifer D. Diamond

Thank you, Stuart, for sharing your journey through letter writing with us. Your ability to pull us in with you creates magic. But it’s your ability to help us understand how letter writing improves our writing across all genres transforms the magic into creative power. Thank you.

Stuart Horwitz

Thank you so much, Jennifer! It is one of the earliest things we learn how to do as writers, and yet we forget sometimes the directness it provides.

Elisabeth Kauffman

Love this! Many of the “early” novels were written as letters between characters (thinking of Clarissa)… there’s so much to convey in letter form! And it can teach you so much about what details are necessary to include and which you can leave out. In this age of social media posts and 240-character limits, letter-writing is sort of a lost art! Thanks for sharing, Stuart.

Stuart Horwitz

Good point about getting to stretch it out a little in a letter, Elisabeth. And of course if the first draft is handwritten you get to communicate the act of thinking through cross-outs and directional arrows!

Annie Tucker

So much about this post resonates with me. I love the idea that letters give us the courage to say things we might not feel comfortable saying to someone in person, as well as a sense of direction as we write not to a nameless, faceless audience, but with a specific target in mind. That level of intimacy gives any book a huge advantage over one whose author isn’t really using his or her true voice. As you articulate so beautifully, Stuart, writers are people who “put themselves out there to help others.” This letter-writing technique is a perfect way to lead by example. Thank you for a thought-provoking lesson in craft. I may have to steal this idea to help advise my own writing clients!

Stuart Horwitz

Steal away! I’ve been hearing more and more examples of where letters catapulted the writer into a new avenue or even style. And it all starts with that word, “Dear…”

Kimberly Savage

I love how I can always find much-needed inspiration from both Stuart Horwitz and Jane Friedman. I can’t wait to read your memoir, Stuart, when it comes out – the sneak peak from the Today Show this past Father’s Day was amazing! I’m getting ready to embark on writing a fictional diary, and I’m definitely going to apply this letter-writing wisdom to that endeavor. Thank you!

Stuart Horwitz

A fictional diary! That sounds awesome, Kimberly. When we say “Dear Diary” who do you think we’re really talking to… someone who will definitely understand, right? You’ll have to let us know..

Maddy Utley

Using letter writing as a launch point is a relatively new practice to me, so this thorough breakdown of the ways it can be intentionally used as a tool is incredibly insightful. For me, it started more as a therapeutic practice, but I quickly realized that getting such raw material down on paper “without the fear of interruption”, as you so aptly note, and with the knowledge that, while directed towards someone else, the words I’m putting down are mine alone to burn, to shout into the void, to edit and sculpt into something I want to shout from the rooftops, etc, etc, etc, is about as liberating as it gets and really creates the room for experimentation. Thanks for sharing, Stuart!

Stuart Horwitz

Well now I want to see those letters, Maddy, lol… but I know, I know. It is really about hearing what we have to say first. And I’ll bet when it comes from that deep, maybe wrenching, place, other people need to hear it, too — in whatever form.

Jan Hogle

This was a great post. I felt validated for my life-long letter-writing habits! I recently received a packet of letters I had written to some friends a couple times a month during years I lived in Africa. The depth of detail was incredible; I had forgotten so much! I think we can achieve the same thing with long emails, but the problem is that those emails will likely disappear unless they are printed.

Stuart Horwitz

What a gift those letters must have been, Jan! Usually all we are left with are the letters we receive; which are also wonderful, of course, and we can read into what was happening and what we were thinking though them. But as writers getting delivered material in our own hand can’t be beat. The details you mention are another reason I have found it so useful to keep journals, but the letter has the extra component of voice to an audience that makes things come alive.

P.S. as part of my memoir project, my high school girlfriend sent me two letters I sent to her… who was that guy?!..

Emily English-Medley

Letter Writing. “Dear You,” and “From, Me.” Yes, this. So like the lost art of knitting or quilting, letter writing as a writing prompt is something we often forget. When I was in my early twenties, my dad slipped a letter into my bag as I was boarding a plane to move far, far, away from him. He told me not to read it until I landed, but of course I opened it right away as we ascended into the clouds. It said, and I’ll never forget, “Dear Emily, I watched you grow up and was there for all your wins and successes, which were many. I also watched you fall and fail, which was not often…but I saw it. And the hard times? Well somehow we got through them together.” His letter in that moment both set me free and held me back. He never signed his letters with “I love you. -Dad” He never said that. He always just said, “you are loved.” And these semantics were prompts for a lot of the writing of my life. Thank you Stuart, for reminding us of this, and I cannot wait to read your memoire. I love this idea. So sweet.

Last edited 3 years ago by Emily English-Medley
Stuart Horwitz

Incredible story, Emily, and how well you remember some of these emotional contours is what it’s all about. That resonance tells the truth on a whole other level. Long live fathers’ letters to daughters (and some, and mothers’ letters and and)…

Jane Gerhard

Letter-writing is as close to authentic confession as it gets. Somehow, the eyes of the receiver (even if just in our mind’s eye) keep us honest, or as honest as we can tolerate on any given day. Even as I write this, I am aware of all the artifice we manufacture all the time, everywhere. But the truth is, as Stuart says here, we all benefit from an audience, a reader, when we write. Using the letter form lifts (or promises to lift) the journal entry into wisdom and humor and hopefully, some kind of useful (worthy?) perspective, the stuff of memoir. Thank you for this musing, Stuart. And for all your help with my writing over the years.

Stuart Horwitz

Wow, Jane — some very astute points here. The indeterminacy of are we ever telling the truth… that’s a lot to contemplate. Or are we just trying to win people over to our side? But let’s be optimistic just for the moment and say yes, writing to someone who will understand (or who will very much not understand) allows us to express half-dormant thoughts and feelings. And making those conscious is the very work of writing, I think.

Cathleen

As writers go, we live life in a bubble of fantasy peering and perusing others worlds through our portal of observations. At least, that’s what many of my writing instructors said. But that phrase didn’t help me move past the debilitating blockade of a blank page and that’s why this article is good. “What you can’t say face to face you can say in a letter” is the journal prompt of all journal prompts. For the first time, I can visualize a writing life by beginning each draft with a focus toward a real person.

Thank you for this post. I’m going to write like a bandit today and we’ll see where it leads.

Cathleen

Stuart Horwitz

Wow, Cathleen, thank you for sharing this! The emotions and thoughts, understandings and misunderstanding, we can achieve with a real person in mind translate later into so many areas because they are just that, real. And we can assume that what is heart-breaking or heart-openingly true from one person to another will carry general, maybe even universal, significance. Good luck!!

Jennifer Lafferty

I love this letter writing idea and am sharing it with my writer friends.

Stuart Horwitz

Thank you, Jennifer! Let us know how it goes.