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Letter Writing as a Powerful Prompt

This originally appeared as a guest post on Jane Friedman’s website. 

 

 

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.

Let My People Vote… (and You Should, Too)

When we first started working with Desmond Meade, he told us, “I might be the only homeless crack addict who ever ended up on the cover of TIME magazine.” He is, of course, so much more than that, and his memoir, Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens, went on sale last week, to huge acclaim.

 

 

Let My People Vote tells the story of Desmond’s life, from his tough childhood to ending up in homeless shelters with a felony conviction on his record. Finding the strength to pull his life together, he graduated summa cum laude from college, graduated from law school, and married. But because of his conviction, he was not even allowed to sit for the bar exam in Florida. And when his wife ran for state office, he was filled with pride—but not permitted to vote for her because there are still four states where one felony conviction means you can never vote again. “You may think the right to vote is a small matter,” he told us, “and if you do, I would bet you have never had it taken away from you.”

Desmond became politically active and spearheaded a movement to restore voting rights to 1.4 million “returning citizens,” a term of dignity he accords to ex-felons who have served their sentence and should be granted full rights to rejoin society. Explaining the core rationale of his ballot initiative to voters up and down the state of Florida, he asked them one simple question: “Has anyone you love ever made a mistake?”

Let My People Vote ends on the exhilarating, joyful night in November 2018 when Desmond’s initiative, Amendment 4, passes with 65 percent of the vote, an event that enfranchised the most people at any single time since women’s suffrage. Publishers Weekly says, “This poignant account soars.” And it’s just in time for the election. . . .

Doris Buffett: 1928-2020

 

Doris Buffett, sister of Warren, and megaphilanthropist in her own right, passed away peacefully last month at her home in Rockport, Maine.

I never met Doris. But if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have been commissioned by one of her foundations to write Letters to Doris: One Woman’s Quest to Help Those with Nowhere Else to Turn.

I wouldn’t have been blessed by the creative synergy with my co-writer, Anita Mumm, and our photographer, Stephanie Craig. I would never have met Amy Kingman, the boss you want to have on a project that involves traveling across 19 states for the better part of a year.

If it weren’t for Doris, I would never experienced such heart-breaking, in the sense of heart-opening, interviews with her grant recipients. I would never have met Ken Prather in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who asked for funding so he could take terminally ill children to the zoo in a reliable vehicle. A man who was getting by himself on a tiny monthly disability check had started his own foundation.

I would never have known there were English Labs capable of detecting when a human’s blood sugar level dropped to dangerous levels, until I met one in Rockwell City, Iowa, along with her new owner, Kalie Buenting, a 12-year-old brittle diabetic. Bringing the two of them together was another of Doris’s good deeds.

I never met Doris, but I met her spirit in each of the two dozen individuals we interviewed for the book—and there were hundreds and hundreds more we could have spoken to. This is what great people do. It isn’t about meeting them; it’s about getting to know each other, about getting together to help each other through this life. That is why, when a great person dies their essence remains here more than anything is gone.

You can read Doris’s obituary in the New York Times here. And if you were lucky enough to meet Doris, you can leave a story, memory, or message on this site, which will eventually become part of a virtual celebration of Doris’s life.

A Convert Speaks

A Word on the Method, by Jeanette Stokes

When I feel completely stuck in my life, I try to remember that I worked all this out about twenty years ago. If I walk, write, and make some art every day or nearly every day, then I can keep going and life can seem quite livable and sometimes even meaningful. So, when I run out of steam, I try walking, writing, or painting.

When I get stuck in my writing, whether working on a book or a shorter project, I can sink into that dark place of: “This is stupid. I can’t write. All those other things I wrote were a fluke. No one wants to read what I write anyway.” Then, just before I give up entirely and turn to learning macramé, a faint voice in my head will say, “the method.”

As though coming out of a fog, I take a few bold steps toward the bookcase in my upstairs study and reach for Blueprint Your Bestseller: Organize and Revise Any Manuscript with the Book Architecture Method by Stuart Horwitz. This and his two subsequent books lay out a brilliant method. I begin at the beginning, proceed through the steps, and everything gets better.

It is important to have already written down everything I can think of to say on the particular subject at hand. That’s actually the first step. The method is most helpful to me once I have written a great quantity of words and am stuck trying to figure out how to help the project hang together.

One step that is particularly useful is writing down all the scenes I can remember. Trust me, I never want to do it, but it’s like peeling the tough skin off broccoli, it is so much more satisfying to eat if I’ll just take the time to do it. So, I write down the scenes, compare them with what I actually have, and notice what’s missing. Almost immediately, I have some hope about the possibilities for the piece I’m working on.

Then comes the really hard part: Cut it up. I never want to do this step either and once wrote a friend: “I don’t want to print the book out and cut up the scenes. I don’t want to do it. I’m SURE it is the next step, because I have the glue-y feeling about the project. I work on a little bit here and a little bit there, but it is time to figure out the theme and the scenes and stop dealing with it as a big wad of dough. Telling you this will give me the courage to DO IT!”

I print the manuscript out and cut up the scenes, worrying the whole time about how to save the brilliant segues I have written to connect various sections. Once this surgery is completed, I get the payoff: a sense of ease and spaciousness comes over me and I can see! Instead of one tight intransigent blob of words, they come to look like small interesting packets that have a chance of making sense together.

The method works for a book, an article, or a chapter. I remember one particularly satisfying hour of writing when I printed out a slightly tangled chapter, cut it apart, rearranged and deleted, and found the meat. The next day I rewrote it. The method never lets me down.

After separating all the scenes, I get to make charts on the wall of all the scenes and a big bullseye target that helps figure out what the theme is for the project. If I just stick with all the steps, I wind up with a much clearer, cleaner, more accessible piece and I stop feeling like I’m lost in the dark.

Writing is hard, but it doesn’t have to feel aimless. Stuart Horwitz’s method will help you find your way.

Jeanette Stokes, is the executive director of RCWMS and author of several books, including Just Keep Going: Advice on Writing and Life. She lives in Durham, NC.