Thanks for your lovely letter

Thoughts on letters and stories

Getting a real letter from a friend in the post cheered me up and when I read ‘thanks for your lovely letter’ it cheered me up even more. I remembered how enjoyable it had been to write that letter, to sit for once with a real pen and paper and to let words come without being too precious about them -  like a conversation on the page. No need for deep thought. Mistakes are part of the deal. They can be crossed out. They make the letter all the more personal and authentic.

It reminded me how powerful a first draft can be. A short story or novel isn’t the same as a letter to a friend (usually), but one thing you can say about an informal letter is that it's written as if you were speaking directly to the reader. Your ‘voice’ is threaded through the whole thing, direct and uncensored.

We writers can spend decades trying to find our ‘voice’. Perhaps we should look at our letters with all their idiosyncrasies and informalities. We might find our authentic voices right there, though I also remember how someone, admiring the spontaneity in a well-known author’s work, received the reply: ‘Yes, it’s taken me years to become that spontaneous.’

What would happen if we began all our stories with: ‘Dear Jane,’? We could always cross it out later.

What better, when someone reads your work, for them to feel like a friend being addressed personally, and to think: ‘thanks for your lovely story’?

Jeff Phelps