Issue 37: Your Replies, and the One I Keep Rereading

Dear reader,

I don't often say this in a newsletter, but last week's letter broke my inbox. Not because it was good. Because it made people want to talk about their own mornings, their own notebooks, their own failures at beginning things. I've spent the week reading and answering, and I'm going to share a few of your messages here (with permission, names trimmed).

The short ones

A teacher wrote: "I tried the pen thing on a Tuesday. By Thursday my students were asking why I looked less tired." She isn't sure the pen is the reason, and neither am I.

Someone who writes grant applications for a living sent three lines: "Handwritten the first paragraph. Cried a little. Application submitted. Thank you." I have no idea what to say to that except you're welcome.

A reader in a different time zone admitted that she dictates her drafts in the car and then types them up while the memory's still hot. "I sound like myself when I'm annoyed in traffic," she said. "That's my voice." I think she's onto something.

The one I keep rereading

Marit wrote a longer reply, and with her blessing I'm sharing most of it. She's been writing a family history for six years, and she'd stalled on a chapter about her grandmother's kitchen.

I kept trying to describe the room, and every attempt read like a catalogue. Stove, table, window. Then your letter made me try something different. I wrote, by hand, only what I could smell on the way in. Onions, then something sweet and burnt, then the particular cold of the back door. The catalogue vanished. The room came back by itself.

She added a line I wrote down and stuck on my wall: "I think I'd been trying to be accurate when I should've been trying to be present."

Why it stuck with me

It's tempting to treat writing advice as a set of tools. Marit's reply is a reminder that most of it is permission. Permission to write badly first, to come at a subject sideways, to start in the nose instead of the eye. The tool is just the door you happen to find open.

A request

If you've got a writing habit that other people think is odd, write and tell me. I'm collecting them. The stranger the better. So far my favourite is a man who drafts every chapter on the back of old envelopes, in the order he'd never read them.

If you missed the letter that set all this off, Issue 36 is still up.

Back next Friday with something lighter, I promise. Seven links, no sermon.

Warmly, Hollis