It’s dark outside and quiet inside. Flogging Molly are no longer playing, Claudia is reading the newspaper and I’m looking at Mastodon.
I currently have one pen pal, and just yesterday I wrote her a six page letter. It’s weird. It’s slow. And the blog post has a target audience of one. Every time I do it I feel transported back in time.
What do I write about? I’m still learning how to do it! Part of it is “here’s something I cared about that recently happened to me.” You need to make sure that there are some open elements to it so that the recipient can answer with their own story, or ask follow-up questions. It should be personal enough to be interesting, mention something you value. Opening up and being vulnerable enables intimacy to work. I’m in interested in the person, and therefore I need to be in my letters, as a person. If you don’t like to reveal personal details about yourself, I suspect you’re going to have a hard time.
If you’re not used to that, perhaps that’s because you’re often writing on your blog, or on social media, like I do. The key for me is that I focus on the paper. A letter cannot be easily shared on the Internet. It’s not potentially read by hundreds and thousands of people. Perhaps somebody will keep your letters and publish them after you die. It’s not something I’m concerned about. 😆
What also seems to work is to ask simple but potentially open questions such as “what is your favourite …” and then, if you want, you can write about the why and the how and more. The important part is not to “close” a conversation by giving the minimal answer. Don’t say “my favourite colour is red.” It goes a bit against the computer nerd tendency to just answer questions. Again, I think the key is to use the question as a writing prompt. You need to make it personal.
Of course, you want to be personal and open, but not too personal – that’d be creepy. What I aim for is to be personal and find that point where I’m feeling slightly uncomfortable and ask myself: “why am I telling these things to a stranger half way across the globe?” One aspect of that is of course that the recipient is of course half way across the globe. If things go wrong, there’s no immediate backlash in my circle of friends and acquaintances. I��m not pouring my heart out, but also being more open than on social media, in public. Does that make sense?
If you write letters to strangers, how do you do it?
#Writing