Letters Craft / Craft

Write to one person, not to an audience

The moment you imagine a second reader, the letter changes shape, and not for the better.

There is a difference between writing to somebody and writing near them. The second happens when part of your mind is performing: for the person's family who might read it, for a future version of yourself who wants to have written something impressive, for a general reader who does not exist. The prose thickens. Sentences get formal. You begin explaining things the actual reader already knows, because the imagined audience would need them explained.

The correction is mechanical. Picture the one person, in a specific room, holding the paper. Then write what you would say if you were sitting across from them, with the small liberties that intimacy allows: shorthand, private references, the joke you would not explain. Assume they know the background. Assume they can handle the truth. Letters gain enormously from what they leave out because both parties already have it.

This is also why round robin letters, sent to a list, so rarely move anybody. They cannot. They are addressed to a category. If you must write the same news to fifteen people, write it fifteen times, badly and briefly, with one sentence in each that belongs only to that reader. That single sentence is the whole letter as far as they are concerned.