Writing to a reader who is not born yet

Letters intended for the future have their own rules, and vagueness is fatal to them.

When the reader is decades away, everything you assume they know must be written down. Not just names and relationships but the texture: what the house sounded like, what things cost, what the argument in the family actually was, what you were worried about that year. A future reader has no context to supply, so a letter full of allusion becomes a locked door. Write as though explaining to a stranger who happens to love you.

Resist the pull towards wisdom. Letters written to the future tend to inflate into advice, and advice ages badly, since the specific world it assumed will have gone. Description ages beautifully. Say what happened and what it was like. If you want to include your own conclusions, mark them clearly as yours and keep them short, so the reader is free to disagree with a person rather than obey a monument.

Date everything, including the small notes. An undated letter loses most of its usefulness the moment its recipient dies, and dating costs six seconds. Say where you were sitting when you wrote it. That single sentence will do more for a future reader than a paragraph of reflection.