Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming

Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming

I always read how novelists would return letters to their readers as a daily writing warm-up. Now that I seem to be a writer, guess what? It’s true. People want to write to me and writing them back every morning is a great way to start my day. Get my fingers moving and my butt in the chair.

The letters seem to fall into a few categories. There are the ‘I’m mad at you because I couldn’t sleep last night until I finished your book’ missives. I could read those all day. And some are funny. One reader had a blackout in his house and finished Old City Hall by candlelight. Another got through the last few chapters by the light of her cell phone on a greyhound bus. Love that image.

Then there are the ‘but’ letters. Usually they say things I love the: story/characters/setting/writing/hockey in the book/complex ending, etc. ‘but’ I didn’t like the: story/characters/setting/writing/hockey in the book/complex ending, etc. Some days I get letters in which one writer loves the exact same thing the other doesn’t like.

I get many, many ‘can I send you a chapter’ letters. Writers of all shapes, sizes, ages and backgrounds who want me to have me look at their prose. I look at everything. To be candid, often it is like looking in a writing mirror – I see the same mistakes that I, and almost all writers struggle with, as we learn this trade. I recommend to everyone the Humber School for Writers – either their great nine-day summer course in July in Toronto, or their six-month correspondence course available to people all over the world. Also that they read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

By far my favorites are the ‘you missed’ letters. Readers just love to point out any little factual inconsistency they can find. Some writers might be offended. I find it wonderfully flattering that sitting alone all these hours, I’ve somehow constructed this fictional world that is so very real to people. Here is an excerpt from one of the best:

I thoroughly enjoyed your first novel…The one (minor) false note concerned your description of the full moon late in the book. You had Kennicott looking up and seeing the full moon well above the horizon in midday, which is an astronomical impossibility. A full moon always rises near the time of sunset and sets near sunrise. For example, in 2009, the full moon occurred on June 7. On that date in Toronto, moonrise was at 9:42 p.m. EDT and moonset at 5:04 a.m. EDT. In other words, the full moon would have been high in the sky in the middle of the night, not the middle of the day. I’m perfectly happy to grant an author a good deal of poetic license, but my “willing suspension of disbelief” doesn’t extend quite that far.

I eagerly look forward to your next book, with or without a full moon.

I’ve now enlisted this reader to check all my future books for solar and lunar accuracy.

Finally there are the letters that touch me so very deeply. Total strangers, who tell me about their relationships with their fathers, and how much Ari Greene andhis dad meant to them. Parents of autistic adults who tell me I got the character of Brace’s son just right. People tell me the parts that made them laugh, and made them cry.

What a miracle. These little black marks on a white page can have so much power, so much importance in peoples’ lives.

The one constant in every letter is that everyone wants to read the next book. Which characters will be in it? When oh when is it coming out?

Well, I’m working away. Close to done. And hoping that readers will be moved to keep those cards and letters coming.

With thanks.

Robert Rotenberg

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