Writing a letter to your children: starting without making it an event

There is a letter you haven’t written. You think about it from time to time, for years perhaps. It’s addressed to your daughter, to your son, sometimes to a grandchild who is still very young. You don’t know exactly what you want to say in it. You only know that you want to write it one day.

And the day doesn’t come. Because you picture a long letter, solemn, right in every register. Because you wait for the occasion, the right phrase, the right state of mind. And meanwhile, nothing gets written.

This article suggests a simple way to put down a letter to your children, without making it an event. A letter is addressed to someone you’ll see on Sunday, not to posterity. You can write it in half an hour, tonight, and keep the freedom to come back to it.

A letter to your children is smaller than you think#

The idea of writing a letter to your children has gathered weight over time. People picture a definitive letter, written once and for all, that would finally say everything that needed saying. That weight is precisely what stops the writing.

A letter, in real life, is smaller. It’s one thing to say to one person. Not your whole life. Not the sum of your love. One precise thing, chosen with care, seen from a certain angle, at a certain moment.

A letter can fit in fifteen lines. It can fit in two sentences. It can hold a precise memory, offer a piece of advice, ask forgiveness, tell something you had never put into words. A letter doesn’t have to be complete. It has to be true. Keep little, tell it well: that’s the whole of it.

Choose the reader before the subject#

The common mistake is to look first for what to write. It doesn’t work. The page stays blank.

Choose first to whom. One person. Your eldest son, not your children as a block. Your granddaughter who’ll be fifteen in five years, not the next generation in general. The reader changes the tone, picks the anecdotes, leaves out what doesn’t concern them.

A letter to your children as a group is almost always poorer than a letter addressed to one of them. You write better when you see the face of the person you’re talking to.

If you have several children, several grandchildren, write several letters. Not the same one copied three times. Each one will be different, because the relationship is. That’s exactly what gives them their value.

Where to enter#

Four points of entry almost always work. Pick the one that calls you, tonight.

1. A precise memory. The morning your daughter learnt to ride a bike in the lane. Not a period, not a general scene; a dated, seen scene. Describe what you saw, what you felt, what you thought without saying. It’s the simplest form, and often the truest.

2. Something you couldn’t say. A sentence you meant to say the day she left for abroad, and didn’t find. The letter becomes the place where that sentence can finally land. Without drama.

3. A piece of advice you want to share. Not a moral. Something you learnt yourself, at a certain age, that you’d like to entrust. When you doubt someone, take the time to see them once more before deciding. That’s what my father taught me, without ever saying it in those words.

4. A question turned around. A sentence you would have liked to hear, and that you weren’t told. You put it down now. I would have liked to be told, at twenty, that not knowing wasn’t a problem.

By hand, or not#

Many people hesitate. A handwritten letter holds a value a digital file never will. The ink, the paper, the trace of the hand that hesitates, crosses out, presses harder on certain lines, tells something beyond the text.

But the manuscript has a cost: it discourages length, it intimidates at the first sentence, it gets lost if you don’t put it in someone’s hands. And sometimes it ages in a drawer.

Three ways to combine.

• Write digitally first, then copy by hand. You keep the freedom to revise, and you offer a clean manuscript. Many writers at ease with a keyboard work this way.
• Write by hand directly, accepting the crossings-out. Rawer, more intimate. The crossings-out say as much as the final text. It’s the most loaded gesture.
• Write digitally and keep it digital. For long letters, or for letters you may want to return to in a year. The manuscript may come later, or not at all. Some use a paper notebook, others a service like Carnely, where the letter becomes a memory in its own right: kept to yourself for as long as you decide, passed on the day you choose.

None of these forms is better than the others. The right one is the one that gets you writing.

Offer now, or choose your day#

That’s the question that comes up most. I write it, and then what?

Several answers, and they aren’t exclusive.

• Offer right away. Slip the letter into a borrowed book, leave it on a table the morning of a departure, send it by post without warning. The offered letter does its work on the spot, and shifts the relationship, gently.
• Keep it in a known place. An envelope in a drawer, with a note on top: For Claire, to open one day. You keep the hand, and your child knows the letter exists.
• Keep it in your notebook, and choose your day. A letter set down in a notebook like Carnely stays yours for as long as you decide. The day you pass it on, your child reads it, that very day: a birthday, a departure, an ordinary Sunday. You choose the moment, and the letter doesn’t sleep in a drawer.

Many writers do both: a short letter offered today, a longer one waiting for the day you’ve chosen for it.

What a letter changes, even when not offered#

You may write a letter you never offer. That isn’t a failure.

The act of writing already changes the relationship. You give a shape to something that was floating, you decide what really matters. When you next see your child on Sunday, you won’t speak quite the same way. Not because they will have read the letter, but because you, you will have written it.

That’s what makes the letter legitimate even when it stays in a drawer. It has done its work inside you first.

A question for tonight#

Before closing this article, take two minutes. Choose one person. And answer this one question:

What would I like to tell them, tonight, in two sentences?

The two sentences are there. You only have to write them down.

Going further#

If the letter makes you want to write more broadly, this article shows how to start writing your life story. And if you’d rather your own parents did the telling, here are thirty questions to ask them.