The Grasshopper Sunday May 14, 23: Writing Letters
It’s a lost art, or is it?
You’re reading a sort of letter, which is why they call these newsletters. My 91 year old mother, still sharp as a tack, still writes and mails letters. It’s getting harder as her sight is poor and her hands unsteady. And many of the people she would write to are gone to places her letters can’t reach.
The people who get her occasional letters are always thrilled to get an actual handwritten letter. They are like artifacts from a lost time, a time when people kept those letters and they became source files for understanding a life. Until the advent of email, when these paper trails basically ceased to exist, probably driving biographers crazy.
One of the reasons I write The Grasshopper is to fill that gap from not writing or receiving letters. Of course this is very different than those one on one letters. This is one to many, and it leaves a record for the future, though I doubt anyone would want to write my biography! I’m ok with that.
I have literally lost the physical ability to write with a pen on paper. It is a chore to write my monthly rent check because I’ve lost the motor skills from lack of practice. Of course I still know how to write but getting the message to my fingers is the problem.
I never mastered cursive because I’m left-handed. If you’re a lefty you’ll know why.
Fortunately for me, and many others, penmanship skills, which I admire, are not necessary to practice our craft. I’m tapping this out on an iPad and my one finger typing is pretty fast, much faster than my handwriting. What I’ve written so far in this newsletter today would take me hours with a pen and I’m pretty certain you would have a hard time reading it.
I know there are many writers who still write longhand on paper then transcribe those words to digital. They can do this because they learned to touch type at some point. It’s called touch typing because it does not require you to look at the keyboard as you type. That kind of typing was taught for clerical skills like copying documents.
I only write original content so I watch the words form on my screen as I tap away.
So, while I may mourn the loss of the art of letter writing, I have this place to practice my own version of writing a letter. And my readers can respond instantly if they want. It’s one of the reasons I have comments on, to get feedback and hear from readers.
Hint, hint.
I am old enough to have had an electric typewriter, a monstrous IBM Selectric my mother brought home from her office when they upgraded. It was on a typewriter table tucked off in a tiny office in my parent’s house. As an adolescent I spent many late nights writing on that machine that sounded like a vacuum cleaner when you turned it on.
I have fond memories of that time in my life, a typical arty kid ensconced in a private space of my own, writing whatever came into my head, mostly poetry, fortunately lost. But the memory of rolling a new sheet of white paper into that typewriter and waiting words to come is important and directly linked to what I am doing at this moment in time, too many years later.
Of course to that skinny kid, this life would seem unimaginably futuristic, to have a lightweight device I can hold in my hand that can reach anywhere on the planet and access the combined knowledge of mankind. But the act of writing has not changed. I still open a Doc and wait for the words to come.
And, so far, they always do.
My writing income is wildly unpredictable. I know this is the case for a lot of people. It’s why you see so many articles touting the secrets of passive income. That’s a fantasy of many, to earn on work you did long ago.
Royalties are an example but most writers never see them and never earn out their advances. I had one book that earned out a fairly large advance and then continued to sell for several years, yielding quarterly checks long after it was completed. In hindsight I realize how lucky I was to experience that, because I know how rare it is.
That was a book on kitchen design I did with my brother Richard. It was an evergreen subject and it turns out people fantasizing about a new kitchen buy a lot of books. And virtually everyone who cooks dreams of a perfect kitchen. We got lucky on the topic and we knew the subject (Rich was a kitchen designer).
But that was twenty-five years ago and people find and consume information very differently these days. As I mentioned in an earlier issue, I could probably do a Substack on kitchen design and do very well. There’s just one problem. The subject no longer interests me.
This is where a good idea, money-wise, diverges from the reality of doing it if you’re not all in. The days of me writing about topics that don’t excite me are behind me. I did it for years and was good at it. A lot of what makes writing good is the ability to clearly explain a complex topic in easily understood English (or whatever language you work in).
The other day I rode with an Uber driver who was from Turkey. He was a friendly and inquisitive guy and asked me what kind of work I do. When he found out I was a writer, he told me he had written successful books in Turkey and had a radio show there. But he could not do those things in English as his language skills were not up to it.
I felt for him with that one. I don’t know why he left Turkey but assume he had a good reason. Uber rides are typically brief for me and I rarely have a conversation that is personal. But we sat at my destination and talked for fifteen minutes, which meant he was giving up income.
I think he needed to talk to another writer. I understand that. It’s rare to find one, which is one of the reasons I started The Grasshopper. It was a conversation I needed to have, even if there were no guarantees anyone would participate.
There are three practical themes here: write, publish online, and interact with readers. And a fourth, get paid. There are, of course, many impractical themes too. The beauty of this thing is I can do what I want. If it resonates, so much the better. So far, so good.
That kind of leads me into a topic I wanted to mention, the Writer’s Guild strike going on in the film and entertainment business. I’ve written quite a few scripts over the years but they were what used to be called industrials, or explainer videos for businesses, a very different discipline. But something I always enjoyed doing, along with working with video producers.
I’m in full support of this strike. The advent and explosion in streaming content has increased demand for writers, but decreased pay as many of the shows and films don’t gross as much money as in the past. We’re hearing stories of producers getting by with smaller writer rooms, which means harder work for fewer writers, with the same expectation of quality.
Not only is the pay down, residuals, that passive income from reruns, which keeps writers eating, are also way down. So, a perfect storm; less available work, harder work, less money, and less long term financial benefits.
Writers in entertainment have always been lower on the pay scale than other film creatives including actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, and editors. This is ironic because without writers, those other jobs would not exist. The cliche of the Hollywood writer banging out rewrites with a bottle of whiskey at hand probably reinforced a stereotype that implied they were poor wretches that would work for less.
They’re not, they are master storytellers, and they deserve to make a good living.
Went a little long this issue, but a thread has seemed to assemble itself as I went along. At least that’s the way it looks to me.
Did you write today?
Martin
1411 words
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It's nice to hear about your mom! I'm with her on letter writing - I still do it too! It's so much more meaningful.