Fan letters

One of the plea­sures of writ­ing for young peo­ple is that they write you let­ters, lots of them. Call them fan let­ters. They are sup­port­ing, encour­ag­ing, often touch­ing. The best of them derive from a deep and spe­cial con­nec­tion to a par­tic­u­lar book, which the let­ter-writer express­es in their own terms and in their own words. From time to time, they will include poignant sto­ries that con­nect their lives to the char­ac­ters or sit­u­a­tions in my books. And the let­ters also often pro­vide clues about what read­ers find attrac­tive about my work con­tent, char­ac­ters, and style.

Now and again, a let­ter comes about a book writ­ten many years ago. That mes­sage tells me that an old book is still alive for some­one, somewhere.

Hard­er to deal with are class-gen­er­at­ed let­ters: “My class was required to read … and write you a let­ter.” In such cas­es, I have received as many as fifty let­ters from one school in one day each one repli­cat­ing a teacher-led dis­cus­sion, each of the let­ters say­ing the same thing and ask­ing the same ques­tions. Each one request­ing a reply.

If a let­ter writer asks an unusu­al ques­tion, I try to answer it on my blog postings.

The sheer vol­ume of the mail pos­es prob­lems, the key one being time. It is impos­si­ble for me to reply to each let­ter with a unique response. Nor can I respond with requests such as, “Send me a book,” “Please call me,” “Can you vis­it my school next week?” With postal rates going ever high­er, cost is also a problem.

How­ev­er, per­son­al­ly gen­er­at­ed let­ters, let­ter-writ­ers who tell me that some­thing I wrote made a dif­fer­ence in their lives, are enor­mous­ly encour­ag­ing; espe­cial­ly on those days when my writ­ing seems dull, and unlike­ly to inter­est any­one. The fan let­ters send a cool breeze across my drowsy brow, wake me up, and make me work the harder.