[ Posted Monday, July 22, 2002 ]

Grace Notes
The value of sending one charming letter every day.

BY CAROLYN SEE | I strongly suggest that in addition to your thousand words a day, you write one charming note to a novelist, an editor, a journalist, a poet, a sculptor, even an agent whose professional work or reputation you admire, five days a week, for the rest of your life. Then after you write the note, you address it, put a stamp on it, and mail it out. These notes are like paper airplanes sailing around the world, and they accomplish a number of things at once.

They salute the writer (or editor or agent) in question. They say to him or her: Your work is good and admirable! You're not laboring in a vacuum. There are people out in the world who know what you do and respect it.

The notes are also saying: I exist, too. In the same world as you. Isn't that amazing? They can also say: Want to play?

These notes are just notes. You don't want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life. You absolutely don't want to ask them for a favor, as in: "Hello. I really like your work. Enclosed please find my 800-page manuscript on giant lizards who live under the earth — and throw massive lizard conventions! — in the state of Arizona." Don't offer to go and live with them. Remember what your mother taught you about thank-you notes (if she bothered). Be gracious. You're entering into an emotional and spiritual courtship with the literary world that will last the rest of your life.

[ Charming notes are best written on "half-sheets." ]

From my point of view, charming notes are best written on "half-sheets," stationery that is five by eight inches. (If you're broke, or excessively pure of heart, you can take a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of white typing paper and fold it in half.) The paper can be as cheap or expensive as you like. Whatever you decide, it's going to say a lot about you. There should be some kind of identification at the top. Joan Didion has stiff, pale blue cards with JOAN DIDION embossed in silver. Herbert Gold prefers a larger sheet of white paper with his name and address "carelessly" jammed down any old way with a blurry rubber stamp. Tommy Thompson, God rest his soul, favored beige cards with his name printed in dark brown. Now that there are Kinko's everywhere, you can order up something with a minimum of fuss.

Your stationery should not have flowers on it. It should not be in the form of a greeting card with a Manet or Monet reproduction on the front. The stationery should be about you, not some French Impressionist. It shouldn't be unnervingly clever, unless you're unnervingly clever. It should be as classy as you can stand it to be.

Postcards are an interesting alternative to this, although in no way do they replace your charming-note stationery. But every once in a while you'll find the perfect postcard, and it's worth stocking up on them: They show your state of mind, and when you're too absolutely depressed to write a real charming note, you can dash off a couple of cards.

A couple of weeks ago I struck up a conversation with a distinguished man at a literary party. (How I love those things! It's immature, I know, and I should be above all that at my age, but a glass of white wine, some hors d'oeuvres, and a conversation with someone who's just had a book come out makes me so happy!) I'd never read his work, and he'd never read mine, but we stood out on a pretty little terrace and exchanged addresses and promised to send each other our books. But in addition to the book he'd written, he sent me a book of blank pages with wooden covers that he'd bound himself. Luckily, in addition to my novels, I had a copy of a coffeetable book of antique postcards my family and I had put out under the name of Monica Highland, and I batted that back to him in the mail. A week later, he sent me one of the coolest charming notes I've ever seen, a landscape watercolor running thirty-six-by-four inches, with the last four inches taken up by the charming note-written in Flair pen, filled with compliments, sprinkled with Spanish words like pues and bueno, and there, stretched out to the left, this long and lovely California watercolor. (Which came first, the note or the painting? How did he achieve such effortless perfection?) I framed it, because it was too wonderful to ever throw away.

My students hate the whole idea of charming notes. "What are we supposed to say?"

I answer, "Why not divide the note into three paragraphs of three lines each — the first one about their work that you like so much, the second saying who you are and why the work touched you, the third suggesting politely that you're looking forward to the next thing they're going to write."

And this is when my students go through agony. They turn gray when they finally realize I'm not kidding, that they really are going to have to send a couple of charming notes in order to get out of the class. What happens next is like a really theatrical, flamboyant consciousness-raising seminar. You get to see people slamming into their own personally erected emotional brick walls, their "hokeyness barriers," if you will.

Students say: "I'm not going to kiss up to anybody!" Or, "What! Do you want me to be a brownnose?" Or, "Won't these notes just make them mad?" Or, "I'm not going to sell out!" Or, "I know you think writing is nothing but a business, but I..."

But then there comes a time, usually a couple of weeks before the end of the quarter, when they bleakly realize that they're not going to be saved by a 10-point earthquake that will destroy all of Los Angeles and relieve them from the obligation of writing those goddamn charming notes.

Some students resort to one last desperate measure. They write to a couple of dead people, hoping against hope I won't notice that Wilkie Collins or Agatha Christie has already left the planet. Others gnash their teeth and send out these little missives. Then sometimes they sail in to class with wide, astonished smiles. "Jane Smiley wrote me back! She says she's glad I liked A Thousand Acres!" Or, "Anne Lamott says she's tickled to death I read Rosie." Or one sweet woman came in, beside herself, with a nice note from Michael Crichton.

It's a little like getting a note from Snow White or the angel Gabriel. There's a wonderful feeling to it.

Of course, you may not get an answer. Somebody somewhere may be holding your innocent little note between two nicotine-stained fingers, snickering, in his haughtiest voice, "Can you believe it? Some rube from Waverley, Ohio, says he likes my work! Well, that certainly makes my day!"

So what? So what, so what, so what.

Carolyn See teaches english at UCLA and is a reviewer for The Washington Post. Excerpted from Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See. Copyright 2002 by Carolyn See. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.