Are you a letter writer?

[shadowkat]

Of course if you were born after 1985, you may have no idea what a letter is - since everyone uses email, wireless messaging, chatrooms, and discussion boards to communicate now. In the olden days, ie. up to and including 1997, we wrote letters. Or at least some of us wrote letters. I'm a letter writer and a journal keeper - always have been. When I was a child I wrote long involved letters to people I'd never seen in Turkey and France. Later as an adult, I wrote friends and family letters - sometimes ten pages long. The content varied - I remember one letter to my parents that ranged from describing the way the light bounced off the car window on a bitter morning in February to Paul Theroux's writing style in Patagonia Express, to how a watercolor brush should be pressed against a sheet of paper to bring an image to life. I loved painting words on paper - with different colored pens. My letters would often shift in color from red, to blue, to green, to black with doodles in the margins becoming odd paintings with letters in of themselves.



Not every writer is a letter writer or an emailer, for that matter. A friend of mine, recently complained about live journal and I asked him - "are you a letter writer"? No, he said. He prefers the face to face conversation regarding personal matters. He's a writer. But he doesn't feel comfortable writing down the personal stuff. I have another friend who is much the same way. She loves to write too. But hates writing more than two sentences via email and is really not into letters. They both seem to wince at the idea of writing a letter - almost as if they were being asked to rip off their clothes and prance about naked on stage. I remember a friend in college referring to letter writing as something akin to exposing your innermost self - she preferred picking up a phone. Letters could be re-read or kept. A phone conversation is immediate and quickly forgotten.

The internet seems to meld the two somehow. The immediacy of email - you can write your words, press send, get an immediate response, no more waiting at the mailbox. Or livejournal where you can write whatever you wish, make it private, public or friends locked - even delete it at a later date - and not worry whether or not someone responds to you.

Non-letter writers/non-journal keepers aren't *ever* going to completely understand why some of us are addicted to live-journal. The mere idea of recording your thoughts and innermost feelings into words and posting them for the world to see is anathema to them. They don't understand the desire or even exercise of writing out the pain or fear or uncertainity and sending it off, away from yourself, half in hopes no one will respond and half in hopes they will - if only to make you feel less alone and less uncertain. It's different than a face to face conversation, partly because it can be preserved but also because there's a means of distancing yourself. Without face to face contact or even vocal inflection - you are forced to use words to convey feelings, and at the same time provided that additional protection of not showing everything to the reader. The written words provide a level of rationality to the conversation, as well as a sense of objectivity, maybe even a sense of distance. It becomes less close, less intimate, less personal somehow. The other person is forced to reject you or accept you based on your ideas, not gender, race, color, looks, appearance...but rather on how you paint pictures with words. For me, at least, this level of rejection is easier to take, to address. Partly because I can edit my words, I can alter and bend and unwind them. Also, when communicating through written words - you have time to reflect on what you've read before answering, time to even reflect on what you've written before sending it. Time we don't have in a face to face conversation.

Now don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying I prefer one to the other. Nor am I saying I like or am good at the epistolery style - ie. letter writing - in fiction. Very bad at that actually - it feels so unnatural somehow. But then I prefer third person close in fiction writing, whenever I attempt to write in the first person - I end up writing about myself and the character gets lost. So I try to avoid it. Regarding the face to face? I don't necessarily prefer letter writing to face-to-face meetings. They are different. Very different. Sort of like comparing apples to pineapples. But for me, to give up letter writing or emailing or journal writing - would be like chopping off an arm or a leg.

I like seeing the words I use more than I like hearing them, possibly because I never can quite trust the hearing and my ability to pronounce words is, well, not very accurate. I can feel the rhythm of the words in my head and on the page - visually see it, but I can't hear it when they are spoken. My dyslexia tends to be more auditory than visual, causing me all sorts of mispronouncation problems. It's why I use close-captioning the second time I watch Angel, to ensure I heard the words right. It's also why I'll often repeat what someone says in a conversation to ensure I've heard them. I'm far more likely to be able to spell the word out than I am ever able to wrap my tongue around it.

Don't get me wrong I like face to face, but...but...I adore with a fiery passion, that may not even be rational, the interaction through letters and emails and now live journal, which is a bit like letter writing actually... Quite a bit like it. Since what I write in my live journal is very similar to what I wrote in my letters. And the readers of my live journal probably know more about what is going on with my life than those I speak with on the phone or see in person. Just because it is easier for me to be honest, to be raw, to be personal with written words than it is with spoken ones. I have more time to find the right meaning or inflection. I'm less nervous. I feel safe. This is something my own family doesn't quite understand about me. Few of my close face-to-face friends do. They just don't understand why I or anyone else would want to write thoughts and feelings out in long letter style entries, sending them off, not always caring if we get a response.

So are you a letter writer? If so, perhaps you understand. I miss letters sometimes. As much as I love live journal, it doesn't have quite the same flavor as writing and reading a letter did.