Drunk-Writing Emails to My Nephew (A Weekend Activity)

Hi T,

It’s Bekah. I told you that I would write to you, and for you to write to me, with your writing and for writing advice. (You can read this out loud with your mom so she can help you with the words you may not understand yet, but I bet you’re going to understand everything because I think you might be a word person.)

Redundancy in writing should be deliberate and strategic. It’s neither in the above example, but editing is for sobriety. I wrote this email to my nephew mid-January 2019 one indulgent Saturday morning, a few weeks after a holiday visit. My sister told me he’d been reading a lot, and showed me a picture of a Word file he’d left open on the family desktop titled “My Love of Writing.” At the time of the picture, that was as far as he’d gotten.

If you really want to write and if you enjoy it, I want to be your mentor. I want to encourage that impulse for creation in you, because it’s a beautiful thing and you have to preserve it. It’s the thing that you will return to forever, the thing that will invariably grant you solace at your lowest points. 

I may or may not have forgotten I was writing to a child for a second there, but something my own dad did as my first non-academic mentor (which left perhaps the greatest impression on me as a kid just starting to write) was to take me seriously.

I think I was around your age when I started writing. Are you in fourth grade? Maybe you’re younger. Which is awesome. The love of writing is such a gift. I hope that this love will grow in you too, but that’s okay if it doesn’t. What you’ll find is that you start loving something else, basketball or soccer, maybe drawing, maybe singing, maybe thinking about how video games and board games work, what makes them so fun and playable.

I suddenly got worried about pigeon-holing the kid, but that’d be cool if he sticks with writing.

Think about what you love to do and then practice, do it all the time and you’ll get better and better and better and you’ll have a passion that will enrich your life, like your mom’s love of playing the piano. She’s amazing at it, she had a raw talent at a very young age. But there’s something else about your mom and it’s that she’s actually pretty good at everything she does. She’s passionate and driven and connected to a fierce impulse for goodness that I respect so much.

I enter the effusive and affectionate stage of inebriation right about here, knowing my sister’s gonna be reading the email too, but I reel it in and get back to the point.

T, my advice to you is to keep all of your writing. When I was a kid, after I started to love writing, I would carry a notebook with me everywhere to work on my stories. I developed a love of a really good pen and for a nice clean white page. These things make me really happy. I don’t have a lot of these notebooks now that I had filled with my young writing and I wish I did. But now you can write digitally and that will make it easier to keep all your writing. Do this. Also write in notebooks, but that will mainly be for putting down ideas or descriptions as they come to you. Keep notes!! Don’t let yourself feel the pain of forgetting something you can only sense was incredible. 

Incidentally, somehow, if you do manage to remember one of these “brilliant” ideas, it’s always less incredible than you thought it was going to be.

Love you T, write back to me.

Your aunt Bekah!

Future “Emails to My Nephew” Posts

He responded the following Sunday, and with his permission I’ve included what he wrote because I love it so much:

Hi Bekah, 

Thank you for the support that you are giving me, and yes I would gladly let you be my mentor. I’ll try to type to write some stories later so you can read them later on. I will use this very advice that you have given me to be able to write/type the best stories available, and I am in fourth grade.

This category is where I’ll irregularly pass on what I’ve thought to share with T about writing. If he keeps it up in school, he’ll eventually read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and it’ll be the greatest compliment to me if he recalls our early emails when he does. It’s the format I’m mimicking, if not the substance, which I couldn’t hope to aspire to. Too much pressure. I’ll leave the timeless brilliance to Rilke and instead I’ll focus on the most basic tips I can think of for anyone with an itch to write, while I attempt to ignore the specter of imposter syndrome*.

I love identifying as a writer and this category is for sharing what I continue to learn about the doing of it. The process can be as personal as a thumbprint; something that works for me another would probably hate, but here it goes.

Summary of Advice to T

• Keep a notebook and pen on hand always (or an app like Evernote).
• As you’re going about your day and observing people and things, write down the thoughts and ideas that stand out.
• Keep all your writing.
• Practice what you love.

If there’s anything you’d add as some introductory writing/creative advice to a fourth grader, please share and I’ll pass it on.

*If imposter syndrome could be seen, it’d be as a shadow, its contortions as variable to the positions of the sun as our self-confidence is to recognition. However I feel about it, I know it’s always with me, the trail of my own self-defeating shade, but it gets easier to ignore the more you do what you think you have no right to, what you’d be doing anyway even if the sun wasn’t watching.