Today’s newsletter makes the case that newsletters should be letters:
People often ask me for advice on how to write a newsletter. I usually tell them some variation of what I wrote in Steal Like an Artist: “Write a newsletter you’d like to read.”
I have a few more tips, like “Pick a repeatable format” or “Be consistent at a regular frequency.”
But my current personal motto is: “Newsletters should be letters.”
What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading?
I go on to suggest that maybe all writing — books, blogs, etc. — gets better when we just sit down and try to write a letter to the people we’re trying to reach.
“Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. “They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one.”
I ended with a list of suggested letter collections and epistolary novels.
I got a really wonderful batch of responses to this one. MVP reader Sara Bader, editor, quote collector, and author of The Book of Pet Love and Loss, Every Day A Word Surprises Me, and Art is the Highest Form of Hope sent me this marvelous photo of one of her bookshelves full of letter collections. (I have the E.B. White and Tove Jansson unread on my shelves, and I bought that M.F.K Fisher collection for Meg a few years ago.)
A few recommendations that are now on my list:
You can read the whole newsletter here.
