Write Like You're Sending A Note To Someone
Now that we're always online, voice is more important than ever. But what does that mean?
I was deep in thought about an idea I wanted to write about.
My friend was doing the dishes.
I explained my idea to my friend.
"You should write it just like that. Write down exactly what you said to me."
But no—I couldn't just write it down exactly as I said it. I hadn't put any effort into that at all. Surely it couldn't be so simple. My intellectual baggage wouldn’t let me believe such a thing.
I was hit by a brief case of the maybes:
Maybe that’s fine advice for a rough draft.
Maybe that's what they meant.
Maybe if I wrote it out plainly, it would show how crude and artless I really was. I wouldn’t be satisfied with writing that reflected that about me. I would need to revise it later.
Maybe they just meant I should write it down so I wouldn’t forget it.
The maybes passed and I took my friend's advice. I wrote down my idea exactly as I had told it to them. No adornment. No fancy tricks, no extra design elements. No craft.
As easy as letting rip a burp, I wrote it down.
It felt different than the usual Extremely Artful writing I did. Instead of the customary sphincter strain that I believed signaled I was making a real humdinger, this piece found me in a state that was absent of any trying.
Later I sent it off to a literary magazine and they published it.
Turns out, it was perfectly fine to write things down exactly as if I’d wanted to tell a friend something.
My friend's advice was good and it remains evergreen; some ideas are good and stay good. They hit you when they come to you, and then they stay with you.
It's like the advice I give to my writing students who are concerned their writing doesn't sound natural or organic, that their transitions don't make sense, that their language sounds stilted and artificial.
I tell them to read their writing aloud and notice the difference. I tell them to pretend they're writing about their topic to a friend.
Why Writing Sounds Stilted
If you want to immerse yourself in stilted and artificial writing, read through some English student essays. This is not the students’ fault. Their essays sound awkward because they are designed to be that way. They’re forced to play a rigged game. Students are given an assignment just after being drilled about these doodads called paragraphs with introductory sentences, conclusion statements, and they are drilled on how many sentences a paragraph is supposed to contain. And then they learn about "transitional words and phrases." They learn about semicolons and proceed to introduce new punctuation mistakes into their writing, mistakes that can be resolved by replacing each of those semicolons with either a comma or a period.
When you catch yourself believing that things make sense, remind yourself of the existence of the semicolon. It's a great idea for a punctuation mark. In a utopic future we'll have language patterns that conform naturally to them, and we'll use them just as much as anything else. Abraham Lincoln knew how to use a semicolon with the best of them, but we live in a derpier world these days.
When you have a hammer, things start looking like nails.
When you are drawn to writing because you love it and it inspires you and you want to have something big to offer your reader, it's easy to pick up the mistaken belief that writing should be hard and that you need to bring a whole arsenal of artifice into your language.
Write It Like a Letter
When you write something, write it like it’s a message to some actual person.
Because of course you should. If it's not a message for someone, what is it?
A letter is a message intended for someone specific to read. A direct person to person message. There's no undue artifice in a good letter.
Look at William Carlos Williams' famous note:
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxand which
you were probably
saving
for breakfastForgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Guess what William did? He ate all the plums. That's it. That's the poem.
If someone loves you, isn’t it more important that they let you know sincerely than obsess over how they express it?
Right now I'm reading through everything Kurt Vonnegut has published. Vonnegut was popular in no small part because he wrote in a very approachable way. His writing was relatable. His first book Player Piano isn't as good as Breakfast of Champions because it doesn’t convey the same sense of the author’s presence the way his later books do. I think when he wrote Player Piano he still believed that's what a writer should write like. Later, he came into his own voice and he dropped that false artifice. Striving for correctness obscures what matters most: your presence.
He actually started many of his books with a note to the reader.
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
- Slaughterhouse-Five
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
- Breakfast of Champions
There's a stylistic decision here but it's also refreshing to read. I like reading a book that I feel I was invited to.
On the other extreme is when a writer forgets they’re writing for humans or when they fail to account for their own presence in the process.
The Passive Voice
Isn’t it strange how we insist on the passive voice in some contexts?
Rupert Sheldrake wrote about this, that it's bothersome how when doing scientific studies we insist on the appropriateness of omitting ourselves from studies.
"The test tube was carefully smelled." I was astonished to read this sentence in my 11-year-old son's science notebook.
It's written as if no one was present, as if only data existed in a truly objective universe.
Writing as if nobody’s in the room is somehow considered objective, but it's not objective—it's actually sort of odd. You’d think it would be more objective to say, "Phil and Steve were in the lab. Steve watched Phil take a deep whiff and he made a sour face."
Then again, if you include some details, why not others? And where should it stop? Online recipes are a prime example of this kind of TMI. I find it annoying if I'm looking for a recipe online and I have to sort through the person's opinions and life story and a weather report to find the actual ingredient list and instructions.
If you’re writing a note to someone, you can get by on very little detail.
Think about what adding detail presumes. If you know the person you’re writing to, if you have some kind of a relationship with them, there’s no need to make first impressions. You value their time and simply want to get across what you believe to be of some value to them.
Who Is the Reader?
When you write, do you write for a specific person?
Sales and marketing people do this—they're writing for their sense of the client persona. I wouldn't want sales and marketing people to beat creative writers at their own game.
But creative writers have a lot that they’re trying to do, so they can be forgiven for overlooking some details like the fact that they’re writing something for other humans to read.
Notes are easy to write. Literature is hard to write. You need elbow patches on your jacket to write literature.
When I write to someone else I'm intending to be seen. Humility is a hallmark of good writing.
Connection Versus Content
When I read something, I want to be met. I want to be seen, felt, empathized with. Thus the success of memes. Literally just posts that say "when you do this."
It’s kind of funny, yeah? You can relate, yeah? Memes validate a sense of shared experience.
You can track the rise in popularity of memes with the increase in social distance and feelings of isolation. The more disconnected we feel, the more we crave those tiny moments of "yes, me too." See, I made a chart:
As social engagement with friends and family decreased (studies show 122 fewer hours spent with family in 2019 vs 2003), meme sharing rose. During the pandemic, when social isolation peaked, meme popularity exploded—Instagram users went from sharing 500,000 memes daily to over 1 million. And then I guess it just became a habit.
It's like we're all sitting alone, scrolling for that hit of "oh good, someone else gets it too." So when you write something and put it online, your writing competes against that.
But for me, what wins is personal connection. The email from someone you know wins over the brand blast subject line that "totally gets you."
In writing terms, this difference comes down to what's known as a writer's voice.
What We Mean When We Talk About Voice
Words on a page aren't spoken, so what's the voice for these marks on page?
Voice comes from the combination of things like word choice and phrasing and sentence length and how subject and object are approached, whether it's descriptive or terse, fast or convoluted or whether it takes time to smell the roses more than it stays connected with the reader.
We speak differently than we write, some people more than others. This gap is fascinating—why is it the case? What is this different distance that writing takes?
When you write, you dip into your inner experience more because writing happens more slowly than speaking. There’s more time to come from a place of clarity, or express nuance, or get lost in the frills and convolutions of artifice.
Why Write Like a Note?
Write like you're writing a note because:
It's intended to be accessible
It rests on a foundation of empathy or a desire for connection
It's more targeted—"know your reader"
It has that indefinable something that makes people want to read it
And yeah. Not all writing is intended for a reader the same way. I get that. Maybe it's intended as a performance, something in the moment, it's writing for writing's sake, not intending to symbolize something else. Words are hella versatile.
But most writing is meant to be read.
So next time you sit down to write, do it like you're sending a note to someone. Someone who might be doing the dishes. Tell them what you want to say, exactly as you'd say it.
It might be good enough to write it down exactly like that.