First published in Column 8, on the 24th March, 1993
A few days ago I spent a pleasant half-hour writing a letter to an author, someone I know only through a book discovered by chance in the library. I’ve never come in contact with the man before, and I’m not even sure if his other books will appeal to me.
However, the book I read (which was about the craft of
writing), struck a chord on most of its 255 pages. The nearer I came to the
end, the more I was sure I wanted to drop the writer a note.
Writing to authors isn’t something I do every time I read a
book – if it was, I’d be writing letters all the year round. But when someone
has written a book that really pleases me, and I wish it would never come to an
end, then a few words of appreciation are always worth the effort.
Probably the first author I had the nerve to write to had
been the victim of an unpleasant American review (the victim was a Brit).
Initially I wrote a rather stroppy letter to the magazine in
which the review had appeared, telling them while everyone else had to put with
and understand the American sense of humour, they didn’t seem to reciprocate by
understanding anyone else’s. I believed that was the main reason why the
reviewer hadn’t seen the point of the British book.
(A reviewer in the same magazine on another occasion claimed
that the spellings on the British edition would be off-putting for American
readers – perhaps the Americans really are becoming a different people.)
Surprisingly my pugnacious letter was published in the
magazine. I photocopied it and the original review, and sent them to the
author, along with a sympathetic letter which I hoped would ‘console’ him a
little for the way in which his work had been attacked.
Naturally he was hardly grateful to the extent of sending me
five free autographed copies of his book, but he did appreciate the fact that a
reader had gone to the trouble of writing.
Writing to authors is a way of expressing appreciation for
their work, and I’ve done it a few times since. Moreover, it establishes human
contact that’s otherwise missing for most authors. Each of those I’ve written
to have replied: in doing so they come across as ordinary people doing a job
that most of us regard as something out of the ordinary.
Sure, authors get paid, and one or two out of a hundred are
able to make a decent living. But apart from the payment, the mere sale of a
book doesn’t mean as much to a writer as the fact that some other mind has
taken hold of it, grasped its point and enjoyed it – or been stirred by it.
All writers like to be told how much their hard work has
meant to their readers (incidentally, this isn’t a personal request to be
inundated with fan-mail!)
Writers must work for the most part on their own; they have
to cut themselves off from families and friends to get the work done; a
tremendous number of brain cells are used up over a job that may barely make a
ripple on the sea of books published each year.
For writers of books which aren’t bestsellers the
encouragement of some readers must go a long way towards telling them what they’d
done wasn’t wasted.
A short letter lets them know, months and perhaps years down
the track from when they first conceived their ideas and shaped them into sensible
sentences, that someone understands what they’re saying, and has responded.
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| Rob Lloyd Jones [see below] from his web page |
The author was John Jerome, and the book was The Writing Trade, the first book of his that I’d read. I really enjoyed Jerome’s work, the apparently effortless style, the quiet humour, and the ability to make something fairly ordinary seem extraordinary. Even the weather.
I also wrote at one time to an author of commentaries on
Old Testament books. Dale Ralph Davis had by that time written several books covering
the period of Biblical history from Judges to Second Kings. I
received a very gracious letter from him, and still have it. I’ve read almost all
of his books now, and re-read the history commentaries two or three each.
I don’t remember the incident about the British book I got
‘pugnacious’ about – so I haven’t a clue as to who the author was or what the
book was called.
The most recent author I’ve written to is Rob Lloyd
Jones, who among some thirty titles wrote a series of four kids’ adventure books.
I found all four of these in the give-away section of the Waitaki library,
where I do some volunteer work once a week. Sadly it didn’t look as though they’d
been read much. However they turned out to be funny and imaginative and very
readable. The main character, Jake Atlas, usually manages to unintentionally destroy
quite a number of famous ancient treasures and famous places in the course of each
of book; the Aswan dam in Egypt, for instance, or a well-known museum of
antiquities, or some long-standing place of ancient worship, or the Terracotta
Army, which goes down like vast rows of skittles. But he’s not out to destroy,
but to save. He grows as a character through the series, and the last one has an
ending that is surprising in light of the style of the books up to that point.
