So you want to be a writer. So you want to tug a reader close enough to feel your breath. You want to write something that really means something, and you want someone to need it. But agents, you say. But publishing. And your heart darkens like the softest spot on an overripe fruit, rotten from waiting. Yes, I want to console you with knowing. Agents. Publishers. Because I know what it means to want so much from words, to want them to take a shape you can hold in your hands. Under these conditions, with these obstacles, writing becomes a painful kind of loneliness. It can blacken to the core. But it doesn’t have to. With a fistful of 99-cent greeting cards and a sheet of Forever stamps, writing can become a form of communion.

You’re disappointed. You’re already pulling away. Greetings cards? That’s not writing, you protest. You want to be taken seriously. But who will take you more seriously than the people you love and who love you? How much more serious does it get? As of this afternoon, over 636,000 readers on Goodreads have rated Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel The Correspondent – with an average of 4.47 stars. The novel’s dramas are limned by the letters its protagonist writes to the people she has known for decades. Though the plot is compelling enough, it’s the epistolary form that has readers enchanted, the kaleidoscopic portrait of a self, refracted through relationship. More than the themes of intimacy and estrangement, the formal experience this epistolary novel evokes is intimacy. The human project it describes is an act of collaboration, of a self formed in relationship with others. Though the writer of these letters is a prickly and sometimes problematic fish, sometimes downright unlikeable to herself and others, readers are captivated. It is not the character, but the chemistry. The words and the silences. But are we lovers of the epistolary captivated enough to write letters? Or do we just want to romanticize them? To paraphrase Gloria Alamrew’s brilliant essay “Healing is Making Us Mean”: Everyone wants a letter, but no one wants to be a letter writer. All around us, people are dying of loneliness, longing for connection. Readers are weepy over The Correspondent. But no one is writing – not to each other.[1]

Paul Erdos was a Hungarian mathematician who grew up sequestered in his family’s home in Budapest because both of his older sisters died in early childhood of scarlet fever, and his mother wasn’t going to lose another one. He later fled Budapest ahead of the Nazi invasion. Erdos grew up to be a quirky and brilliant man. Possibly the most prolific mathematician of the 20^th century, he was also one of the most eccentric. As if his childhood of sequestration was enough being cooped up for one lifetime, he lived out of a suitcase, traveling from one conference to another, showing up at his hosts’ front door and camping out on their couch for weeks at a time. If having a mathematical oddball stake a claim in the living room was an imposition, it was also an invitation to a kind of fame. Per Wikipedia:

Erdős wrote around 1,525 mathematical articles in his lifetime^[32] – a figure that remained unsurpassed as of 2023^[33] – mostly with co-authors. He strongly believed in and practiced mathematics as a social activity,^[34][28] having 511 different collaborators in his lifetime.^[35]

Collaboration with Erdos –and with collaborators of collaborators with Erdos— is mathematics’ Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Twentieth-century mathematicians bragged about their “Erdos number.” My uncle had one. Of what in life might we be the most deeply proud? The conversations and collaborations we have with others.

A love of the story of Erdos is a love I share with my younger son, who is a mathematician and an artist. My son and I have many conversations about many things, not all of them in person and not all of them with words. Not long after my son moved to the other coast, I invited him to submit a cover design for my second novel. He hadn’t read the book (“I would like it a lot better if it was written by … not you.”) but threw himself enthusiastically into an exuberant collaboration as joyful to me as I imagine I would feel jamming together in our own jug band. (That cover always draws compliments, and always overwhelms me with a mixture of love, pride and satisfaction.) A relationship is a collaboration, and writing can be understood and practiced as a collaboration that creates relationship, as critics like Harold Bloom and T.S. Eliot note of the poets echoing each other down the long corridors of history, a call-and-response from one generation to the next, a relationship, a reverberation, a lusty rebuttal. It’s possible that with the fragmentation of literature, of society, of attention, we’ve lost that art. And also that we crave it.

With cards and letters, space and time are an explicit part of the craft – what English poet William Wordsworth, imagining the even weightier craft of inscription on stone, described as the work of “slow and laborious hand.” Labor is one of the reasons people don’t write letters. I read an essay some years ago in a publication like this one by a writer who urged other women, when they received letters and texts, just not to reply. She said that women responding to people is the reason more women didn’t write novels, weren’t as successful as men. Be ruthless, she urged. Be an art monster. Certainly, women are more imposed upon than men, or at least are worse at rebuffing imposition. But somewhere over the past couple decades we’ve been sold the lie that relationships are the labor we’re meant to refuse. People have been taking cover these past couple decades under the guise of “protecting my peace.” As if there are relationships and there is writing. As if one must choose. Real talk? Human relationships are the stuff of your work. For real? Maybe it’s the scrolling that’s eating your novel, not the postcard you could send to a friend.

It’s a radical thing in this third decade of the 21^st century to have a conversation with the people in your life, an even more radical thing to have a long thought. In an algorithmically polarized world, an invitation slowly and deliberately to make contact with another person is a form of revolution. What is your writing for if not to move people? And who can you move more than the people to whom you belong, the people who belong to you? What, in this age of algorithm, is more important than that?

You’re a little insulted at this point, with this suggestion of postcards and pens and letters. This is not the serious work you’re on this earth to do. I’m asking you to be unserious. To give up on yourself. Not to dream about publication. Not to insist on it.

What can I say? Except:

Don’t be ridiculous. You can and should do both.

Writing to specific human beings will make you a better writer. It will make yours a better life. Pick up a pen. Touch grass. In this world that asks us every day to screen and stream, stay embodied. Stay real. Cards and letters cross physical distances and are the work of hands. Your warm palm pressed against the spot where I will press mine. This is not the reluctant defeat of a life’s ambition. It’s the beginning of a bigger one.

[1] No, not every em dash is written by AI. It’s a Saturday afternoon. Dogs are farting at my feet. Neighbor children are shrieking. This is all, entirely human.

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Hilary Zaid’s latest novel, FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS (Zero Street Fiction, 2023), is about the art of writing letters, and about being an artist in the age of AI. Learn more about Hilary’s work, including her first novel, PAPER IS WHITE, at hilaryzaid.com.