How to Write a Letter for Grandchildren You May Not Meet
The instinct is to fill it with advice. Advice is the part that ages worst. Here is what these letters are actually for.
People sit down to do this with the best intentions and produce something that reads like a greetings card. It happens because the natural instinct is to write advice and blessing, and both of those are general, and general writing does not survive thirty years.
The letters that land are almost always specific, a little unflattering, and about the writer rather than about the reader.
What to put in
Step 1Who you were at their age
Not what you achieved. What you were like. What you were afraid of at nineteen, what you were bad at, what you thought was going to happen. A grandchild reading this at nineteen is being told, by somebody with authority, that uncertainty at nineteen is normal, and that lands harder than any encouragement could.
Step 2The mistakes, named plainly
Not as cautionary tales with a moral attached. Just what you got wrong, what it cost, and what happened after. Every grandchild reading a letter from a flawless grandparent quietly concludes the letter is not about a real person, and stops taking it seriously.
Step 3What you loved, in detail
The specific things. A place, a piece of music, a Saturday routine, a person. Enthusiasm is the most transmissible thing in a letter like this and it dates far better than wisdom.
Step 4What you want them to know about their family
Where the family came from, who the difficult ones were, what the pattern is. Grandchildren often receive a sanitized version of the family and are quietly confused by it. A straight account from somebody who was there is a real gift.
Step 5One thing addressed to them personally
If you know them, write something only you would notice about them. If they are not born yet, write what you hope to notice. This is the sentence that gets read most often, by some distance.
What to leave out
- Long stretches of advice. One or two lines earn their place. Three pages of it will not be read twice.
- Predictions about the world. They date immediately and badly, and they make the rest of the letter feel less trustworthy.
- Instructions about how to live. A grandchild will accept a description of how you lived and will resist a prescription for how they should.
- Anything conditional on being remembered fondly. Write it as though you will be read by somebody who is allowed to disagree with you, because you will be.
Letters worth writing separately
Rather than one letter attempting everything, several short ones each doing one job. These four cover most of what people are trying to say when they sit down.
- A letter about their parent. What your son or daughter was like as a child, what you were proud of, what worried you. Your grandchild has never met that person and cannot imagine their parent at nine.
- A letter for when something goes badly. Written now, to be read at an unknown future low point. Say what you got through and how long it took. This is the one that gets read most.
- A letter about the family, told straight. Where it came from, who was difficult, what the pattern is. Grandchildren usually receive a tidied version and are quietly confused by it.
- A letter about what you believe, and why. Not an instruction. An account of how you came to it, including the parts you are unsure about, which is what makes it credible.
Writing to a grandchild you have not met
The difficulty is that you cannot picture the reader, and writing to nobody produces general prose. The way through is to write to a specific age rather than a specific person. Address it to a nineteen year old. Say so at the top: this is for you when you are nineteen. It gives the letter a register and a subject immediately, and it means you can say things that would be strange to say to a child and are exactly right for somebody at nineteen.
Tell them what you were like at nineteen. That single move does more than any amount of good wishes, because it converts you from a photograph into somebody who was once where they are.
Practical matters people get wrong
Write more than one. A single letter has to serve every possible reader and every possible moment, which is why so many end up generic. Several short letters, each about one thing, work far better than one long attempt at completeness.
Date each one and say how old you are. A letter without a date loses most of its power, because the reader cannot place you.
And do not seal it away somewhere clever. Letters intended to be found after a death are lost with remarkable frequency, in exactly the drawer where they were safest. Put them somewhere ordinary and tell somebody they exist.