When Half Is Twice As Much as All

The Letter Reimagined | Week Three: In Correspondence, Half Can Be Huge And Hilarious. Come Write A One-Sided Letter Exchange With Us!

Sometimes fixes are easy. Here’s an example.

Last week as I drove the two hours home from Moose Lake Prison, where I teach an advanced fiction class, I struggled to see the road. I wondered if my contacts were working, or if my vision was rapidly deteriorating. On the sections of I-35 with construction, where the interstate narrows to two lanes, I felt literally blinded by the oncoming headlights.

It was as unnerving as it sounds.

I mentioned it to my husband at some point. “I think maybe the headlights are dirty,” I said. “I could barely see on my way home from the prison.”

At some point, he took a look. “One of the headlights was actually burnt out,” he said. He replaced both with “long-distance” bulbs before my drive last night. And just like that, I could see again. Which was great, because it allowed me to actually notice the spectacular crescent moon to the west, which followed me all the way home.

Even though the new headlights were a real hallelujah moment for me (the blind drive was really hard), it’s kind of a boring story. And that’s what I actually meant when I famously told

Billie Oh

at some point (which they recall and I don’t), that “happy is boring,” a premise upon which they’ve based an entire chapbook about their childhood, proving that we should probably be careful about the adages we blithely announce to our children.

What I meant was that happy alone doesn’t make a story. And not just because happy is boring, but also because happy alone doesn’t fulfill the purpose story, which overshadows entertainment. The purpose of story is to illuminate some aspect of what it means to live and die in a human body in a hard world, and, if we can manage it, to love life anyway.

That’s part of what we’ll look at when we explore scenes next month in WITD’s last seasonal intensive of the year, starting November 6. As always, those posts come out each Wednesday. If you’re a paid member, you’re all set. If not, you can upgrade to write with us.

Meanwhile … our Letters intensive ends next week. It’s too soon!

I knew that Letters could and would likely be extraordinary, but even still, I was not wholly prepared for the loveliness and grace of your writing these past weeks. Your letters for Instructions for Saying Goodbye especially overwhelmed me with their beauty, heartbreak, and humor. Please keep them coming for as long as you like (in line with Monday’s post and voice memo, You’re Never Too Late & Always Enough).

Thank you, always. It is such an honor. 🙏

That said, I hope we don’t get whiplash from the pivot we’re about to make with this week’s quirky “one-sided correspondence.”

I’ve been looking forward this since the very beginning of Writing in the Dark, because it’s an exercise I’ve taught a few times in live synchronous workshops, and it’s delightful. I’ve just never quite found the right moment for it here—until now, when it suddenly feels totally doable and highly promising (and if you’re not a paid member but would like to be, just hop in and write with us!).

So, what do I mean by one-sided correspondence?

Well, just think of a situation where you are only seeing or hearing one side of a two-way (or multi-way) correspondence. You can only guess at what the other person(s) said, the unheard person(s), through inference.

It’s a powerful premise!

The net result is that you listen differently, and harder. For example, consider when you were a child or a teenager listening to one of your parents (or better, an older sibling!) speak on the phone. Or consider scenes in movies that include a character on the phone, and we can only hear their side.

This imbalance can, with the right use of details, timing, and repetition, be anything from hilarious to evocative to a gut-punch.

Because sometimes half is actually more than whole. Sometimes it’s more than twice as much … depending on what you do with it. In highly effective one-sided correspondences, the white space, the silences, serve not as a subtraction, but an essential element of how the piece works.

But how?

It has to do with the way our minds work, the way we love a puzzle, the way our minds whir over anything incomplete (there’s even a psychological term for that whirring over incompletion, and it’s called the Zeigarnik effect).¹ It has to do, also, then, with the great satisfaction we experience through completing the incomplete. Mentally filling in the “white space” within a one-sided correspondence sets off little sparks of pleasure in our minds.

Interestingly, when we consider the power of white space (and resulting inference) on the page, we can’t help but consider the same effect in our lives … and just like that, writing is once again a metaphor for life, as I wrote about recently in Writing = Living, Here’s Why.

Studying writing with curiosity and openness never fails to enrich our understanding of our own lives.

So with no further ado: This week I offer you two epistolary readings that demonstrate how this one-sided correspondence works. Both readings are fiction, one from the New Yorker and one that my daughter wrote in college in a creative writing class. Both use email as the delivery vehicle. And while you could use whatever you want—text, email, traditional letter, etc.—the generally shorter forms like email and text messaging will probably work best for this because the expected brevity of those forms keeps the story moving along.

Both of the epistolary readings this week use humor, though the second one has more melancholy under the surface. And while the fact that they’re both funny is sort of a coincidence, it’s sort of not, since the one-sided form does lend itself well to comedy.

But that does not mean you have to try to be funny! Not at all. In fact, you should never feel like you have to force something toward humor, because humor is actually the hardest genre of writing. That’s in part because it’s even more subjective than most other writing (disclaimer: some of you might not find these example pieces funny at all!) and in part because it’s so often referential of specific cultural and societal and even geographical circumstances and trends.

The New Yorker piece is hilarious to me because I was a Waldorf teacher for ten years. I find it utterly delicious. The piece my daughter wrote is funny to me for at least one reason beyond my love for her, which is that she based it loosely on an extended family member (again, see how subjective humor can be?).

So, if humor calls to you, great, but feel free to go wherever the trail takes you this time (and, by the way, if you know other examples of one-sided correspondence writing, I’d love for you to share them in the comments—along with your own, of course).

Below, you’ll find the two readings (a PDF of the New Yorker piece to give access to nonsubscribers) and the stepwise exercise plus some “helpful tips” which will hopefully live up to their subhead.

Edited to add: Also provided, two gift links to separate NYT pieces about the way the brilliant comedian Bob Newhart used this device in his famous one-sided phone conversations! Thank you, Martha Southgate!!

I can’t wait to see you in the comments!