Please tell them you love them.

Fan letters aren't just meaningful to their recipients--they unlock seismic changes in your confidence and career.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.

…We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage (1991)

I’m surprised as anyone that a piece of music did it for me. I was expecting it would be a book or poem or something, and indeed, a handful have come close. But agony? An agony of recognition? Only one artwork has ever hit me with such force—titanic, upending, a tidal wave rushed in to drag me back to the uncanny vastness whence I came—and it’s Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.¹

This piece contains the most useful career development practice you can undertake as an author, I swear. Walk with me; we’ll get there.

When I listened to M418M for the first time—headphones, Acela, September 2019—I felt rapture indelible in the hippocampus as any calamity. I still remember what I was wearing, for heaven’s sake. (Shout out to my cousin Tommy for the rec.)

I didn’t know art could do what Reich’s music did—still does—for me. It’s cracked open my understanding of so many things: the natural world, art, time. It’s steadied me through several turbulent periods and (somehow) dramatically improved my writing. It makes me feel high. I once flew to actual Dresden in actual Germany just to hear it live.

Six years—six years I’ve spent rhapsodizing to anyone who’ll listen about Music for 18 Musicians (and for that matter, Music for a Large Ensemble). And not once in that entire time did it occur to me to aim my rhapsodizing at the one person most likely to cherish the gift:

Steve Reich.

STEVE REICH!

I mean, it didn’t occur to me until yesterday. Which is ridiculous.

When you work with authors full time, as I do, you learn rather fast that there is no height of creative achievement at which praise from strangers loses its value.

NONE.

Au contraire: I’ve watched random fan letters make even “famous” authors’ entire days, weeks, futures. I’ve watched them save people in ways the sender probably couldn’t even imagine.

Most of the artists we consider “famous” are not exactly smothered under I Love Yous, after all. I mean, think about Steve Reich: he’s huge for a certain type of person—Sufjan Stevens, Thom Yorke, Aaron Dessner,² and countless others have all called him a major influence—but he’s not exactly Beyoncé. He’s not even the most popular 88-year-old working minimalist composer (boooo, Philip Glass, boooo).

I have no idea how many fan letters Steve Reich gets on a daily basis, but it’s silly to assume one from a random literary agent in DC wouldn’t clear his dopamine threshold in 2025.

It’d be one thing if I were writing to Steve Reich expecting something in return: time, attention, reciprocal admiration. But a simple thank you? That cringe isn’t about him; it’s about me, me, me—namely, the yawning void where my self-esteem should be. It’s pure ego.

And if there’s one thing I hope you’ve learned from this newsletter over the years, it’s that egotism makes for bad art.

Which brings me to the real reason you and I should write more fan letters: IT HELPS US IMMEASURABLY IN OUR PUBLISHING CAREERS.

Please write fan letters, OK? Write them as often as you can. Try to write them every single time you’re moved by art from a living artist. Make it a practice, a hygiene thing; try to do at least one a week.

I am BEGGING you to do this, and not because it’s “good networking.” Fan mail is not about starting a correspondence; it’s about completing a circuit. You’re taking the electric awe a work of art sparked in you; grounding it into something visible, with form and meaning; then handing it back, incandescent, to someone whose life might be saved by its light.

You see how important that is, don’t you?

You also see how important it is for you? And why?

Hint: It’s not just something nice you can do for an artist. It’s excellent—and I mean excellent—practice for writing a book.

But it’s also good networking, right?

Guh. Gross. No.

All right, all right: if I’m being honest, it might be. Through the years, I’ve accidentally introduced myself to more than one client—or future client blurber—through them.

However: fan letters hold manifold inherent career benefits per se, whether or not the recipient replies. And all of these are in my opinion much greater than superficial acquaintance with an impressive person.

Let’s go through them together:

One: Writing fan letters helps you find your place among artists—and market comps.