Dear Nathaniel,

Our telephone conversation of day before yesterday continues to reverberate 
in my mind. I hope what I need to tell you will not seem too intrusive. You 
told me that you wanted to be a writer! What a wonderful, what a redeeming
propect! I write to encourage you and to urge you on, and to tell you what
writing has meant to me and what I hope it will come to mean to you.

You should learn to write not with the expectation of becoming famous, not
with the hope of becoming rich, or even of earning enough to defray the
costs of the most necessary items of day to day existence. You should write
not to please a potential readership. You should learn to write not learn
to communicate with others but to learn to communicate with yourself.

When you write you should be writing to yourself. You should tell yourself
what is most important and immediate to you, what preoccupies you, you should 
describe what you see, you should recount what you hear, you should report 
what you think, - without censoring yourself, without concern about what a
potential reader might think. Write about Bulgaria, write about Radina and her
family, write about Bloomington, about your teachers, about your fellow students,
about your friends and your enemies, about your understanding of the present,
about your hopes and fears for the future.

Don't procrastinate, don't put it off. Start writing today. Resolve to spend
at least three hours a day writing. Write letters, imaginary or real, to your
friends, to your teachers, to Rebekah, Benjamin or Leah, to your parents, 
conceivably even to me. Avail yourself of computing technology. Save a copy 
of everything you compose. Write at least 1200 words, three printed pages of 
400 words a day, day after day, weeks after week, month after month, --- 
then when you look back over what you have written you will see that you have 
become a writer.

Jochen